New Music Friday: Stream new projects from Charli XCX, Clara La San, Emma dj, and more

Charli XCX has always been fun to root for. She is the ultimate “relatable girl” pop star, blending the edgy, futuristic innovation of P.C. Music with pop earworms that hark back to the trashy kitsch of the early-2000s. She’s tasted sky-high fame on numerous occasions — be it as a co-writer for an Icona Pop song or a breakthrough hit from the Barbie soundtrack — but she’s still celebrated as a cult pop star of the underground, always intentionally seeking out the most interesting and original female musicians to collaborate with and world-building through the artistic company she keeps (Caroline Polachek, SOPHIE, A.G. Cook, Sky Ferreira, Carly Rae Jepsen, Redcar). On BRAT, Charli pushes the innovation even further, teetering within the liminal space of achieving mainstream, tongue-in-cheek “It Girl” status and turning the whole world a slimy, chartreuse green one single at a time, while still managing to profess her own securities and anxieties. She is now bigger than she has ever been, yet she does not shy away from her tendency to project her self-doubts as confidence. The whole world is jealous of her, she proclaims, (“Von Dutch”) before name-dropping collaborators she’d like to party with (“Club classics”), still feeling threatened by the female pop stars she occupies creative space with. BRAT is at its most interesting when Charli examines her relationships to the female musicians she both admires and feels insecure around; the struggle to maintain healthy female relationships in a music industry that thrives on rivalry and competition (“Girl, so confusing); and the internal struggle she has with herself, where she ponders motherhood: “I think about it all the time.” BRAT seesaws between real, human anxieties and DIY warehouse debauchery, projecting tenacity while bowing to the world’s demands of her as a pop star, and nursing the delicate line between love and hate, admiration and jealousy in a patriarchal music industry that both relies on and exploits its female pop stars. In Charli we trust. — Cady Siregar

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

For years, Clara La San nearly felt like a collective dream of underground R&B enthusiasts. Her debut mixtape Good Mourning was released in 2017 after the British artist built a small but dedicated following for her bespoke jams, indebted to the inventiveness of acts from Aaliyah to the club collective Fade2Mind. Two years later she wiped it from the internet and went silent, with just a few SoundCloud tracks to remind us that her presence was not as shadowy as her music. One of those songs, "In This Darkness," went viral on TikTok last year, and slowly La San began to re-emerge; while it may have first appeared that she was capitalizing on a song that was getting hundreds of millions of streams, the truth is that she had been working on Made Mistakes, her first official album, since first retreating from the spotlight. La San makes the most of this fortunate coincidence on the LP, written and produced by La San on her own. The emotional landscape of Made Mistakes ranges from the barren wasteland of codependency ("Don't Worry About It") to lush sexual confidence ("Solo") and a hard-won, stormy independence ("Made Me Feel"). La San has opened up a new world within her sound with gorgeous details that reveal themselves on multiple listens and huge, cinema-sized emotions; whether you were introduced to La San in the blog years or TikTok, Made Mistakes will sound like a revelation. — Jordan Darville

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

For anyone who used to trawl Hype Machine for new MSTRKRFT remixes, there’s an odd sense of comfort in the prickly rawness and confrontational confusion of Emma dj’s Lay2g. Haunted by the ghosts of bloghouse past, the Finnish producer’s latest record takes the messy, unmastered feel of 2007 indie dance and smirks at its obsession with chromatic, robo-house sounds from the rearview mirror. On tracks like “Wiip Intro,” sardonic retrofuturist synths are overwhelmed by the kind of thunderous broken bass of a deconstructed club track. Meanwhile, reverb-heavy vocals balance out the crude MIDI presets and fried industrial feel of tracks like “bQosYe,” the distorted gabber doom of “Kd9,” and standout track “RR.dnk,” which is a crunchy, sub-heavy dose of dancefloor déjà vu. — Sandra Song

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Candy are a hardcore band who fuse their explosive riffs with industrial flourishes, creating a digitized rage akin to watching electricity pylons burn. It's Inside You is the group's third album and was co-produced by guitarist Michael Quick alongside Converge’s Kurt Ballou and Uniform’s Ben Greenberg. There is a heaviness and density to songs such as "eXistenZ" and "You Will Never Get Me" that feel like being trampled on or washed away by a tidal wave. The synthy freakout "Hypercore," meanwhile, is both a clear highlight and perhaps the best descriptor of Candy's self-created genre. Frontman Zachary Quiram stands firm amid the noise, leaning into nihilism as a coping mechanism. "How do you fight the feeling?" he asks at one point. "Are we living in a world just to die?" It's a bleak idea but It's Inside Younever shies away from the idea that a way forward can be found in such extremity. — David Renshaw

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp