Pop

As Harry Styles embarks on a solo career with an eagerly anticipated self-titled debut out May 12, we’ll see a new side of One Direction’s most famous member. As is usually the case when a boy-band member goes solo, his new music is more personal and idiosyncratic than the pop anthems the group cranked out over five albums in five years. But where Zayn left One Direction altogether and took a sharp left turn toward R&B, Harry’s solo work is more of an organic continuation of the One Direction sound, with influences from classic rock, power pop, and folk music.One Direction thrive on big choruses that bring everyone’s voice together in unison, while giving each member a turn at singing verses, but it’s undeniable that Styles is the most prominent voice in the mix. As far back as the band’s peppy debut hit “What Makes You Beautiful,” his deep, relaxed voice has always stood out among the other members’ more boyish vocals. As they ventured into bombastic arena rock on tracks like “Clouds” and “Diana,” his voice took on a gentle soaring quality.Over the course of One Direction’s run, the members of the band gradually took on a more active role in songwriting, with Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson taking the lead. But Harry Styles notched over a dozen songwriting credits in the group’s catalog, the best of which are included in the second half of this playlist. Styles occasionally put a personal stamp on their material—most famously with his thinly veiled lyrics aimed at Taylor Swift on “Perfect”—but he was also involved in some of the band’s most buoyant melodies, including the Tears For Fears homage “Stockholm Syndrome.”Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

With anticipation for her upcoming sophomore effort, Melodrama, at a fever pitch, Lorde has retreated back to her favorite place of solace—as an acute observer of everyone else. Even the title of her new Spotify playlist, Homemade Dynamite, feels a bit like a cheeky inside joke pulled from some faded memory. While the 20-year old artist is best known for layering her timeless, soulful voice over a nu-goth aesthetic, Lordes other essential quality is that shes unwaveringly sympathetic towards her listeners. While most of the songs on Homemade Dynamite could soundtrack a night at the club, Lorde takes the entire evening into consideration with the same meticulous attention to detail heard on her 2013 debut album, Pure Heroine. Similar to the compassionate but authoritative friend everyone should have, Lorde has already anticipated that you’ll need something to perk you up (Amine and Kehlani), something to help soothe your feelings at 3 a.m. (Bon Iver and Weyes Blood), and something to tell you that you are a million bucks the morning after (Santigold). Under Lorde’s curation, Future’s “Mask Off” and your dad’s favorite Paul Simon song, “Graceland,” feel cut from the same cloth; they are two tales of escapism designed to reach all corners of her audience. These selections are indicative not only of Lordes desire to address the extraordinary moments of relatively mundane affairs, but also affirm the experiences of her listeners in the process. Depending on which side of middle age you’re on, ordinary experiences are either aspirational or nostalgic. Lorde’s universal appeal derives from the fact that she consistently accounts for both.

Scandinavian pop sensibilities have sporadically found a home on the American charts since the days of ABBA. Like Sweden’s Max Martin, the Norwegian duo Stargate have joined the transatlantic crossover in the 21st century. Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen formed Stargate in the late ‘90s, producing a string of hits for British groups like S Club 7 and Atomic Kitten that charted almost everywhere in the English-speaking world except America.Stargate finally broke into the U.S. by helping another behind-the-scenes player step into the spotlight—the young R&B singer Ne-Yo, who had also written hits for other artists. Their first collaboration, 2006’s “So Sick,” brought together Stargate’s slick European dance-pop sonics with Ne-Yo’s soulful midtempo songwriting to great effect. They came together many times over the next few years, with Ne-Yo penning Stargate-produced hits like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” and Rihanna’s “Take A Bow,” broadening that signature sound with lush instrumentation and witty lyrics.Stargate soon began to use their foothold in R&B to nudge American radio toward four-on-the-floor dance beats with tracks like Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop The Music” and Ne-Yo’s “Closer” years before uptempo EDM grooves began to saturate U.S. airwaves. In Rihanna, they’ve perhaps found their greatest muse, producing six of her 14 chart-topping singles and putting their own unique spin on Caribbean sounds in “What’s My Name?” and “Rude Boy.”In recent years, Hermansen and Eriksen have shown their versatility, hopping from rock (Coldplay) to hip-hop (Wiz Khalifa) to pure pop (Katy Perry). They even scored a viral hit in 2013, providing the killer dance track that made Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis’ “The Fox” a YouTube phenomenon. But it hasn’t been until this year that Stargate put their considerable music-industry clout behind a record of their own, releasing the single “Waterfall,” featuring P!nk and Sia.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

