The Playlist: Blood Orange’s Fragile Pop, and 11 More New Songs

Over the past few years, Dev Hynes has become a reliable sub rosa pop innovator. But what is well-masked in his productions for others is, in his own music, brought to the fore — a fluency with texture, a willingness to unsettle. On “Charcoal Baby” — one of a pair of new songs he released this week, in advance of his forthcoming album “Negro Swan” — he juxtaposes lush singing, especially that of his collaborator, EVA, with emotional scars (“No one wants to be the odd one out at times/No one wants to be the Negro swan”); he pairs a crisp drum track with a guitar that wobbles and staggers. It takes deftness to render fragility this sturdily. In Hynes’ world, comfort and discomfort are not at war, but holding each other close. — JON CARAMANICA

Just the type of casual, trash-talking, sticky, staccato, thickly vibrating song that Tinashe needs to pull herself out of career purgatory, especially if people are willing to reconceptualize her as a rapper, rather than a singer. — JON CARAMANICA

“Burnt Out Star,” from the prolific Australian psychedelic band Pond, is idyllic, then sumptuous, then ominous. Meditative guitars lead into billowing, multitudinous vocal harmonies sustaining the song’s title above an orchestral backdrop. But they vanish as singer Nick Allworth starts to wonder what happens when “the ozone goes, and Paris burns, and Australia — who knows?” A drum machine ticks steadily and nervously as Allworth turns to chanting obsessively about “1917”; then rock drums come crashing in along with a relentless bass line, all but drowning him out; no happy ending here. — JON PARELES

Kristin Hersh, who founded Throwing Muses, describes her album due in October, “Possible Dust Clouds,” as exploring “the sociopathic nature of music.” Everything in the initial single, a three-chord rocker called “No Shade in Shadow” — guitars, drums, her voice — is swathed in distortion and echo effects; one of the intelligible lines is “Waiting for the noise to stop.” It does not. That is the point. — JON PARELES

“Potato Salad,” a loose back-and-forth with Tyler, the Creator, is the most relaxed ASAP Rocky has sounded all year. In the video (which appears as part of the “AWGE DVD Vol. 3” release), the two trade verses in a park with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Rocky muses about subpar fashionistas and subpar rappers, and Tyler, at his gravelly best, drops absurdist boasts — “Based on my neck, boy/you would think I hate glass homes/the way I’m handling the rocks” — and gives a quick lyrical wink to Cole Sprouse. — JON CARAMANICA

Flamenco hand claps propel “Pienso en Tu Mirá” (“I Think of Your Gaze”), and images of flamenco performers show up throughout the video clip, though one is a figurine that gets smashed by vandals. Rosalía, a major star in Spain, writes up-to-the-minute songs infused with bits of tradition; the six-beat buleria rhythm of those handclaps is meshed with staccato trap percussion and her breathy, intimate vocal. She is singing about jealousy, fear of abandonment and a gaze that feels like “a bullet in the chest”; in the video, men appear with spreading bloodstains, while Rosalía is at the center of an insurrection. — JON PARELES

The first single from Jon Batiste’s forthcoming album, “Hollywood Africans,” stays anchored to a set of tolling, somber arpeggios on the piano, never bubbling over into a funk groove or a power-ballad roar. But its lyrics are, apparently, a hopeful call for communion. Usually, words like this (“Put your hand in mine, don’t stop/We’ll dance the night away, won’t care what people say”) point toward one place: jubilant, heedless excess on the tail end. By the middle of the bridge — “Don’t stop dreamin’, don’t stop believin'” — you may be itching for some big, purgative blast to wake you up, and wash away the cliché. — GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Queen Naija’s payback anthem “Medicine” has been one of this year’s defining R&B songs, a slow seether about infidelity sung with disarming calm. On her new self-titled EP, though, the most striking song is about something altogether different: the joys of motherhood. Over a slow march of a beat, Queen Naija is by turns tender and exultant, the joy here easily outpacing the hurt of her breakthrough hit. — JON CARAMANICA

“I’m in my 20s so I panic in every way/I’m so scared of the future I keep missing today,” the two women in Ider sing in this hymn to millennial stresses. They cannot resolve the conflict between seizing the day and making long-term plans, but at least they have a chorus to show for it. — JON PARELES

As Kenny Chesney sings about the urge to explore uncharted wildernesses in “Ends of the Earth,” from his new album, “Songs for the Saints,” the music gives him heroic, wide-open spaces. The song is both an invitation and an ultimatum: Join him on his travels or he’s going alone. It opens with the gentle Caribbean lilt Chesney learned from Jimmy Buffett, but that is a fake-out; with the chorus, a giant guitar twang and booming tom-toms reverberate to distant horizons. Everything country learned from arena rock is in the mix. — JON PARELES

On “Water’s Rising,” experimental producer Djrum creates a swirling ambrosia of clinking beats and dreamy piano while Lola Empire sings of infatuation in a distant but declarative tone. What begins as a sparse rustle of sounds builds into a shivery, post-dubstep thrash of haze and percussion. The track comes from Djrum’s forthcoming album, “Portrait with Firewood,” due next month. — GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Built from two slowly tolling piano chords and countless reverberating, wordless voices, Sarah Davachi’s “Evensong” is not exactly ambient music. It is an arc of mourning and mysticism, a patient crescendo dissolving into a haunted memory. — JON PARELES