New Music Friday: 8/30/24

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:

"SOS (Sex on Sight)," Victoria Monét featuring Usher
It's pretty rare for me to select anything from the upper tenth of a NMF playlist — that tier's reserved for the biggest artists, who often tend to release the most middle-of-the-road, least interesting stuff — but there are exceptions to this rule, and "SOS (Sex on Sight)" is one of them. Not just because it's frankly horny R&B in a grown folks way that I, as a very grown folk, can appreciate; there's also the matter of the song's delightfully slinky arrangement, which incorporates judicious splashes of brass between all the come-ons. Excellent. Sexcellent? You get the idea.