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Ratboys, ‘Light Night Mountains All That’
“You didn’t care, you didn’t care,” Julia Steiner bristles in “Light Night Mountains All That” from the new album by Ratboys, “Singin’ to an Empty Chair.” The track starts out serene and folky, but that doesn’t last. As Steiner sings about mystical revelations she wanted to share — “how the lightning strikes when the sun explodes” — the song gallops into a squall of feedback and distortion, frustration turned into noise.
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James Blake, ‘I Had a Dream She Took My Hand’
James Blake conjures a fully realized anachronism in “I Had a Dream She Took My Hand.” Extrapolating from a sample of “It Was Only a Dream” by Thee Sinseers, he transports his synthesizers, his falsetto and his pervasive melancholia back to an imaginary warped 1950s for a surreal doomed-love song. Over a vintage chord progression in slow arpeggios, he envisions couples walking hand in hand with “the Titanic band / playing them out miles from land,” and he concludes with an epistemological plea: “I just wanna know what it means.”
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Momoko Gill, ‘No Others’
“No Others” is from “Momoko,” the debut solo album by Momoko Gill, a songwriter, singer, drummer and producer who has worked with fellow British experimenters like Matthew Herbert and Alabaster DePlume. It’s a jazzy, complex, six-beat track. Over a loping bass line and little shards of piano and guitar, Gill sings enigmatic thoughts — “Take me down and let me come alive until I fall / I wonder when it ends, how does it feel?” — with calm curiosity.
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What’s New in Instrumental Music
Tigran Hamasyan, ‘Manifeste’
The Armenian keyboardist Tigran Hamasyan bridges jazz, prog-rock and ambient music on his album “Manifeste.” Its title track is by turns complex, patterned, impactful and improvisatory, with Hamayan’s fast fingers on pianos and electric keyboards. Large forces — a band and a choir that have learned complex, meter-shifting parts — are involved. Yet the key players are Hamasyan and his drummer, always pushing fearlessly ahead.
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What’s Big on the Hot 100
Noah Kahan, ‘The Great Divide’
Noah Kahan’s “The Great Divide,” the title song of an album due April 24, got major promotion when it was played in full as an ad during the Grammy Awards, and now it’s No. 6 on the pop chart. It’s a folk-rock song about a former friend from younger, wilder days, who was worse off than he could understand at the time. Now the singer realizes “how bad it must have been for you back then / And how hard it was to keep it all inside.” The guitars dig in as Kahan proclaims his regret.
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