The Playlist: Radiohead Digs Into the Archives, but Zola Jesus Is More Extravagantly ‘Exhumed’ THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Playlist: Radiohead Digs Into the Archives, but Zola Jesus Is More Extravagantly ‘Exhumed’

By JON PARELES, JON CARAMANICA and GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

JUNE , 2017

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Radiohead’s latest release is an outtake from the “OK Computer” sessions called “I Promise.”CreditKevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella

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.

Radiohead, ‘I Promise’

“I won’t run away no more, I promise,” Thom Yorke sings in this outtake from Radiohead’s “OK Computer” sessions, newly released as part of the album’s expanded reissue. Whether it’s inspired by devotion, repentance or coercion is a matter of speculation. The song itself is a folk-rock march, with straightforward strumming and genteel strings, and could almost be taken as an earnest vow. The video clip, a nighttime bus ride through barren English towns, grows far more sinister. JON PARELES

Zola Jesus, ‘Exhumed’

The grave pomp of Russian late Romanticism meets the jittery electronics of trap in Zola Jesus’s “Exhumed,” an early preview of her album, “Okovi” (Russian for “shackles”) due in September. Nika Roza Danilova, a.k.a. Zola Jesus, gives a full-throated wail of an incantation, answered by her own banshee choir, over dark low strings along with electronics and  percussion that starts out twitchy and ratchety and ends up at a throng-of-Cossacks gallop. The lyrics are cryptic — “Give you the knocks/of a lost war/Cut knife deep in/spit down swallow” — but they’re clearly dire. J.P.

Pharrell Williams, ‘Yellow Light’

Was it only four years ago that Pharrell Williams was happy? It’s hard to remember that far back sometimes, given how much detritus has been left in the rear view.  Something has soured in Mr. Williams, though, as is clear from “Yellow Light,” one of several originals he wrote and performed for the upcoming film “Despicable Me 3.” Mr. Williams is, in his way, scathing: