This week’s New Music Friday crop leans hard into reinvention and reckoning: U2 return after nine years away with a song carrying Dolly Parton’s final recorded vocal, Skepta ends a seven-year wait for a new solo album, and Christine and the Queens previews a record due next spring with a bilingual disco single. Add a hip-hop flex track, a country ballad written on a tour bus two years ago, a K-pop love song, and an Interscope-backed electronic album, and you get a week that covers rock, grime, pop, hip-hop, country, K-pop and electronic without much overlap. Here’s what actually came out between November 4 and November 14.
U2, “Silencio” (and Dolly Parton’s farewell on “Torn”)
U2’s first album of new material in nine years, Carnaval De Luz, arrived November 13 via Interscope Records, and its lead single “Silencio” is a brisk, 2:35 blast of surf-punk urgency with additional production from OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder — a sharp left turn from the widescreen arena rock the band is known for. But the record’s real story sits at the very end: its closing track, “Torn,” features what’s described as Dolly Parton’s last recorded vocal performance, cut before her death on August 25. Parton lending her voice to a U2 song, and doing so as her final studio recording, turns a comeback album into something closer to a send-off.
Skepta, The Fork and Knife
Skepta’s first solo album in seven years — his last was 2019’s Ignorance Is Bliss — landed November 6 via Big Smoke/Epic, 15 tracks deep with features from Central Cee, Jorja Smith and Asake. The title comes from a saying of his mother’s, about eating properly with a fork and knife rather than your hands, and the record leans into that framing: reviewers have described it as a more settled, retrospective turn for the grime pioneer, one that reckons with his immigrant identity and two decades at the center of UK rap rather than chasing a new sound.
Flo Milli, “Throw That Money”
Flo Milli’s November 6 single, released through Jive Records, is a standalone flex track built for a night out — dancing, spending and not looking back — and early coverage frames it as a preview of her next album rather than a one-off. It’s a tighter, more direct record than some of her recent singles, built to land on a playlist immediately rather than reward repeat listens for subtext.
Christine and the Queens, “Rendez-vous avec toi”
Released November 4 in parallel French and English versions — “Rendez-vous avec toi” and “Rendez-vous in Your Arms” — this is the first single from Christine and the Queens’ next album, due next spring. Where recent releases have leaned moody and stripped-back, this one is an upbeat, disco-inspired groove about a late-night meeting with a lover, with Chris describing the song as being about the devotion of someone who simply waits for you. It’s a lighter, more danceable reintroduction than the project’s last few singles.
Thomas Rhett, “Be There in a Minute”
Rhett’s new single, which started hitting country radio and streaming around November 6, has an unusually long backstory: he and producer Josh Kerr wrote it with Rocky Block and John Byron on a tour bus in Arizona nearly two years ago, and it almost didn’t make the cut before the team circled back and decided it should lead off his next album era. It arrives less than a month after the final stop of his most recent tour run, in Nebraska on October 24, making it the first real signal of what’s next rather than a victory-lap release.
D.O., “Darling”
EXO’s Doh Kyung-soo released the digital single “Darling” on November 11 at 6 p.m. KST, his first new material since September’s DOPAMINE mini album. It’s a ballad in the most literal sense — Korean outlets describe it as a song about the simple happiness of looking at someone you love — a quieter, more intimate release than the EP that preceded it by only two months.
2hollis, Pirouette
The 21-year-old producer and singer’s fifth studio album came out November 11 via Interscope, following the September lead single “Warhorse.” For an artist still early in his career to already be five albums deep says something about his pace; Pirouette keeps him in the same lane that’s made him a favorite among a younger, internet-native electronic-pop audience — dense, hyper-produced tracks that move fast and rarely repeat an idea twice.
A posthumous Dolly Parton feature, a grime veteran’s reckoning with his own legacy, and a tour-bus country demo that waited two years to become a single — that’s a lot of ground covered in ten days. Check back for the next “Needle Drop” roundup.
