NPR Music - All Songs Considered: U2 meets the moment, Lana Del Rey goes 'True Detective,' James Blake croons

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

This week on All Songs Considered: U2 surprise-dropped a new EP that opens with a scorching critique of the government crackdown on immigration; Lana Del Rey inched closer toward releasing her long-awaited album with a haunting and strange ode to love and obsession, while singer Arlo Parks takes a bold step out onto the dance floor. All that and more as host Robin Hilton and NPR Music’s Sheldon Pearce share their picks for the best new songs of the week.Featured artists and songs:(00:00) Intro(01:50) U2: “American Obituary,” from ‘Days Of Ash’(10:24) Arlo Parks: “Heaven,” from ‘Ambiguous Desire’(17:37) Lana Del Rey: “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” (Single)(25:22) Baby Rose & Leon Thomas: “Friends Again” (Single)(31:58) James Blake: “I Had a Dream She Took My Hand,” from ‘Trying Times’(39:08) Bella Kay: “Steady,” from ‘a couple minutes out’And here's a link to Sheldon's piece on Jill Scott and Brent Faiyaz that was discussed during the show's intro: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/19/nx-s1-5713600/jill-scott-brent-faiyaz-rnb-reviewSupport the show with a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And tell a friend!Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This episode of All Songs Considered comes to you from the NPR Music podcast. NPR Music, of course, is where you will find Tiny Desk, but it's also home to Alt Latino with new episodes in this feed every Wednesday. The plus version of the podcast, deep dives on a single song every other Thursday and, of course, new music Friday. That's every Friday. NPR Music, also where you will find reviews, analysis, and hot takes from Sheldon Pierce. Hello, All Songs, fam. You just had a piece go up. People can find it on the NPR site.

It's all about, well, ostensibly, it's a review of two new albums by Jill Scott and Brent Fias. But really, I read it as a complete takedown of the self-help industry. Yeah. It really, it kind of ends up being that in a way, doesn't it? I mean, you call them charlatans. Yeah. I guess it's because I was thinking, like, she has been so much a figure of relentless. optimism throughout her career.

Self-improvement has been such a key cog in the way that her music functions and the way that it sounds. It's like very sort of like spiritually refreshing in a way. Also belief in the self though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really investing in becoming the better you.

Yeah. And I was like, man, Jill Scott is like the antithesis of so many of these grifters out here who are selling a version of you. Right. That is like just, it's specifically designed to make them money. And it just made me think about that. album in conversation with the Brent Fias album as two artists sort of like try to reckon with what the idea of becoming the better version of and you as an artist is well it's a great read

and people should definitely go check it out it's on the NPR site on this episode of all songs consider we're talking about the best new songs of the week the songs that you and I have been obsessing over uh you know when we started kind of circling some of the stuff that we thought we might want to play on the show this week I really wanted to find something that that just rocked really hard. Like, well, it's because, like, a lot of the stuff that we, we ended up picking is, it's not quiet, but pretty chill. Yeah.

Like, kind of. There's understated qualities to all, most of the stuff. Yeah, so kind of mid-tempo-y, kind of, some of it's a little weird, we'll get to that. But anyway, so I was doing some virtual crate digging and listening to a bunch of stuff, trying to find that thing that, you know, would just light everything up, when out of nowhere, and I mean literally like a total surprise. Yeah. You two, the band U2 drops this EP on everybody.

Like, it's been nearly a decade since they've had any new music out. Yeah. And like all new, brand new songs. Their last album was in 2017 called Songs of Surrender. This new EP is pretty great. It's called Days of Ash. And it opens with this absolute scorcher called American Obituary. like a coffee cup

I just cannot tell you how re-energized and re-energized and vital this band sounds so deep into their career like if ever there was a band that literally has nothing left to prove Yeah. It's you too.

And they come back with this just blistering critique on everything that's been happening around immigration, so much more. And it is just such a, it works so well. It is such a fist in the air rallying cry and a celebration of love, like fighting with love. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. I mean, if ever there was a sort of band that was going to live up to a moment like this or

for sure. It was going to be you too. I think you can really feel if anything has rallied them back to like peak you too, it would be the desire to meet a moment like this with something as anthemic and rallying as this. And I mean, I think about how simple it is in its messaging, how straightforward, how blunt it is, the force of that, how if you've ever actually been to a protest, and heard the kind of chance that will like ring off there. It is that kind of effective like cut to the chase rhetoric. Yeah.