I didn’t linger too long in front of the theater. A sign posted by the front door warned that the street was under surveillance, and I didn’t want to arouse suspicion. But I stayed long enough to take in the beauty and whimsy and power of it all: The hulking size of the building. The bright colors of the exterior, evoking a Moulin Rouge-esque festivity. The letters doing a merry jig above the front door: BATACLAN.It was early April and I was on a 13-hour stopover in Paris while on an overseas trip back to Los Angeles. For all of its romance and history, the French capital has never been one of my bucket-list travel destinations. But now that I had a chance, the first place I wanted to see (aside from the Eiffel Tower) was the 1,500-capacity Bataclan theater, site of the 2015 terrorist attack where ISIS gunmen killed 89 people during an Eagles of Death Metal concert.In front of the building, I thought back to the day when it all went down. I remembered driving my car around sunny Los Angeles, listening with growing panic and horror as news of the coordinated Paris attacks unfolded in real-time on NPR. Terrified reporters and witnesses were giving reports while barricaded inside restaurants as shooting went on mere blocks away. French president François Hollande was broadcast live giving a statement calling the attacks an act of war.Terrorism is a heavily symbolic gesture—it’s a spectacle meant to spill blood and cause carnage, but also to generate waves of confusion and panic, to undercut our sense of safety, elevate our sense of doubt, and make us feel ill at ease wherever we are. Now, in recent years, as a music journalist and longtime music lover, I’ve felt more and more so that my own community has become a target. There was the attack on the Bataclan. There were the jihadis aligned with Al-Qaeda who violently banned music in northern Mali in 2012—a region that has long enjoyed a rich overlap between religion and song. There was the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last year, and the New Year’s Eve attack at a club on the Bosphorus in Istanbul.And then there was the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on May 22. The bombing killed 22 people, including an eight year old girl, and I struggle to imagine how far gone a militant must be, how many atrocities they’ve already committed, how deep they’ve sunk into their own numb and dead-eyed worldview, to be capable of carefully plotting out an attack like this: Targeting the fans of an artist whose songs are so expertly crafted that they always have a way of hitting right on the pleasure centers of your nervous system, an artist whose very name—“Grande”—speaks to the enormity of her personality and the power of her voice in conveying joy and release and love.The point of these attacks, of course, is to destroy lives and destroy what we love. To make us think twice about going to our next show. To make us look for the emergency exit signs every time we walk into a venue, instead of focusing on the great music unfolding onstage. But music is one of the most resilient human expressions, and this playlist—featuring Ariana Grande and Eagles of Death Metal, Mali’s Khaira Arby and Vieux Farka Touré, a release off Turkish label Drug Boulevard, as well as some classic Manchester bands—stands as a testament to the way music keeps us coming together even in the face of hatred.

Fresh off the release of their third album, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, the Seattle-based indie band Chastity Belt have compiled an annotated playlist that outlines the three phases of a “Coffee Comedown”: Ecstasy, Anxiety, and Hope. In the same way the four-piece band have built their songs around turning everyday observations into weighty revelations, bassist Annie Truscott’s emotional, caffeine-fueled expedition doubles as the soundtrack to an existential crisis.Process is paramount and Truscott takes her time untangling the complexities of each phase. Her description of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Higher” is both jubilant and feral: “When the coffee starts crankin’ through my system, I feel invincible. I feel ready to take on the day.” However, Truscott differentiates between contemplating big thoughts and actually putting them into action. These flashes of clarity show up in moments of transition on the playlist. Merchandise’s “Become What You Are” caps the the Ecstasy phase and its lulling repetition offers a reprieve before the track’s quiet chaos morphs into Anxiety.But like most seemingly catastrophic situations, Truscott knows that this will not last forever. One of the best (and worst) things about coffee is that it will inevitably wear off. It mirrors an ongoing tension in Chastity Belt’s own music; a self-aware brand of self-indulgence derived from knowing that the tribulations of youth are also temporary. Of course, Stevie Nicks gets in the last word with “After the Glitter Fades,” which Truscott explains as a cleanser of sorts: “I remember how it feels, and I can look on all the phases of my comedown thru nostalgia-colored glasses.”

