New Music Friday: 1/16/26

As always, New Music Friday is partly powered by the fine folks at Pause & Play, whose tireless work rounding up each week's new releases is a true public service. Also: Reminder that the Jefitoblog Discord for paid subscribers includes bonus weekly Old Music Friday posts that look back at the Hot 100 from 40 years ago.

"w-w-w-w-w," hemlocke springs
It's a recurring theme here that it isn't hard to find new songs drenched in '80s or '90s nostalgia, but it's genuinely fairly difficult to find ones that manage to burrow into the spirit of that older music and emerge with something that goes beyond mere pastiche to find something (somewhat) new. The colorful dance-pop anthem "w-w-w-w-w" belongs in that latter camp. I think this is my first brush with hemlocke springs, who's been building buzz for the last year or so. Suddenly anticipating her debut LP, the apple tree under the sea, which is dropping next month.

"Lean," Charlotte Day Wilson featuring Saya Gray
Part sultry Sade, part chopped-and-screwed synth/beats workout, "Lean" is the type of ballad that manages to simultaneously comfort and disquiet in equal measure. The heat of passion pulses throughout, but there's also something icy and unsettling going on — two great tastes that, perhaps paradoxically, taste great together.

"Traffic Lights," Flea featuring Thom Yorke
This is the second pre-release track from Flea's upcoming solo album, and based on what I've heard so far, it seems altogether likely that he's got a bunch of musical curveballs lined up for this thing. Honestly, he had me at "no Anthony Kiedis," but if he wants to up the game by putting Thom Yorke behind the mic, hey, so much the better.

"Everyone Wants to Feel Like You Do," Courtney Marie Andrews
Pulled from Andrews' tenth LP, the just-released Valentine, "Everyone Wants to Feel Like You Do" is rather Stevie Nicksian in terms of its sonic vibe, tight harmonies, and lull-and-attack vocal melody... and in the pointed, dipped-in-acid way the lyrics casually disassemble its subject's selfish bullshit. Some days, it feels like the country as a whole is rushing toward a place where every last public figure is just as blissfully self-absorbed as the jackass Andrews is singing to here.

"NASTY (How She Like It)," Chef Boy
At its best, hip-hop can be thrillingly adventurous, on a sonic as well as lyrical level. It can also be laugh-out-loud funny. "NASTY" makes the cut this week because it's been a long time since I came across a new hip-hop track that exalts the earthly delights of a sexually adventurous woman with this much tongue-wagging humor. Rick James would certainly approve, and not just because there's a touch of that "Super Freak" thing going on here.

"Fuck It Up," Master Peace featuring Declan McKenna
Forty-one years after Billy Joel reminded us that our mistakes are the only things we truly own, along come Master Peace and Declan McKenna with the far more direct "Fuck It Up." Then as now, it's a great time to remind people that perfection is always out of reach.

"Roommates," Hilary Duff
Based on the amount of anticipation I see whenever she's getting ready to release new music, I guess Hilary Duff has entered the elder statesperson phase of her singing career, with all the "well, actually" reevaluations that tend to come with sticking around long enough to outlast your first impression. At the risk of enraging fans of either artist, "Roommates" is something I could imagine hearing out of Taylor Swift or Carly Rae Jepsen, which is a compliment; I'm nowhere near the target demographic for this stuff, but I'll never really get tired of this blend of pillowy synths, stacked harmonies, and big-ass choruses.

"Against the Dying of the Light," José González
The state of the world can make it easy to forget and/or hard to believe, but better things truly are possible — and as powerless as we might feel at times, there are things we don't have to accept. Clocking in at a slender 2:28, "Against the Dying of the Light" finds José González tackling this rather unwieldy theme, using little more than a fingerpicked guitar and an acre of reverb to get his point across. Hopeful and haunting.

"Not Enough," Daughter
With soft, soothing vocals wafting over a buzzing, swirling lead guitar, "Not Enough" is sort of hypnotically comforting — an addictively replayable track that deserved to be rescued from the "not quite" pile left over after the sessions for Daughter's 2016 Not to Disappear LP. When songs this strong end up being filed away for (ten years) later, you know you're doing something right.

"Nothing Comes Easy," Joy Oladokun
I was just talking with a friend the other day about how time is the magic ingredient in a lot of things, and yet it works that magic so frustratingly slowly that it can sometimes feel like it's either no help at all or its actively working against you. We can be impatient creatures, in other words, especially when we've been hurt. On that note, "Nothing Comes Easy" finds Joy Oladokun doing what she does best — namely, offering gentle notes of spiritual uplift and poetic reminders of universal truths. In this particular case, the truth is that "Nothing comes easy / Except for pain." A message that feels a bit on the nose for 2026, but one that still sounds sweeter than you might expect, because of the message behind it: As Rilke said, "Just keep going. No feeling is final."

"Kiss Me," Maro
There isn't a ton to say about Maro's "Kiss Me" – as one would expect given the title, it's a dizzy declaration of infatuation, and one that's been assembled using a short list of simple ingredients. Skittering programmed drums, a circular repeating guitar figure, CSN-indebted harmonies; in and out in just a hair over three minutes. You've heard stuff like this plenty of times before. Still, I'm not sure we can ever have too many tracks that are willing to be this open to love: "Take me / Anywhere you wanna go / Anywhere and I will follow you / I promise you." I mean, who doesn't want to hear that? To say that?

"Everybody Hurts," Al Green
On one hand, I'm not sure there's an act on Earth that could improve upon the original version of "Everybody Hurts." On the other hand, when the Reverend Al Green deigns to cut his own version of a perfect song, it's our moral obligation to sit up and listen. At the very least, I think we can all agree that Green puts his own stamp on the song; where Michael Stipe's tremulous vocals emphasized the "hurts" side of the equation, the Reverend's exhortations favor the "everybody." At 79, he remains a peerless interpreter.

"Patience," Kid Kapichi
Kid Kapichi is typically described as a "punk rock band," which strikes me as an awfully loose interpretation of the words "punk rock," at least insofar as it's being applied to the group's current work. Much of their latest album, the brand new Fearless Nature, has less "punk" in it than anything Joe Jackson was doing in the late '70s. This is not, however, to say that their latest songs lack appeal. The eminently Gorillaz-ish "Patience" is my current favorite from Fearless Nature, but on the whole, this is an impressively solid set.