That is most effective in bringing people together in support of a common message. And that is really what I hear in this song, like the ability to cut right straight to the feeling. Yeah. And supercharge it. That's a great point because like the activism and the advocacy and the protest, and across their catalog from day one, it's always been in there. It's always been very obvious. It hasn't really warranted a lot of deconstructing because it is so direct, as you say.

For me, it kind of comes down to, is it just a great song otherwise? Like, does it just work as music? And this really, really does. And then when you pack it with a punch like that with all the messages in this, it's game over. I was listening to it honestly just now as we were playing it. And I thought, man, don't. come at U2. Yeah.

I think it's the, the charm is twofold, right? Because there is this sense of it being like true U2. like it is a band in its element. That is also part of it. It is a great song on its own. It's also a great U2 song specifically.

And fast too. Yeah. I mean, it's mid-February. Yeah. So, and they're talking about things that happened a month ago. Yeah.

So it's really amazing. So again, the EP from U2 is called Days of Ash. They're working on a full album. They apparently already have more than a couple dozen tracks that they've got ready to go on this new release. Don't know what it's called or when or anything like that, but they have said that it is an album of defiant joy. Welcome back, YouTube. We've missed you.

I don't know where you go from there. Well, you know, I think probably a good place to land is, you know, in the wake of the sort of of many existential crises we face in this moment, as you two is singing about. I mean, there is also a call for escapism, like a place to, like, step back and not have to live in that for every single moment of your life. The new music from the singer-songwriter Arlo Parks

is specifically geared towards that feeling. The first single, Two-sided, sort of set the tone for what her music is. It's very club-focused. It's kind of a tweak of the indie pop with like folk flourishes that she's done throughout her career, but just far more rhythmic, far more about ecstasy. And the second single, Heaven, takes it to a whole other level. I'd love this song anyway, but that bass drop.

Oh, my goodness. That's when it just goes to this level. Yes. Man, you and I were in here, we were just like grooving, man. It is so groovy. You feel it in your chest. And it's like, that's not a sensation that you would have previously expected out of an Arlo Park song. No, I mean, like, so you mentioned two-sided, the first single.

When that came out, I thought, oh, what are you doing here? Like, where are you going with your music? Because, like, that first album collapsed into sunbeams was, it had such a vintage sound, such a classic soul and R&B sound. Yeah. A lot more sort of acoustic and analog. And she's really blowing things up here. Yeah, this feels like a bit of a fresh start. But I think what I like about this song in comparison to two-sided is it's not what you'd expect from her.

but the mood and tone are kind of like perfectly aligned with what her music has been in the past. Yeah. This feels like more of an extension of what she had done before than two-sided. I felt like when I heard two-sided, to your point, it's like, oh, is this a left turn? Right. And then here she has sort of like settled into a nice progression of her sound.

It is more nightlife focused. Yeah, I agree completely. That's exactly what I wrote down in my notes. It feels like having sort of splits. the difference. Like she's found that nice, perfect sweet spot between those two sonic worlds. So much great imagery across this, too.

Just Diet Coke and kitten heels. I don't even know what that is, but it's perfect. Diet Coke and kitten heels. Concrete washing with metallic green bodies in the summer breeze. So good. Well, again, the album from Arlo Parks is called Ambiguous Desire, and that is

out on April 3rd. Sheldon, we've been on Laudadale Ray Watch for about a year and a or so now it feels like the album that we keep thinking is going to come any minute now. I want to say like at the top of 2025, we were thinking like any day now. Yeah, it could drop today. It's gone through several name changes. The latest is stove, that it's going to be called stove.

But it felt like maybe we got at least a little bit closer last week when Lana Del Rey released yet another single. It's the third single that she's released kind of leading up to the album. And it's really not like the other two that she dropped at all. So I guess we're no closer to really understanding what the album is going to sound like. But, I mean, that's one of the things I love about Lauderdale Ray's music so much is that when you hit play on a new song, you don't know which Lana Del Rey you're going to get. And when I hit play on this new song, it was exactly the Launa Del Rey that I wanted to get. The song is called White Feather, Hawk, Hale, Deer, Hunter. and I'm not making that up.

A real mouthful. White feather hawk-tail deer hunter, the new song from Lana Del Rey. Very curious to hear what you think after we listen to it. Here's my white feather hawktail, dear hunter. Likes to keep me cool

in the hot breeze summer. Likes to push me on the screen, John Deer Moore. I know you wish you had a man like him. It's such a bummer when I met him like an arrow, like a bird in the heart,

like a spirit. Big a dog. Snap, crackle pop. Very much. Everyone trouble, but I'm home for the summer in a stove to cook something up for you because you're positively voodoo.

