Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.
This week: Tricks and treats from Florence + The Machine’s howling latest, an early Mother’s Day gift from Tyler, the Creator and a right-on-time R&B love song from Brent Faiyaz.
Florence + The Machine, Everybody Scream
We all scream for Florence + The Machine’s latest, an appropriately titled album for a Halloween release, certainly. The horrors here are not necessarily of the jump-scare variety, but more the realities of life as both a veteran pop-rock star not always given her due and as a woman facing double-standards in the music industry — one who recently endured a potentially life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, as she detailed in a recent Guardian profile. But regardless, Florence is no Final Girl, and Everybody Scream evinces the mighty strength she’s developed as a singer, artist and person: “Come on, come I can take it/ Gimme everything you got/ What else?” she goads in “Sympathy Magic.” Besides, as she attests in “Witch Dance,” “Your threats and your promises, they don’t scare me/ After all, there’s nobody more monstrous than me.”
Tyler, The Creator, “Mother”
Tyler, the Creator apparently considers his newly released bonus track “Mother” such an important of his CHROMAKOPIA experience that his new CHROMAKOPIA+ sticks it in the middle of the tracklist, not just at the end. A sympathetic song about his mom’s experience having him, raising him and trying to teach him life wisdom, the track even includes an interlude of said matriarch warning him not to get arrested, because she had no intent of bailing him out of jail. He also holds some grace for his father: “Father told me nothin’/ F–k it…. I hold no grudges, I heard he a fan.” The beat and the backing grunts are tense (and intense), but the electric piano is warm and tender.
Brent Faiyaz, “Have To.”
In what’s turning out to be an excellent year for crossover R&B, it’s a perfect time for the return of hitmaker Brent Faiyaz. Especially with a song this irresistible: “Have To.” is an immaculately produced love song about Faiyaz doing whatever has to do to be where he needs to be: “I’m in a race with time to get where I belong/ ‘Cause it feels so right after all these nights alone.” Sweetly urgent but never overly insistent — and winking enough to avoid any undue sweatiness, including multiple vocal tracks of a pitch-altered Faiyaz basically dueting with himself — “Have To.” is another big winner for Faiyaz.
Reneé Rapp, “Lucky”
Frisky, poppy, lightly grungy alt-rock certainly seems to be the musical sweet spot for Reneé Rapp, as evidenced first by her impressive August sophomore LP Bite Me, and now from her new song “Lucky.” Recorded for the Now You See Me: Now You Don’t soundtrack — sure — “Lucky” features Rapp bragging about her charmed life over propulsive guitars and occasional synth flares, even throwing in a little meta-nudge with the bridge’s “It’s almost like I’m Reneé.” Extra points for actually working the film’s title into the lyrics.
Sub Focus feat. Grimes, “Entwined”
Grimes ‘n’ Bass! As the wait continues for the follow-up to 2020’s Miss Anthropocene, Grimes has been busy with one-offs and collabs — most recently teaming up with the U.K. producer Sub Focus for this week’s “Entwined,” whose moaning, growling, frequently shape-shifting beat is the perfect bed for the Canadian alt-pop star to wail over. It might not be explicitly spooky-scary, but if you happen to be one song short on your Halloween playlist for this weekend, it’s unsettling and intense enough to be a fit.
Oklou, Choke Enough (Deluxe)
Speaking of Grimes — rising French electro-pop singer-songwriter Oklou arrived with heavy Claire Boucher vibes earlier this year on shimmering debut album Choke Enough. If that 13-track set understandably left you craving more, the artist born Marylou Vanina Mayniel reissues the set this week with four bonus cuts, including the previously released fka Twigs collab “Viscus,” the gorgeous synth ballad “What’s Good,” and the uncharacteristically acoustic (but still satisfyingly warped) “The Fishsong Unplugged.”
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