Is it weird that the Haim sisters seem to all love the same songs? Anyone with a sibling who shouldn’t go anywhere near a Bluetooth speaker knows that the sharing of DNA has virtually no correlation with musical taste. At least a little disparity should be par for the course for Este, Danielle, and Alana, too. But on the matter of musical taste—as with so many other areas for the harmony-loving trio—HAIM are far more in the tradition of the Osmonds and Hanson than Oasis and the Kinks, putting the lie to myths about sibling acts and the likelihood that their members may attack each other with drum cymbals.Indeed, the women of HAIM present a surprisingly unified front in the opportunities they’ve had to present their predilections to the world. In the four years since they broke through with the irresistibly hooky contents of Days Are Gone, the playlists they’ve either curated together or individually are very much on the same page, with the sisters expressing their solidarity through their shared love of ‘70s and ‘80s pop, soul and disco crowd-pleasers (with an emphasis on all the ladies they love), party-starting hip-hop, more introspective singer/songwriter fare, and vintage California sounds from either coastline. (Their hero Tom Petty may live in Malibu but he’s still pure Florida.) They sound just as snug in the same pocket when performing covers, a diverse array that ranges from Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” (performed with Stevie Nicks, no less) to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” to Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” to songs by pals-slash-inspirations such as Jenny Lewis and Julian Casablancas.Their savvy when it comes to mixing the old with the shiny and new is all over their second album Something to Tell You, too. To celebrate the arrival of what will surely be a summer soundtrack for the ages, we’ve got an extensive slate of HAIM-approved songs that you can enjoy with the relative of your choice.

September 2017 will see the release of Michael McDonald’s Wide Open, his first solo album of original material since 2000’s Blue Obsession. Following that record, McDonald reoriented his solo career around a series of albums in which he recorded tasteful tributes to Motown Records, cementing his position as one of the most respected “blue-eyed soul” singers of all time. But that career path, however lucrative it may have been, only served to make a fairly uncool pop star of the ’70s and ‘80s seem even less cool.McDonald’s status as a pop-culture punchline is perhaps best epitomized by the 2005 comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin, wherein an electronics-store employee played by Paul Rudd squirms with annoyance as a Michael McDonald live DVD plays on a loop at work. In 2007, I saw McDonald in concert and filed a review for my local paper, and the next day my editor sidled up to me with a smirk and said, “So...Michael McDonald, huh?”But in 2017, Michael McDonald is about as cool as he’s ever been. The “yacht rock” sound with which he’s associated (thanks to his work with the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, and Christopher Cross) has become a renewable source of inspiration for dance and hip-hop producers. And over the past decade, McDonald has collaborated with a number of hip younger artists that appreciate the distinctively smoky grain of his voice, including Brooklyn indie bands Holy Ghost! and Grizzly Bear. L.A. future-funk bassist Thundercat even reunited McDonald with longtime collaborator Kenny Loggins on his acclaimed 2017 single “Show You The Way.”This newfound appreciation of McDonald didn’t happen overnight, and in fact there’s no one particular tipping point that turned him from camp to cool in the way that The Sopranos helped rehabilitate Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” But the seeds were laid by hip-hop, particularly when McDonald’s 1982 solo hit “I Keep Forgettin’” became the bedrock of Warren G. and Nate Dogg’s G-funk smash “Regulate.” De La Soul sampled Steely Dan’s “Peg” and Meek Mill sampled the Doobies’ “Minute By Minute” on hit singles, and dance producers like Grant Nelson have remixed tracks like “Yah Mo B There,” McDonald’s 1983 duet with James Ingram. But McDonald himself has also demonstrated himself capable of surprising displays of good taste, like his killer cover of Neil Young’s “Down By The River.” And the sheer range of artists he collaborated with in his heyday, from Van Halen to Patti LaBelle, has placed him at the intersection of rock and soul, and continues to inspire a wide swathe of music both popular and underground.

Although I don’t believe homo sapiens as species has improved, in this century we expect hotels to offer attractive bars serving cocktails with fresh ingredients and restaurants that can properly bake Brussels sprouts. We also expect boy bands to offer decent material. I don’t think my memory is playing tricks on me when I claim New Kids on the Block offered terrible songs: slovenly written and indifferently produced. Matters improved during the Backstreet Boys and NSync days, thanks to Max Martin and Kristian Lundin, among others.By the time the English quintet One Direction released “What Makes You Beautiful,” the boys were thinking in terms of sharp middle eights and crazy harmonies. For a while I was on SPIN’s unofficial1D beat even though it took me a while to get their voices and faces straight; I never would have figured Harry Styles to be the star but there you go (I also thought The Wanted had the career; I still prefer “Glad You Came” to “What Makes You Beautiful”). Brad Nelson’s rumination on how the loss of Zayn Malik crippled the band helped.In the meantime, we have songs, good ones. At an academic year-end banquet in April, students manning the smartphone playlist slipped “No Control” into the mix; these college radio devotees went crazy.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

