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 newsletter (coming soon!) here.

ZAYN and Taylor Swift, ‘I Don’t Wanna Live Forever’

The sleight of hand that made “Earned It,” the Weeknd’s magisterial song for the original “Fifty Shades of Grey” film, so effective was that it relied on a sort of bondage, balancing the tension between its polished exterior and what was easy to imagine as its sleaze-ridden core. “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever,” the first offering from the film’s sequel, by ZAYN and Taylor Swift, (available on Apple Music) has no such struggle. There’s little moistness here: ZAYN’s sweet vocals never manage anguish or tension, and Ms. Swift has perhaps never been more obscured by digital manipulation, in places to the point where she’s practically anonymized. The pleading in the song is clinical, the chemistry muted. (An opportunity for Ms. Swift to strike back at an ex is largely missed — ZAYN is a former bandmate of Harry Styles, her one-time paramour.) The thickness of the production conveys the urgency here — in the beginning, it recalls the hollers of Ms. Swift’s “Out of the Woods” — and the chorus gleams. But the song never sweats, nor threatens to. JON CARAMANICA

The Jesus and Mary Chain, ‘Amputation’