The Playlist: The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar Join Forces, and 15 More New Songs

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Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos — and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, Iggy Azalea returns with Quavo, Girlpool teams with Dev Hynes, and Ed Sheeran writes a song for a boy band.

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The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar, ‘Pray for Me’

“Who’s gonna save me from this hell?” the Weeknd laments. “You need a hero, look in the mirror,” Kendrick Lamar vows. “If I gotta be sacrificed for the greater good, then that’s what it gotta be.” This melancholy but resolute track from “Black Panther” faces and overcomes a hero’s self-doubt, in a production that glances back toward Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” while it makes synthesizers sound like African hand drums. JON PARELES

Thom Yorke, ‘Why Can't We Get Along?’

Blip, buzz, jitter and haze suffuse Thom Yorke’s latest release, which works in his ascetic synthesizer mode with a haze of vocals that are barely intelligible beyond the aching phrase that carries the title: “Why Can’t We Get Along?” It’s as much soundtrack as song, the backdrop for a fashion promotion choreographed by Benjamin Millepied that revels in vertiginous camera angles, then immediately deconstructs them. J.P.

Iggy Azalea featuring Quavo, ‘Savior’
Bhad Bhabie featuring MadeinTYO,
Rich the Kid and Asian Doll, ‘Hi Bich’ (remix)

Whether you embraced Iggy Azalea during her brief run as a pop-rap interloper a few years ago or derided her, she certainly left a strong impression. So strong, perhaps, that she’s all but retreated from the spotlight, and in a comeback that’s taken place in fits and starts, has been struggling to reorient her sound. “Savior,” which features Quavo at his most wailing, is a compromise between compromises, a mix of trap, early-90s club music, Spotifycore, lite-calypso and more, all mortar-and-pestled into a meaningless paste. Once the most divisive figure in pop, Ms. Azalea seems keen to please everyone here. Also, imagine releasing this the same week Bhad Bhabie, the unlikely rising rap star of the post-meme economy, raps — on the remix of her infectiously surly “Hi Bich” remix — “Don’t compare me to Iggy/that old hoe is washed and I’m lit/wouldn’t pay her to wash out my whip.” JON CARAMANICA

Girlpool and Dev Hynes, ‘Picturesong’

A collaboration with Dev Hynes (a.k.a. Blood Orange or Lightspeed Champion) transforms Girlpool’s music. On its own, Girlpool usually comes up with straightforward indie-rock revolving around the two voices, guitar and bass of Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad. With Mr. Hynes joining them on vocals and instruments, both lyrics and music embrace blurry contemplation instead, wandering “into empty space where hollow shapes won’t misbehave/What does holy want?” The music opens up echoey hollows and a sudden stretch of loud distortion. (Let that SoundCloud waveform be a warning.) In the end, the duo sounds like it’s on its own again, picking quietly as listeners wonder what hit them. J.P.

David Murray featuring Saul Williams, ‘Cycles and Seasons’

“Hack into comfort, compliance. Hack into the rebellious gene. Hack into doctrine.” Saul Williams’s directive on “Cycles and Seasons” is forthright and seemingly endless. He casts a stern impression, but you can hear an eyebrow wryly raised. You won’t know how to handle this, but I’m telling it to you anyway. That bearing puts Mr. Williams, a poet, roughly in common with David Murray, the eminent tenor saxophonist whose warbling style is equal parts ribaldry and pique. “Cycles and Seasons” (the name on Spotify is wrong) comes from Mr. Murray’s new album, “Blues for Memo,” which was recorded with a quartet and features Mr. Williams as a literary co-pilot. This track has two musical sections: a querying refrain, with a tweaked blues melody that lodges quizzically between major and minor, and a skating section of crisp swing. Throughout, Mr. Williams and the pianist Orrin Evans maintain a jittery and prolix flow, demanding action but not waiting around for you to take it. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Jennifer Lopez, ‘Us’

If you are planning to have your wedding ceremony at SoulCycle, here is your song. J.C.

Middle Kids, ‘Mistake’

Here is an arena-size rock song masquerading as a warm, thoughtful 1980s-styled indie rock song. Middle Kids are from Australia, and “Mistake” is the first song from their full-length debut album, due in May. It begins with Smiths-esque guitar, and then the frontwoman Hannah Joy slides in with a clarion clear voice singing about ringing disappointment. The song is about someone else’s failure, but the band sounds celebratory, even ecstatic. J.C.

Nils Frahm, ‘Sunson’

The composer and keyboardist Nils Frahm is comfortable at the interstices of jazz, chamber-pop and electronics, and this slowly evolving nine-minute track from his new album, “All Melody,” encompasses them all, meditating through both calm and bustle. J.P.

Carnage x Lil Pump, ‘i Shyne’

You might think, “What in the world is less necessary than a lyric video for a Lil Pump song?” There is nothing to be clarified, nothing to be expounded upon. But credit this effort — for a rowdy and very effective collaboration with the D.J.-producer Carnage — for its cartoonish, hypercolor exuberance, its mischievous glee and its troll-worthy screengrab moment (at 1:06), “Lil Pump saved the rap game like a poet.” J.C.

Laura Veirs, ‘Everybody Needs You’

Laura Veirs, a still too little-known songwriter based in Portland, Ore., previews her 10th album, “The Lookout,” with “Everybody Needs You.” It’s a terse, friendly tune thoroughly interwoven with nervous undercurrents: her quick acoustic guitar-picking, a rock band, a chamber orchestra full of woodwind pulsations and string-section countermelodies. Her voice sounds shy, but the ambitions are huge. J.P.

Why Don’t We, ‘Trust Fund Baby’

Class warfare comes to boy-band pop: Here’s an Ed Sheeran song — note the vocal syncopations — that finds attraction in intelligence and car-repair skills rather than hair, makeup and designer footwear. It’s as posed as can be, but its anti-materialist heart is in the right place. J.P.

Many Rooms, ‘Which Is to Say, Everything’

Many Rooms — the songwriter Brianna Hunt, recording in what sounds like a studio made of mist and apparitions — creates drama from whispers in “Which Is to Say, Everything.” It’s a meditation on death, loneliness, death wish, memory and perseverance, drifting through clouds of guitars and static, voices and reverberation, processionals and elegies. J.P.

Tiësto featuring Gucci Mane and Sevenn, ‘Boom’

Gucci Mane made a hip-house song with Tiësto. Gucci Mane made a very good hip-house song with Tiësto. In 2018. That is all. J.C.

Julian Lage, ‘Pantheon’

At 30, the guitarist Julian Lage has now been a virtuoso protagonist for as long as he was a child star. In fact, he appears to be comfortable enough at this point to luxuriate a bit. Across most of “Modern Lore,” his fifth album as a leader, he bears a kind of likeness to Bill Frisell, the tart-toned guitarist whose argot is a pillowy blend of American roots music. (Kenny Wollesen, the drummer on “Modern Lore,” is a longtime Frisell collaborator, and gives the album a familiar bounce.) But toward the end of the album, Mr. Lage starts to inquire in other directions. On “Earth Science” he refers more to John Scofield, slinging quick runs of sour, bended notes. And on one misty passage of “Pantheon” — around 2:30 — he comes close to the phantasmagoric, frictionless legato of Allan Holdsworth. G.R.

Sunny War, ‘If It Wasn’t Broken’

“How would you know you had a heart/If it wasn’t broken?,” Sunny War asks in this minimal lament, which uses just acoustic guitar picking, fiddle and a backup vocal here and there. It’s both lived-in advice and a kind of solace, presented with plain compassion and profound grace. J.P.