Alynda Segarra examines our frailty and resilience with an unsparing, yet tender cadence. This week on 8 Tracks, NPR Music producer Lars Gotrich looks at lyrics that stand on their own as poetry.

The second album from Radiohead offshoot The Smile is very good. But can its singer ever transcend his role in his revolutionary other band?

With an eight-piece band, the singer-songwriter brings her wry charm to the Tiny Desk.

H. Sinno, former lead singer of the pioneering Lebanese rock band Mashrou' Leila, pairs their own history with that of the Metropolitan Museum's Temple of Dendur in their new opera.

Sonic Youth's co-founder took her cues from a '60s girl-group but forges a new lane. NPR Music producer Lars Gotrich functions as your antidote to the algorithm in eight tracks to know this week.

The U.K. singer-songwriter recasts four of her electro-pop songs in fresh arrangements.

Plans are still coming together, but two up-and-coming names on Broadway are already attached to the Prince project: playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and director Lileana Blain-Cruz.

The English alt-rock star talks about writing in the Dorset dialect of her childhood home on her new album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, plus she performs live with a special guitar.

The band's recreation of its billowy, shoegaze-y sound lights up the Tiny Desk.

The British rock band performs a special acoustic set ahead of the release of their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, next year.

The Alabama Shakes singer exploded preconceptions with her 2019 solo debut. On What Now, a follow-up born from a few years of life-quaking resets, she's ready to leave any remaining limits behind.

Samia's set provides a stunning showcase for her charisma, vocal talent and deftly detailed lyricism.

The Beatles' final song could never live up to the body of work that precedes it. But it could never diminish it, either.

Paul McCartney and producer Giles Martin used artificial intelligence to isolate John Lennon's vocals from an old demo to finally complete The Beatles' "last" song, "Now And Then."

Byrne opens up about filming the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense and says the band's hit song "Burning Down the House" is a compilation of "non-sequiturs that have a kind of emotional impact."