The song SZA introduced in a commercial during the Grammy Awards, “Saturn,” has now been separated from its credit-card plug and released to streaming services in multiple versions; one, the sped-up version, brings out its clear pop structure. But the real-time version is better. The song is about a longing for the better place that her karma has earned: “Stuck in this paradigm/Don’t believe in paradise,” she sings. Arpeggios glimmer around her; a boom-bap beat brings an undertow. Her vocal lines argue with the beat as she joins generations of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, looking beyond Earth and insisting, “There’s got to be more.” JON PARELES
“Musow Danse” (“Women’s Dance”) is the title track of the jubilant new album by Les Amazones D’Afrique: a Pan-African, proudly multilingual alliance of singers and songwriters carrying feminist messages to dance floors. “Musow Danse” is propelled by gritty distorted electronics and traditional drumming; it features Mamani Keïta from Mali, Fafa Ruffino from Benin, Dobet Gnahoré from the Ivory Coast and Kandy Guira from Mali, singing (respectively) in Bambara, Fon, Bété and Mooré, and sharing the chorus, “Rise up African woman!” PARELES
A.G. Cook, ‘Britpop’
On this cheekily named, kaleidoscopically catchy title track from his upcoming third album, the zany electronic producer A.G. Cook turns a simple, hypnotically repeated Charli XCX refrain — “Brit, Brit, Brit, Brit, Brit, like Britpop” — into an alternate-universe national anthem. As prismatic synths bounce off Charli’s increasingly processed vocals, “Britpop” recalls the wild effervescence of Cook’s best work with the avant-pop collective PC Music, but its concept is refreshingly streamlined and direct. Blur and Oasis never did it quite like this. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Rhiannon Giddens, ‘The Ballad of Sally Anne’
Mark O’Connor’s 1991 recording of “The Ballad of Sally Anne” was so bouncy that its chilling, crucial lines could almost go unnoticed. They’re about Sally Anne’s husband, lynched on their wedding day: “As he hung from a tree she watched him die.” The longtime Nashville Music Row songwriter (and a novelist) Alice Randall collaborated on the song, tucking a Black story into a white musician’s catalog as she often did. “My Black Country,” a tribute album of Randall’s songs recorded by Black women, is due April 12. Quickly following her newfound exposure playing banjo on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em,” Rhiannon Giddens has reworked “The Ballad of Sally Anne” to bring out the haunted grief at its core. It has a new, minor-mode tune with fiddle and banjo upfront at first, later bolstered by jabbing horns. Sally Anne’s ghostly quest isn’t a hoedown any more. PARELES
The lyrics seesaw between wry — “Money makes things seem so out of whack/Drive away in my blue Cadillac” — and forlorn: “Someone tell me what the hell is wrong/Nights always feel quiet and too long.” But the music leans optimistic. Like the rest of her coming album, “Visions,” “Staring at the Wall” is a collaboration between Norah Jones and the producer and drummer Leon Michels. Between his backbeat and her twangy guitar, understated keyboards and reassuring vocal harmonies, it’s clear she’ll make it through her misgivings just fine. PARELES
Adrianne Lenker, ‘Fool’
Adrianne Lenker sings about connections — “They say when it’s right it’s right” — that can last or disappear: friendship, infatuation, romance, marriage, family. In her feathery, quavery voice, she itemizes various people’s names and situations amid a six-beat web of picked, manipulated guitar tones, precise but never certain. The guitars are likely to bend, float in, stutter or vanish at any moment: as fragile and needed as the human companionship she longs for. PARELES
Kings of Leon, ‘Mustang’
The taut leadoff single from Kings of Leon’s forthcoming album “Can We Please Have Fun” begins with restrained, palm-muted verses over which Caleb Followill deadpans some absurd lines: “A muscle magazine next to the toilet, I’m getting big and strong just thinking about it.” But ultimately, after an initial fakeout, this seemingly arch song explodes into the kind of cathartic rock chorus for which the band is known. “Are you a mustang or a kitty?” Followill hollers. The answer seems to be the former. ZOLADZ
“How much can I take, drowning in my pain?” Baby Rose sings in the opening verse of “Breaking Point” from the new album, “I’ve Never Been Here Before,” by the Brooklyn-based producer and rapper Erick the Architect. Over lush strings, his guests sing about being at the brink of despair, but Erick’s rap preaches patience, endurance and shared effort: “I could never swim without you, tides is turning, we evolve!” PARELES
Kelly Moran, ‘Butterfly Phase’
The keyboardist and composer Kelly Moran, who has worked with Oneohtrix Point Never and FKA twigs, made her coming album, “Moves in the Field,” by meshing live performance with material she created on a Yamaha Disklavier, a computerized player piano that can record and reprocess a musician’s performance, including her touch. “Butterfly Phase” layers multiple levels of activity: sustained chords, a thoughtfully unfolding melody and plinking, perpetual-motion eighth-notes, the sound of finding a path through countless glittering distractions. PARELES
