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The playlist: Shawn Mendes shows his scars, and 9 more new songs

What has set Shawn Mendes apart from other rising pop stars is his ability to pump up traditional singer-songwriter dynamics with steroids, making grand anthems out of interior thoughts and moods.

Shawn Mendes, ‘In My Blood’

“In My Blood,” the first single from his forthcoming third album, has some of that muscle, especially in the chorus. But it stands out from his earlier hits for just how scarred and forlorn he sounds:

“Laying on the bathroom floor, feeling nothing/I’m overwhelmed and insecure, give me something/I can take to ease my mind, slowly.”

In the hook, his blood is biological determinism: the thing that won’t let him succumb. But in the rest of the song, his blood — his self — is what’s betraying him. It’s a tug-of-war, not a triumph.

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— JON CARAMANICA

Snail Mail, ‘Pristine’

Young love can feel eternal and precarious at precisely the same moment. “Pristine” is the first single from the debut album, due in June, by Lindsey Jordan’s band, Snail Mail. She insists that “I’ll never love anyone else” even as she worries that her partner might “find someone better.”

The chorus, in a surge of self-doubt, asks, “Don’t you like me for me?” Eventually, she declares, “We can be anything — even apart.”

The music opens out from a lone strummed guitar to full band, with harmonic ambiguity built into the chords. As Jordan’s singing moves from matter-of-fact to resigned — the word “anyways” just aches — to adamant, no fickle partner will tarnish her passion.

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— JON PARELES

A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie featuring Tory Lanez, ‘Best Friend’

One of a handful of songs A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie released on his SoundCloud page this week, “Best Friend” is about the fragile balance between like and lust. As ever, the cracks in his voice are perfectly suited to the anxiety of such confusion, but his melodic strength allows him to boast — “I smell like the money is my fragrance/Now I got a house inside my basement/Used to trap in houses that was vacant” — while sounding tender.

— JON CARAMANICA

Wynton Marsalis Septet featuring Ray Charles, ‘I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town’

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At Jazz at Lincoln Center’s annual fundraising galas, Wynton Marsalis’ septet often backs rock and pop stars. The new album, “United We Swing,” gathers live tracks featuring, among others, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, John Legend, Natalie Merchant and Lyle Lovett. Many of the guests sound a little daunted by Marsalis’ ultratight little big band — but not Ray Charles from 2003 in one of his last recordings, still in great voice. Singing about ways to prevent getting cheated on, Charles is suave, bluesy, cagey and improvisational — and it’s Marsalis’ trumpet fills that sound overexcited.

— JON PARELES

Alison Wonderland featuring Trippie Redd, ‘High’

Turns out that Trippie Redd’s ambient howls are as well suited to his usual spare, spooky love songs as to this thuddering, build-up-to-the-drop, largely edgeless club music by Australian DJ-producer Alison Wonderland. She provides some rote tension, but he’s never not meditating.

— JON CARAMANICA

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Dillon Carmichael, ‘It’s Simple’

This Kentucky country-rock singer has a voice that moves with the heft and certainty of a tractor-trailer. “It’s Simple,” the first single from his forthcoming Dave Cobb-produced album, is more gussied up — including urgent pedal steel by Robby Turner — than Dillon Carmichael needs. It’s effective, but not as much so as some of his older material. See “Old Songs Like That,” a history lesson delivered with affection, warmth and conviction.

— JON CARAMANICA.

Miles Davis and John Coltrane, ‘All of You’

From one angle, it’s a shame that this 1960 tour of Europe was the last time Miles Davis and John Coltrane performed together.

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But it was probably inevitable too. After four years in the Miles Davis Quintet, Coltrane had broken a hole in the parachute and was hurtling somewhere new at terminal speeds. And he was taking the band’s consensus down with him.

The live recordings on “The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6” capture the tenor saxophonist just as he is starting to define the eruptive, gut-emptying style that would eventually revolutionize jazz’s avant-garde.

This remarkable new box set spans four concerts from the Davis quintet’s fractious tour, which have been passed around for years in semiofficial packages but have never before received the proper Columbia remaster-and-release treatment. Coltrane bleats and heaves through his solos, spewing out odd clusters of notes, splitting acrid tones and repeating big, windmill patterns until they seem to have broken free of their context. At the Paris show in particular, there’s dissension in the crowd:

The audience’s squalling cries are often difficult to decipher (grateful catharsis? pique?). And then you hear something else: Did Wynton Kelly, the group’s sturdily swinging pianist, catch some of Coltrane’s bug? Once in a while, you’ll hear him dropping in a darkened harmony or playing swirling, chaotic arpeggios.

— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

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Caroline Davis, ‘Footloose and Fancy Free’

Caroline Davis, an alto saxophonist, earned a Ph.D. in music cognition, but her focus lately has been on the heart, not the head. Her sophomore album, “Heart Tonic,” was motivated by questions of entanglement and emotional adjustment and by the process of helping her father cope with a heart arrhythmia.

The first song on the album, “Footloose and Fancy Free,” finds her electrified rhythm section playing in a five-beat weave inspired by the pumping of the superior vena cava, the vein flowing from the brain to the heart.

The metaphor fits: This is cerebral, modern jazz that still has a convincing pulse, and a wide berth for fetching improvisations. Davis takes a solo of slippery insistence, then turns things over to the trumpeter Marquis Hill, a virtuoso with a sandy tone and an ear for reflective phrasing.

— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

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Sonnymoon, ‘Root’

Sonnymoon, a trio of beat makers and vocalists, is staking out some unclaimed terrain between ambient and 8-bit and Gen X house. The group has been dropping a scattering of digital singles recently; the latest is “Root,” a pattering plea for earnest communion in a time of digital simulacrum.

“I don’t care how many times you’ve cut the vine/You gotta go for the root,” says vocalist J. Hoard, sounding both melismatic and percussive. “I won’t hear all of the lies between the lines/I want the ugly truth.”

— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Hatis Noit, ‘Illogical Lullaby (Matmos Edit)’

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Japanese vocalist Hatis Noit, who shows her face in just under three minutes into the video clip, mixes childlike purity and digital pointillism in “Illogical Lullaby” — something like Meredith Monk toying with computers. Rhythmic syllables harmonized by cantilevered keyboards; sustained sliding tones that defy breath and gravity; ancient-seeming melody, chopped-up counterpoint, glitchy noise and meditative repetition all arise during the title track of the EP that she releases today.

— JON PARELES

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

(Tag bylines with individual items.) © 2018 The New York Times

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