Did you know exactly how magic you are? Whoopsie, Daisy, you, yelling I love you out to my white feather, cocktail de lanta her. Take my head, have to starve, hon. Yoo-o-you-hoo-o-o-o-o-o.

Who-sey, daisy, you, who I imagine you do. Oh, how absolutely wonderful that you are. Here's my white feather, hawk-tailed, dear, honer. Before I met a moribou over three summers. Now it's a ribbon round my neck and it's cherry color. I've just been baking, waiting on a spirit on it. I got a nicotine patch for the summer. Yeah, my ghost doesn't mean I feel nothing.

I feel nothing put it on my ass, no tan line summer I love my daddy Of course we're still together But it's been three summers Who did you know exactly how magic are Whoopsie Daisy you hooh Cocktail de utter Take my head

Whoopsie Daisy you I imagine you'd be bad I'm within a fin Is it do you think Poster's sugar cocaine Should a safer friend So much going on on this. I don't even know where to begin, but I mean, doesn't it sound like a soliloquy from some out-of-time haunted musical from like the 40s or 50s or something like that? Don't you get that?

Yeah. The interesting thing about her is her flourishes, though the touchstones are always like classic Americana in some sense. there's always something that is like very modern and like very rooted in the present in her music. That like it's something about the way that she puts the elements together that always makes it a little uncanny. Yeah. Anachronistic in some ways. Like when the song opens, it almost sounds like something from like a 50s horror movie, like a B movie, one of those old black and white terrible war movies from the 50s, you know. And then, yeah, it just turns into this sort of twisted musical.

I don't know how else to put it. And then what she's singing about is so curious, too, because she's saying, I think it's safe to say she's singing about her husband, Jeremy Dufreen, Dufrein. And, you know, she had an Instagram post where she referred to his little hawk-tail hair. Yeah. And, you know, obviously that comes up in this song a lot. I'm just not sure how to take it because she says things that sound like the kinds of things. that someone who's very much in love would say, you know, she says he's magical, he's positively

voodoo, that they're perfect match and like he's in her bone marrow. But the overall mood is so strange and unsettling. I'm just, I just don't know what I'm supposed to think. Yeah, I've been trying to make sense of the lyrics on this for a week now and still haven't. There is something just a little distorted about it, something that isn't all on the surface, all of her music has kind of toyed with the ideals of like the domestic, like the nuclear American family at the center of the American dream. And this song, it feels like it's still playing in that sandbox. But it's maybe harder to read than a lot of the stuff that she's released previously. Maybe that's part of the point. But I am just still so careful. I am just still so

captivated by this version of her. I hope there's a lot more of this kind of stuff on this record. Yeah, me too. White feather, hawk, tail, deer, hunter from Lana Del Rey. Say that 100 times really fast. I'm going to go in a complete, well, I guess it's not a complete 180, but to another artist who has sort of embodied a singular sound, they have really one of the most powerful voices in all of music, one that is so singular, so astoundingly recognizable every single time you hear it, and so piercing the heart every time. The artist is Baby Rose.

There's a new single. It's called Friends Again, and it features Leon Thomas. sure with a matching garrisoned and I don't forget this age. Yeah, you say singular voice, like, you're two bars into that song, and you could listen to it not knowing anything about it

and immediately say, Baby Rose. Yeah. Baby Rose. I don't think we can overstate it, though. I think her voice is generational. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's one-on-one. It is so singular,

and it's not affected in any way. It's not like, Oh, here's that singer who does the baby Rose voice. It is her voice and it is unlike anything else. Yeah, there's so much character in it. I mean, honestly, I feel like she could probably sing the terms and conditions to me and I'd still be locked in with her. Is that possible?

I would actually pay attention to the terms and conditions. But I think this song works so beautifully also because she sort of picks the perfect foil for her in this moment. Oh, Leon's hanging with her really well. Leon Thomas, if you don't know, recently, he was the Grammy winner for Best R&B album. He's sort of coming to his own over the course of the book. She was on. She appeared on. Their previous collaborators.

So there's already a rapport there. But also, he is sort of like a modern version of like the classic soul man. He's a multi-instrumentalist. He leans into like the strength of his. vocals in the way that a lot of other R&B singers don't. And you can hear him sort of going stride for stride with her in this song, which is a difficult thing to do. The way that they play off of each other is so instrumental to what makes this song work to me.

