Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos — and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. You can listen to this playlist on Spotify here. Like this Playlist? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com, and sign up for our Louder newsletter (coming soon!) here.  The electronic musician who calls himself Burial deals in blurry, melancholy, ominous implications. His first release since 2013 is a pair of tracks that are never far from dissolving into entropy. “Young Death” can be glimpsed from the farthest fringe of dance music; most of it has fairly steady but nearly subliminal beats, though they are submerged deep in the mix. Much closer to the foreground are crackly sounds — a storm? a burning city? — and voices singing words that would be soothing if they didn’t sound so utterly lost: “Don’t fear,” “Don’t cry,” “I will always be there for you.” The beat is absorbed by the static, to be replaced by one that’s slower and even less supportive. “I’ll be there, promise I’ll be,” a voice offers before the haze swallows it, too. “Nightmarket” is an even more shadowy, attenuated travelogue. Its passages of blippy arpeggios are separated by lengthy stretches with echoes of wind chimes, distant keening voices, screams, whispers and stray spoken words — “Come with me,” “the frontier,” “over here!” — that only lead deeper into the void. JON PARELES  The title of Laura Marling’s ravishing new song isn’t meant as a descriptor, but rather a note of anguish — like the word “water” as rasped by someone crawling across a desert. “Oh my hopeless wanderer,” she sings at the start of the track, tracing an upward arpeggio in a minor key. “You can’t come in, you don’t live here anymore.” Still, Ms. Marling toys with aspects of seduction in the song’s arrangement, which leans heavy on a sinuous electric bass, and in the video, which she directed herself. Inspired by a series of dreams she had while making her new album — “Semper Femina,” due out in March — it’s a vision of human bodies as sculptural forms, and also an argument for physical intimacy as just another mode of performance. NATE CHINEN  If you are the sort of person who expends much energy stressing about the fact that rapper du jour Lil Yachty had not, until recently, listened to the music of the Notorious B.I.G., then little in this score-settling freestyle — on the Beats 1 radio show of his longtime antagonist Ebro Darden — will change your mind. Rather than concede to the beat — Craig Mack’s “Flava In Ya Ear,” the remix of which featured B.I.G. — and perform a flow that recalled the original, in an act of homage, Yachty goes rogue, rapping in elongated sentences that stretch past the ordinary beat boundaries. It’s not quite virtuoso, but it’s intriguing — the sound of a rapper following the beat in his head, not his earphones:  I’m in a Benz and I’m getting a BentleyI’m reading texts from last night, she said ‘I love how you bent me’I just bought a Benz and it said ‘please take me’You wanna buy it but you can’t, so you’re rentingYou take it back in six months, if there’s no denting  “Arkansas,” by the rising Texas country singer Troy Cartwright, is wonderfully patient. On this song, from his recent EP, “Don’t Fade,” he muses about the stability of a relationship (“Is this love or is this convenience?”) and, after a couple of minutes, comes to no conclusions. And yet his voice is remarkably free of anxiety — he’ll wait as long as it takes, play it as it lays. That’s clearest when he’s not singing at all: the minute-plus at the song’s end that’s just melancholy, stretched out ambient notes with cricket noises screaming for attention in the background. J.C.
Hear the new music that caught our pop critics’ attention this week, from Lil Yachty’s Beats 1 Freestyle to an imaginative Paul Simon remix.