Kanye West dips a toe in the moment

■ Kanye West featuring Travis Scott, ‘Wash Us in the Blood’: Anxiety permeates “Wash Us in the Blood,” the first song from a forthcoming Kanye West album, and one that harmonizes some of his various dissonant threads. It’s a “Yeezus”-era take on “Jesus Is King” subject matter that’s lyrically impressionistic, with nods to mass incarceration and other moral concerns. (Even Travis Scott chimes in with some lines about the death penalty.) Produced by West with BoogzDaBeast, Ronny J and FnZ, the song is tense, moody, urgent and purposely sloppy at the edges. The video was directed by artist Arthur Jafa, who used West’s “Ultralight Beam” to soundtrack his devastating short film “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” Jafa’s video collage of trauma and exuberance remains effective here, but where “Ultralight Beam” had a swinging, tragic grandeur, “Wash Us in the Blood” feels like a shrieking alarm.

■ Sufjan Stevens, ‘America’: No one calls a song “America” and extends it past 12 minutes without serious intent. Sufjan Stevens, who once inaugurated making an album about every one of the 50 states — a project now sensibly abandoned — previews the Sept. 25 release of his eighth album, “The Ascension,” with the slow, steady, four-chord march of “America.” Its pace is inexorable; its refrain is “Don’t do to me what you did to America.” Instruments, voices and programming all have a part in the track, and a two-minute postscript — that’s a long time — is entirely about resonance and reassurance.

Sufjan Stevens

Kanye West