New Music Friday: 8/2/24

Here are the rules: I listen to all 100 tracks of Spotify's New Music Friday playlist, except for anything that rhymes the n-word with itself more than three times, any screamo or screamo-adjacent stuff, any CCM that reveals its true intentions in time for me to hit the skip button, and any egregiously corny modern country music, typically performed by a dude with two first names. Having sifted through this week's playlist, here's what I actively enjoyed:

"Heatstroke," Khalid
Deep in the sweaty armpit of the heaviest, most humid summer I can remember, I'm not exactly looking for songs that begin with the line "What if I told you the sun is coming closer," which is my way of saying that the pleasantly head-swimmy groove of Khalid's "Heatstroke" is so effective that it outweighs the fact that I would much rather be listening to songs about fall.

"Arm's Length," Kacey Musgraves
Lyrically speaking, this is largely middle-school notebook stuff — "I guess I thought I knew you, but you don't know yourself / My heart was on the table, yours was on the shelf / You promised me a castle, but all you built were walls / I treated you like a king, but even kingdoms fall" — but on a musical level, it's such a smart and appealing showcase for Musgraves' bell-clear vocals that those deficiencies almost don't matter. This song also sounds a little like an autumn breeze, which as I said earlier is something I appreciate in this muggy moment.