New Music This Week: Hasley Wants To Be "Alone," Arcade Fire Get The Message, & More

Mix Sunset Boulevard and the life story of Howard Hughes up until it's a song, and I bet you'd get Halsey's new track. I love that her brand has become "international pop star who will disappoint you if you get to know her as a person." It's brilliant persona-building based on only one aspect of Halsey's personality. I can just tell you this: you'll never hear another pop song that makes becoming a pop star sound so unappealing. It's almost unfair that this track also makes it so damn danceable.

After their disastrous and, frankly, agitating launch for this album, I have to admit that I wrote Arcade Fire off. But, they seem to have found the right medium (it was not speaking to the press) by making a short film based around the concepts this album wants to explore: selling out, corporations running everything, the state of the relationship between artist and patron. Probably best to leave their notions about fake news out of it. They got the wonderful Toni Collette to star as the face of the evil empire they imagineered, Everything Now, and I send them kudos for even daring to dream that a woman could leverage power in a multi-national corporation; that's already one step further than the real world is statistically likely to go. This hellish Vegas dream of a video pretty much nails it with condemnations for everything I hate. Perhaps some ideas are too big and textured to be described in sound bites, eh Arcade Fire?

I feel like I should just play this song for 98% of the dudes I go out with from Bumble. It's only the fragment of a song, from Kash Doll's new mixtape, but damn, it's true. It feels like she's building on that SZA vibe of talking about real life and relationships from the woman point of view. If you're looking for an argument that we need more space for women in rap, please direct your attention to this track.

I am a sucker for a piano ballad, and Ruth Koleva does it one better by layering trumpets over the thing. Oh, and then there's her voice! It's haunting and feminine. I'd like to sing along to this song, but I might as well not even learn the words because I cannot sing that high. Put this one on your taking a bubble bath and chilling playlist.