I wish there was a third chorus. I wish they had brought it back. When that spoken word part comes in, though, I thought, yes, just keep going. you're nailing every part of this I think if your only critique of the song is that you wish they had given you a little bit more of it than it did its job perfectly really beautiful and it's called Friends again

and it's just one-off single for now? For now I think she's got to be gearing up early it's been too long. If nothing, I am manifesting it. We need a new record from Baby Rose. Well, we found out at the end of January that James Blake is coming back. James Blake has a new album coming.

It's due out in March. It's called Trying Times. Really have loved everything that I've heard so far from it. The latest single, especially, it's called I Had a Dream She Took My Hand. And it kind of reminds me a little bit of the Lana Del Rey cut. Actually, it's not as moody as the Lana Del Rey, but both of them just kind of feel out of time in a way. And with just a little touch of the surreal.

Again, it's called I Had a Dream She Took My Hand. You hear some of those parallels I'm talking about with the Lana. It opens, it's got that sort of post-war vocal pop group like Mr. Sandman sort of. I always find that so creepy that sound. And it kind of lurks in the background throughout the whole song. The synth, that synth line, it's a little cracked and broken. It's a little warbly and broken, you know. It's all these subtle little things that blur the picture and make you realize that maybe it's not exactly what you think it is.

Maybe it's not just somebody walking through a park holding hands with the person they love. Yeah, there's a little bit of waltz in it. For the way that he interprets it. But with anything that James Blake does, there's always going to be this element of like conjuring the ghost in the machine. Like he will always be able to take anything that he does. bring it back to this wheelhouse of like really evocative, electronic-based music. Like he is very much straddling the divide between traditional and whatever people think of as traditional, right? The old school ideals of music making versus the digital ideals and like mashing those two together in a way that blurs the lines between those two worlds.

There's a moment in this song where it like literally sort of like devolves into just him and his voice and the piano. Oh, the piano, yeah. And he's just like, it literally sounds almost like a demo of him. Just like raw, uncut audio in the middle of this song. But then it like slowly like builds back up into that last bridge. Yeah. There's a really important line in this song that I think changes everything. And it's when he name checks the band that played on the.

the Titanic. And he says something like, you know, they're playing everyone out miles from land and that there's nothing left to do but to hold her hand. And in that one little moment, it goes from, again, like maybe you're just walking in the park holding hands to, oh, no, you're drowning in an ocean and you're holding her hand and you're sinking to the bottom of the ocean because then he, and then he says she starts to dissolve. And the whole picture completely changes in that one little moment. Yeah, I mean, coming out of that second verse, I think I completely hear the chorus differently.

I got to be honest, Sheldon. I really like music. Yeah, man. Music is pretty good. It's a pretty sweet deal. James Blake, the song I Had a Dream, she took my hand. That's from an album coming out in March, an album called Trying Times out on March 13th.

But Sheldon, I know you got one more you want to play. Yeah, I'm going to send us out on something new to you, I believe. Oh, that's totally, totally new to me. It's by a singer-songwriter named Bella Kay. She sort of broke out last year with the single The Sick. It went viral on TikTok. It's bait for a certain kind of post that is just like an image, often a selfie with a kind of quote about like tragic romance overlaid on top of.

It's very like Tumblr core. But it's easy to get white. the song has sort of like a quiet somewhat like mellow dramatic quality. That single didn't really do it for me. But I've been paying attention to her because it felt like the higher end of like a souped up version of a lot of the bedroom poppy stuff that seems to exist in like the covers corner of the internet. And there was something sort of really intimate about her songwriting that stood out to me. And there's a song that has sort of, I don't want to say it's got me. me all in, but I'm curious about where she goes from here. It's called Steady. Yeah, this is a great find.

I will say this song is so confessional and so honest, so revealing. It kind of made me uncomfortable listening to it. That was what got me. Sort of like the raw, bruised quality of it. It's like so, so hurt, but like so earnest in its like assessment of that hurt. All right, so Belichay, the song Steady. This is from an album called a couple minutes out. And we'll go out on this. Sheldon Pierce, thanks as always for a great hang. So great to be here. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton.

It's all songs considered. I don't want to fall in love because I don't believe that I deserve it. There's always one more pound to lose. I'm not worthy if I didn't earn it. I don't want to fall in love because who could love me back on purpose. Always too much.

Never enough. person I can't treat you right if I treat myself like this I guess I'll never be ready I'll never be good never go study that we should A bridge to burn how far can I make you run

I don't want to fall in love because I know when it's all sad and then I'm back where I started and one broken heart I did less of the person I was I can't dream I dream my wish