New Music Friday: 5/31/24

Here are the rules: I listen to all 100 tracks of Spotify's New Music Friday playlist, except for anything that rhymes the n-word with itself more than three times, any screamo or screamo-adjacent stuff, any CCM that reveals its true intentions in time for me to hit the skip button, and any egregiously corny modern country music, typically performed by a dude with two first names. Having sifted through this week's playlist, here's what I actively enjoyed:

"places to be," Fred again... featuring Anderson .Paak and CHIKA
I don't know what it is with kids these days, what with all their grammar-defying stage names and their pronouns and their woke mi — ugh, sorry, can't do it, not even as a bit. I admit I was a trifle annoyed by the number of times I had to check and make sure I was following all the capitalization and punctuation gimmicks at play with this trio, but I can't complain about the song they've made together; the music's as pleasantly spacey as a mid-afternoon summer nap, but .Paak's verse adds a few dashes of salt to keep things interesting.