9 Songs This Week We’re Talking
About Sting joins the Argentine pop duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso on a track that recalls the Police, and Noah Kahan breaks into the Top 10 with his latest single.
It shouldn’t have been the last time anyone saw Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. In this day and age of online lyrics and machine translation, language should not be a barrier to a rich and varied musical world. This week brings new releases from both stalwarts and rising stars of Latin pop, and English speakers have been busy, too. Here are some notable new songs.
(Use Apple Music or Spotify to listen.) The Latest “Hasta Jesus Tuvo un Mal Dia,” by Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso and Sting, Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, an Argentine pop duo whose 2025 EP, “Papota,” recently won a Grammy for Latin rock or alternative album, features Sting, of all people. Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso can be deeply tongue-in-cheek, but this song comes across as a sincere self-help pep talk. Sting adds, “Don’t give up yet,” translating, “Even Jesus had his bad days.” “Free Spirits,” the album’s first single, will be released on March 19. And Sting sounds right at home in a track with a backbeat and guitar chords that hark back directly to the Police.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Baby Rose featuring Leon Thomas, ‘Friends Again’
Is it ever going to be the same? Why did we have to complicate it?” “Friends Again,” a slow-rolling neo-soul duet that is a jumble of regrets and lingering desire, has those questions hanging over it. Leon Thomas responds to Baby Rose’s incessant ache with spiraling melismas as they both contemplate an encounter that may have changed everything.
You can hear it on YouTube, Apple Music, or Spotify.
“Toco Madera,” by Jorge Drexler
The African-rooted rhythms of Uruguayan candombe are the core of “Toco Madera” (“I Knock on Wood”). It’s the first single from “‘Taracá,” the new album Jorge Drexler recorded in his native Uruguay after decades of working in Spain and elsewhere. In 2005, Drexler won an Academy Award for his song “Al Otro Lado del Rio.” He is a master of compressed, multileveled lyrics and arrangements that turn spaces into syncopations.
Drexler has won 16 Latin Grammys. He sings in “Toco Madera” about watching someone’s GPS location move away from him while he knocks on wood for luck in the hope that they will return. In candombe, touching wood also means tapping out the central beat, the clave, on the wooden side of a drum — and that clave paces the song.
You can hear it on YouTube, Apple Music, or Spotify.
Ratboys, ‘Light Night Mountains All That’
In “Late Night Mountains All That” from Ratboys’ “Singin’ to an Empty Chair,” Julia Steiner snarls, “You didn’t care, you didn’t care.” The track starts out serene and folky, but that doesn’t last. The song bursts into a whirlwind of feedback and distortion as Steiner sings about mystical revelations she wanted to share—”how the lightning strikes when the sun explodes.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
“I Had a Dream She Took My Hand,” by James Blake
“I Had a Dream She Took My Hand” is a fully realized anachronism created by James Blake. He creates a surreal doomed-love song by extrapolating from a sample of Thee Sinseers’ “It Was Only a Dream” and transporting his synthesizers, falsetto, and pervasive melancholy to an imaginary warped 1950s. Over a vintage chord progression in slow arpeggios, he envisions couples walking hand in hand with “the Titanic band / playing them out miles from land,” and he concludes with an epistemological plea: “I just wanna know what it means.”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
“No Others,” by Momoko Gill
“No Others” is from “Momoko,” the debut solo album by Momoko Gill, a songwriter, singer, drummer and producer who has worked with fellow British experimenters like Matthew Herbert and Alabaster DePlume. Six beats make up this jazzy, intricate track. Gill sings mysterious thoughts with calm curiosity over a loping bass line and small fragments of piano and guitar: “Take me down and let me come alive until I fall / I wonder when it ends, how does it feel?”
You can hear it on YouTube, Apple Music, or Spotify.
What’s New in Instrumental Music
“Manifeste,” Tigran Hamayasan
The Armenian keyboardist Tigran Hamayan bridges jazz, prog-rock and ambient music on his album “Manifeste.” Its title track is by turns complex, patterned, impactful and improvisatory, with Hamayan’s fast fingers on pianos and electric keyboards. Large forces — a band and a choir that have learned complex, meter-shifting parts — are involved. However, Hamayan and his drummer, who never backs down from a challenge, are the main players.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Hot 100’s Biggest Hits Noah Kahan, ‘The Great Divide’
Noah Kahan’s “The Great Divide,” the title song of an album due April 24, got major promotion when it was played in full as an ad during the Grammy Awards, and now it’s No. 6 on the pop chart. It’s a folk-rock song about a former friend from younger, wilder days, who was worse off than he could understand at the time. Now the singer realizes “how bad it must have been for you back then / And how hard it was to keep it all inside.” As Kahan expresses his regret, the guitars begin to pound.
You can hear it on YouTube, Apple Music, or Spotify.
What’s Hot in Portugal and Brazil?
“Posso Até No Te Da Flores” by DJ Davi DogDog, MC Ryan SP, MC Jacaré, and MC Meno K
The long-running No. 1 song in Brazil — and in Portugal — is “I May Not Give You Flowers,” a collaboration from three rappers and two producers. Brazilian rappers favor melody, so this shared boast and come-on is also a friendly competition over who can float the best vocal lines over the harplike loop. MC Ryan SP borrows part of his feature, bringing some Portuguese lyrics to the chorus from Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling.”