She was a tragic character from the very beginning—Lana Del Rey was Born to Die. And yet, half a decade later, her story continues; her myth still grows. The pouty princess who once served as Hipster Runoffs lifeline has made her way to the (literal) top of Hollywood with a renewed Lust for Life. "Were the masters of our own fate," she coos with confidence on the albums title track. Its a well-worn cliché that sounds downright profound coming from a woman who has meticulously created and refined a persona that is far more than meets the black-lined eye.Lana is not the tortured seductress we first assumed her to be. No, she is a true and shrewd 21st-century star. She glorifies outdated stereotypes, while challenging outdated perspectives on sex, race, youth, beauty, power, fame, and the American dream. She then neatly fits these ideas into classic archetypal figures that come alive in noir soundscapes as silky and sumptuous as her bed sheets surely must be. Here, we break down Lana Del Rey into her four most distinct roles and unpack the influences behind them.THE FEMME FATALE

Lana got plenty of heat back in 2014 for telling The Fader, "The issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept." The fact that she opens a song with a line like "my pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola" doesnt help her cause, but shes hardly proven to be a powerless woman. In fact, Lana is arguably at her best in her most infamous role: the femme fatale. Her idea of feminism is using and abusing the power of femininity, not unlike strong sex symbols before her, from the slithery slyness of Nancy Sinatra and Brigitte Bardot to the overt eroticism of Madonna. Of course, the femme fatale can be as lethal to herself as she is to the opposite sex. When her own dangerous games of sex, drugs, and intrigue turn against her, self-awareness becomes crucial. When Lana admits that she wants "Money Power Glory" and that "prison isnt nothing to me" (on "Florida Kilos"), she takes on the gall and grit of proud bad girls Rihanna and Amy Winehouse.

THE HOPELESS ROMANTIC

Lana will break an endless amount of hearts, but will forever find true love elusive. She can lure the boys in but never quite let them go. She is the hopeless romantic, much like "Lust for Life" collaborator The Weeknd, who once said, "she is the girl in my music, and I am the guy in her music." On her big, symphonic ballads, shell sweep you up in every intimate detail with the pained quiver of Antony Hegarty, the vivid imagery of Leonard Cohen (whose "Chelsea Hotel #2" Lana has covered), and the brooding intensity of Chris Isaaks sultriest unrequited-love song, "Wicked Game." All the while, she associates youth and beauty with romance ("Will you still love me/ When Im no longer young and beautiful"), believing that none of these things will ever last—but it doesnt mean shell stop falling in love.

THE SAD GIRL

Behind every calculated move and every shade of cool is a sad girl "crying tears of gold." This is the fate of a tough temptress with a soft soul. Lana wallows in her sorrow as much as she does in her drugs, booze, and boys. Her most indulgent torch songs are draped in infinite sadness, starting with the obvious "Sad Girl," with its dark, dusky swing in the style of Twin Peaks enchantress Julee Cruise, or "Million Dollar Man," in which she echoes the most "Sullen Girl" of all, Fiona Apple. She even finds a kindred spirit in Mr. Lonely himself with her stunning cover of Bobby Vinton’s "Blue Velvet." Still, through all that misery, at least she knows that shes pretty when she cries.

THE ALL-AMERICAN PROVOCATEUR

Lana embodies the American dream as every bit of the illusion that it is. The American flag is her most provocative symbol, whether shes standing proudly before it (mischievously winking) or suggestively wrapping herself in its stars and stripes. She finds money, fame, and all that dream promises—but never happiness. She sings of Springsteen in "American"; portrays herself as both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O in the video for "National Anthem"; and even gets political on "Coachella – Woodstock in My Mind." Her vision of America starts and ends on the West Coast. She paints the Golden State as both scandal and savior with hints of EMA and Courtney Love; tells sordid tales of "Guns and Roses" like only Guns N Roses could; and finds her fellow California "Freak" in video co-star Father John Misty. All together, she is America the Beautiful, the Cunning, the Miserable.

The hot weather has melted our otherwise highly analytical, somewhat elitist brains, leaving us lounging on rooftops with a cold beer and humming the latest Future jam. Please join us in this blissful state of non-sentience with this handpicked selection of summery jams from SZA, GoldLink, Kendrick, Chronixx (pictured), Kamaiyah, and more.