Every week, Vulture highlights the best new music. If the song is worthy of your ears and attention, you will find it here. Read our picks below, share yours in the comments, and subscribe to the Vulture Playlist for a comprehensive guide to the year’s best music.
DJ Khaled ft. Nas, “Nas Album Doneâ€
Whatever DJ Khaled is — producer, DJ, hypeman, life coach — he’s first and foremost an expert curator. He collects every A-list artist imaginable for his compilations, and now that his profile has entered the stratosphere, he can lock down “classic shit†like Nas over one of the biggest samples of the ‘90s. Not just anyone could get away with repurposing the Teena Maria interpolation from the Fugees’ “Fu-Ga-Lee,†but Khaled resurrected Nas’s Escobar persona for the honor. The song’s title serves as a status update on Nas’s pending twelfth album; its body has Nas at odds with the duality of his pen. Should he rap about being a kingpin (now less drugs, more mogul talk) or a person conscious of what’s plaguing the streets. Ultimately, he finds a hybrid, using his self-made business acumen (“start a label, run it, sign yourselfâ€) as a survival tactic for anyone unconvinced they can rise above America’s corruption. But even he’s not so detached from that struggle to think the middle class can reverse a history of disparity alone: “So I’m askin’ Gs to go in their pockets / The racial economic inequality, let’s try to solve it.†—Dee Lockett (@Dee_Lockett)
Russian Circles, “Lisboaâ€
Composed of one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer, and zero vocalists, the Chicago band Russian Circles have been crafting music for over a decade that maintains the dramatic heft of metal while cutting down on the portentousness to which the genre is prone. “Lisboa,†the final track from their forthcoming album, Guidance, represents them at their best, patiently circulating a small, pensive, gentle melody until it sinks in fully and then blowing it up suddenly into grand proportions, producing a song in which delicacy, sadness, and power are inseparable from one another — an elegy without words. —Frank Guan (@frankophilia)
MisterWives, “Same Drugs†(Chance the Rapper cover)
Covering any song from Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book is a bold move. It’s pretty much a perfect album, and trying to put your own signature on sounds that are so distinctly Chance is a big gamble, but MisterWives manage to maintain the same hopefulness and spiritual uplift of “Same Drugs†while giving it a life all its own for fans of fluffy electronic pop. The success of the track can be largely hung on the shoulders of singer Mandy Lee, whose vocals climb and drop with the song’s emotional highs and lows. MisterWives have a lush, synth-y sound, but for “Same Drugs†they mostly defer to Chance’s music and just let Lee play among the piano, trumpets, and backing gospel choir. —Jordan Crucchiola (@jorcru)
Mac Miller ft. Anderson .Paak, “Dang!â€
Mac Miller is the rare rap talent that grows as the years pass instead of dwindling, and his just announced new album, The Divine Feminine, seems poised to shine a spotlight on the Pittsburgh rapper-producer’s underrated ear for vocal melodies. Lead single “Dang!†is a roller-skating jam with smooth vocals from soul upstart Anderson .Paak, but offsetting .Paak’s hook beautifully here are Mac’s verses, which pair his own capable singing and his agile raps to prove he can pull both off coolly at once. The album’s out in September. —Craig Jenkins (@CraigSJ)
JACKAL ft. Mister Blonde, “Anonymousâ€
“Anonymous†starts out sounding like sweaty people dancing against each other in slow motion in room filled with cool light, then the beat drops and that glistening mob starts to pulsate under a strobe. Producer Jackal gives Mister Blonde just the right vehicle for her dreamy voice to beckon you into his beat and to “step outside the world that you know.†—JC
Martin Garrix ft. Bebe Rexha, “In the Name of Loveâ€
From the moment Martin Garrix dropped this song live for the first time at Ultra back in March, you could sense that the official version would be a slapper. It’s a controlled explosion, an H-bomb in a crowded room with the strength to melt the face of anyone it touches. Bebe Rexha has played second fiddle on a lot of other better-known people’s song this year (even on her own debut single, which featured Nicki Minaj), but here, in the grand tradition of EDM dudes using female vocalists to do the heavy lifting, she’s the focal point. Just as the production soars, her voice aims higher and higher and higher until it pierces right through you. —DL