Heavy Rotation

Five new tracks for your ears

By Caitlin Rockett

‘GARDEN SONG,’

BY PHOEBE BRIDGERS

Phoebe Bridgers has turned making you giggle while you cry into an art form. The video for “Garden Song” starts with Bridgers, clad in a matching pajama set, taking a healthy rip from a bong before launching into lyrics that dissect the complicated nature of nostalgia. The song never rises above a gentle whisper, but its effect is resounding: “I don’t know how but I’m taller / It must be something in the water / Everything’s growing in our garden / You don’t have to know that it’s haunted.” But just as you feel the gloom settling over you, Bridgers cracks a joke: “The doctor put her hands over my liver / And she told me my resentment’s getting smaller.”

‘DAMSEL IN DISTRESS,’

BY RUFUS WAINWRIGHT

After Rufus Wainwright and his husband, Jörn Weisbrodt, moved to Laurel Canyon, Weisbrodt became obsessed with the music of one of the Los Angeles neighborhood’s most iconic troubadours, Joni Mitchell. Wainwright admittedly wasn’t that familiar with Mitchell’s work, but after taking “a journey into her music” with Weisbrodt (and meeting the Canadian folk singer), he was hooked. “Damsel in Distress” is Wainwright’s tribute to Mitchell, an effortlessly soaring song about a damaged relationship. The track rides the same line between delicate and sturdy that’s a hallmark of Mitchell’s compositions, evoking visions of sunlight dappled through California bay laurel leaves. Wainwright is deceptive in his delivery; it might feel like sunlight on your face, but it’s actually the heat of a fiery anger.

‘HEROINE,’

BY JEHNNY BETH

Music journalists like to use the word “provocative" to describe Jehnny Beth's music, first as a lead singer of British-based post-punk outfit Savages, and now with the release of her first solo album, To Love is to Live. But provocation indicates Beth writes music to inflame, when it seems evident she writes music to speak truth to power — for catharsis and connection. To Love is to Live is a deeply sensitive album driven by an urgency that overtook Beth after David Bowie died; rock star or not, everyone joins the great majority. “Heroine” channels the dark electronic groove of Nine Inch Nails (who Beth was set to open for in a now-canceled fall tour) with a message of self-confidence, no outside approval necessary: “All I want is some good tunes, and my great body / All I want is to feel me come the way I love and only I can do it / All I want is ... to be a heroine.”

‘BLACK 2,’ BY BUDDY

Rising Compton rapper Buddy (a nickname Simmie Sims III has had since childhood) gets down to brass tacks on “Black 2,” calling out the endless ways white America has appropriated and profited from black culture without having to deal with the dangerous realities of actually being black in America. “Everybody tryna get dreads and shit, but they ain’t African / All the light girls gettin’ the tan so they can darken they skin.” Let the wrecking ball hit you in the chorus and deposit you in the Land of Real Talk.

‘I CAN’T BREATHE,'

BY H.E.R.

Gabriella Wilson is only 22 years old, but her voice and lyrics draw from a deep well of wisdom. Her stage moniker, H.E.R., stands for Having Everything Revealed, which Wilson does on her new single “I Can’t Breathe,” simultaneously a eulogy and a protest song. Wilson’s soulful voice carries verses, but then she dips into spoken word to drive the message home in the third: “We are fed up eating your shit / Because you think your so-called ‘black friend’ / Validates your wokeness and erases your racism / That kind of uncomfortable conversation is too hard for your trust-fund pockets to swallow / To swallow the strange fruit hanging from my family tree ... Do not say you do not see color / When you see us, see us / We can’t breathe.”