The Playlist: The 1975 Talk About Its Generation, and 9 More New Songs

Matthew Healy, the lead singer of the 1975, is 29 and feeling elderly enough to venture an older-and-wiser song, “Give Yourself a Try,” as the first single from this English band’s next album, “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships.” The verses hold regrets and self-criticism, countered by the encouraging chorus. And while the video pretends that the song is guitar-bass-drums punk, the clever production uses a guitar line like a loop, giving what could have been an electropop song a constant bite. — JON PARELES

It’s almost all fun in the sun in “Humility,” the first single from a Gorillaz album, “The Now Now,” due June 29. There’s a relaxed, string-laden R&B groove with glossy lead guitar from George Benson; the video has the cartoon group’s character 2-D skating around a Los Angeles beach while a smiley Jack Black clowns around and fakes the guitar licks. Still, behind it all, Damon Albarn remains dependably morose: “I don’t want this isolation/See the state I’m in now?” — JON PARELES

Kadhja Bonet is a songwriter, one-woman studio band and producer (and illustrator) with a whimsical imagination and jazzy chord progressions. Amid bubbly synthesizers, cooing backup vocals and the tinkle of a toy piano, “Another Time Lover” breathily envisions a fantasy romance “on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.” It’s from her second album, “Childqueen,” due June 8. She is working in her own mental realm: “Another time, another place/Another life, another space.” — JON PARELES

Kamal Keila was among Sudan’s biggest musicians in the 1970s and ‘80s, but he never recorded an album. Instead, he stashed in his basement a copy of the recordings he’d made for a radio station in 1992, a bit past the peak of his career. That music will finally become publicly available next month as an album, titled “Muslims and Christians.” On some tracks, Keila sings in English, while making direct musical reference to American funk. But on “Taban Ahwak” and some of the others sung in Arabic, the clipped guitar and hovering horns clearly reflect the influences of traditional Sudanese music, and the Ethiopian funk of the 1970s and ‘80s. — GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

No choruses, no catchphrases, no memes — Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought from the Roots, forcefully upholds the discipline of 1990s hip-hop, steam-rolling through verse after allusion-packed verse and interweaving his own memories and ambitions with a broader sense of politics and history: “I heard murder ran this vast deserted land/since when Burning Man was blacks in Birmingham.” The production on “Twofifteen” and the rest of the EP “Streams of Thought Vol. 1” — the first in a planned series of collaborations — is by 9th Wonder and his team the Soul Council, whose tracks are grounded in vintage R&B that, as Black Thought raps, are “soulful as orthopedics.” — JON PARELES

The songwriter, singer and electronic producer MNDR starts out complaining “Why you pull me down?” in “Gravity.” The track is a collaboration with three other producers — mainly Hudson Mohawke, along with John Hill and Peter Wade — that cunningly mutates from a sparse dembow beat through syncopated trance chords to a skein of prog-rock organ arpeggios. Along the way, MNDR decides that love is worth an “iffy start”; at the end she urges, “Baby, pull me down.” — JON PARELES

It’s hard to imagine anyone turning down Syd’s seductive request to “Come Over” and visit someone who’s “home alone for the night” in the latest single by the Internet, from its album “Hive Mind” due July 20. Its midtempo groove, deliberate bass line and informal backup vocals hark back to Sly and the Family Stone, while Syd doles out her come-ons just a few syllables at a time. At the end of the video, the charm evaporates with a teaser for another song: a male gripe about gold-digging women. — JON PARELES

Pithy storytelling, twang and a backbeat have defined Dwight Yoakam’s music throughout his career. He collaborated with Chris Stapleton, a younger songwriter with his own deep throwback streak, on “Pretty Horses.” Major chords and a loping beat — precisely placed between Yoakam’s foundation of 1960s Bakersfield country and Bob Dylan’s 1960s “wild mercury sound” with its electric-organ filigree — carry a song about a deeply embattled romance: “Softly searching for small signs of me and you/gently thinking of what’s left that we could do/about our love.” Can horses carry all of that emotional strife? — JON PARELES

The version of “Italian Toothpaste” that the Los Angeles psych-rock band JJUUJJUU released in April on its album “Zionic Mud” was unhinged enough: an obsessively repeating blues-rock riff and a barely intelligible vocal in a rhythmic vortex of rockabilly echoes over a Bo Diddley beat. For his remix, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. waded in with — what else — a lead guitar, and later a throng of them, wailing and screeching toward a distortion supernova. — JON PARELES

For “Siiva Moiiva,” the opening cut on his sophomore album, the young trumpeter Adam O’Farrill wrote a melody that sighs and subtly blooms from minor to major: It’s lazy but watchful, slumping and physical and bright. Not all the tracks on “El Maquech” are so innately catchy, though the entire record keeps a tight hold on your attention. On this tune the tenor saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown improvises with a combination of breezy insouciance and sharp rhythmic assurance. As his solo closes, he and O’Farrill link up again, finding a loose, conjunctive flow. — GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO