The Playlist: The Unstoppable ‘Old Town Road,’ and 11 More New Songs

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.

Lil Nas X featuring RM, ‘Seoul Town Road (Old Town Road Remix)’

As! I! Was! Saying! (This is the worst of the lot, FYI.) JON CARAMANICA

King Princess, ‘Prophet’

“I just want to be your pretty girl when you want it/’Cause I can only think about you,” King Princess breathily tells someone who’s a lot more calculating than she is, for whom, “It’s only ’bout the money and control.” The 20-year-old musician sees it all and doesn’t care. Through a hymnlike bridge, a band crescendo, a proud guitar solo and a chorus flecked with glockenspiel and retro guitar reverb, she’s still in thrall. Later, no doubt, lawyers will be involved. JON PARELES

Rick Ross featuring Drake, ‘Gold Roses’

The scene: a moonlit living room in an oceanside mansion. The windows are floor to ceiling. Two men pour generously from a bottle into tumblers that stay full for mere seconds. They’re late-night rambling, scornful of their enemies and wounded by those who’ve betrayed them. “My depositions never surface,” Drake says. “Hundred-room mansion but I felt abandoned,” Ross says. Together, they can share their fears, speak without structure. Eventually, though, the sun comes out of hiding. CARAMANICA

Taylor McFerrin featuring Anna Wise, ‘Memory Digital’

“Memory Digital” starts with an buoyant kick-snare beat and woozy, electric-keyboard chords. Maybe we’re about to hear a 21st-century update of Evelyn Champagne King’s basking “Love Come Down?” Nope. When the voices enter, they’re weary and resigned; the song becomes a kiss-off to a relationship doomed by deception, and fated to live on in the form of digital scraps. “At least I give you this, girl: You are consistent,” Taylor McFerrin sings in his high, pristine voice, one eyebrow raised as he recounts the unraveling. “I can tell you have a special mind.” Anna Wise, known for her work with Kendrick Lamar and in the duo Sonnymoon, haunts the track like a memory that refuses to flicker out. Toward the end, she sighs: “You, you, you, you/Knew me better than anyone/Now you’re a memory digital.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

BJ the Chicago Kid, ‘Feel the Vibe’

BJ the Chicago Kid has been a busy mixtape maker and collaborator, singing hooks in his sweet-grained tenor for rappers including Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and Freddie Gibbs. “Feel the Vibe” opens “1123,” BJ’s new album, as both song and branding statement, neatly placing him between the retro and the contemporary. The moody sway of the production, with trumpet and children’s voices in the mix, harks back to Marvin Gaye (plus some turntable scratching), and the song, with Anderson .Paak rapping the opening verses, is about a family reunion where everyone’s eating soul food and watching “Mama dancing to some Al Green”: cross-generational harmony. PARELES

Blueface, YBN Cordae and Rico Nasty’s 2019 XXL Freshman Cypher
DaBaby, Megan Thee Stallion, YK Osiris and Lil Mosey’s 2019 XXL Freshman Cypher
Roddy Ricch, Comethazine and Tierra Whack’s 2019 XXL Freshman Cypher

The annual XXL Freshman Cyphers are a useful index of hip-hop’s increasing splintering, a display of the myriad sorts of rapping that are gathering traction among younger artists. They also serve as a camera-hides-nothing survey of up-and-comers who — thanks to the power granted to them by the internet — increasingly seem to believe that they have little to prove. The idea of freestyling over an unfamiliar beat as a worthwhile challenge feels particularly antiquated these days, a radio-appearance relic in an online-video age. But that dissonance makes for fascinating moments when artists can’t seamlessly walk the tightrope between the two.

These clips — 10 artists in three groupings likely never to again share a stage — include some impressive rapping (Megan Thee Stallion, Rico Nasty, DaBaby) and some conceptualist verse (Blueface), and are useful in poking holes in careers that have been quickly and unjustifiably inflated (Lil Mosey, Comethazine). But the rappers reveal the most when caught responding to someone else’s performance: Megan Thee Stallion barely tolerating Lil Mosey; YK Osiris in slack-jawed awe of DaBaby’s arrogant ferocity; Blueface and YBN Cordae hitting the woah while Rico Nasty speed talks; Comethazine staring out into the ether while Tierra Whack, going a cappella, offers a master class in rapping, an art form of which Comethazine has little understanding. CARAMANICA

Norah Jones featuring Tarriona ‘Tank’ Ball, ‘Take It Away’

Is it a protest song, or just a sigh? With “Take It Away,” Norah Jones maintains the semi-confrontational stance she struck on her previous single, “Just a Little Bit.” But this time the target isn’t a lover — it’s broader and more ambiguous: our collective shrug in the face of injustice, perhaps. Singing in wide harmonies with Tarriona Ball of Tank and the Bangas, Jones unspools her lament over a murky, two-chord progression. That eventually gives way to a rolling-storm bridge, ending with the line, “Find a way to make a real change.” But it’s not really clear to whom this plaint is addressed, or what we ought to be dismantling. RUSSONELLO

Mason Ramsey, ‘Before I Knew It’

From “Twang,” the extremely affable debut EP from the preteen country phenom Mason Ramsey, comes “Before I Knew It,” a winsome slice of late 1980s line-dance-friendly country that features Ramsey singing way beyond his years: “I used to be the guy that talked about the guy/that I’m turning into ever since I met you.” Except he’s so young that it’s not unnerving, merely adorable. Funny how that works, until it doesn’t. CARAMANICA

Four Tet, ‘Part 5’

Why don’t electronic musicians release many live albums? Because they understand that home listening and live shows unfold in different time frames and attention states: one subject to distraction and carefully distilled, the other contained, immersive and therefore almost leisurely. Four Tet — the electronic musician Kieran Hebden — makes electronic music in a zone where synthetic and acoustic and meditation and motion overlap. He has just released a documentary album on Bandcamp — “Live at Alexandra Palace, London 8th and 9th May 2019” — that sometimes mixes in the applause and whoops of the live audience in tracks that stretch as long as 39 minutes. The relatively brief “Part 5” — slightly over 6 minutes — starts out sparse and rhythmic, then methodically changes: through a quasi-reggae backbeat, looped female voices that sync up with the beat, consonant keyboard tones. As dance music, it’s noncoercive; as electronic Minimalism, it strives to lead somewhere peaceful. PARELES

Black Country, New Road, ‘Sunglasses’

Exasperation gathers, seethes, sputters and eventually explodes — more than once — in “Sunglasses,” a nine-minute post-punk exposition, rhapsody and rant about the hollow consolations of materialism (among other things) including sunglasses that feel like “a high-tech wraparound blue-tinted fortress.” Black Country, New Road places itself somewhere between Protomartyr and early King Crimson; the music veers from austere, sullen guitar vamps to dissonant saxophone squalls while Isaac Wood’s talky, prosy vocals get all worked up, as disgusted with himself as he is with what he sees. PARELES