Column: Essential tracks: New from Ariana Grande, Ariel Pink and more

Amid the thousands of new pop, hip-hop, EDM, rock, country and R&B songs that have been uploaded and eclipsed since Taylor Swift released “1989” last week, below are a recent five for a weekday that offer a glimpse of the (non-Swiftian) here-and-now.

Ariana Grande featuring the Weeknd, “Love Me Harder,” (Republic). As a smooth seduction that serves to further transition a former Disney star into the mainstream adult marketplace, “Love Me Harder” goes all the way. It does so by following a path that worked so well for Miley Cyrus: diving in head-first.

To do so, Grande teams with contemporary R&B’s current master of the bedroom, the Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye, who’s never met a plot of land he couldn’t turn into a candlelit sex den. “Love Me Harder,” the video of which debuted on Vevo this week, is both buoyant and thick, a rush of luxurious synthesizers and a humming heartbeat rhythm below. Saucy? Most certainly, but in a PG-13 kind of way.

DJ Quik, “Puffin the Dragon,” (Mad Science/Ingrooves Music). Many try to define Los Angeles, but through the last two decades few have so effectively documented South Los Angeles as DJ Quik. Twenty-three years after the Compton rapper and producer introduced himself through his classic debut “Quik is the Name,” the artist born David Blake, 44, continues to deliver a bumping Southern California sound filled with swinging post-G-funk tones. His new “The Midnight Life” shows a chronicler as keenly lyrical as at any point in his career, or, as he puts it, “Back on the scene with no cracks on my screen.” He backs the words with beats built specifically for windows-down driving.

“L.A. can be a very cold place at times,” rhymes Quik in a hot love letter to his home called “Puffin the Dragon.” “A lot of different drugs / No universal mind / On the same page of a lot of different books / I swear that this could be as fun as it looks.” He offers this while horns burst behind him, a bass line roams below and a snare splashes every other beat. Throughout the excellent “The Midnight Life” Quik celebrates South L.A. landmarks — “the Liquor Depot on Crenshaw where all the working class Gs go,” for example — while offering rhymes both vivid and memorable.

Ariel Pink, “Picture Me Gone” video, (4AD). The curious new (and perhaps too-freaky-for-work) video for “Picture Me Gone” is a world away from the Ariana Grande/Weeknd brand of mainstream expression. A lyrical suicide note involving a missing iPhone in Mexico, uploaded photos and a mysterious relationship, the song’s a teaser from Ariel Pink’s forthcoming album “pom pom,” which arrives Nov. 17. The shock is to be expected from the artist born Ariel Rosenberg, one of Los Angeles’ most talented and polarizing musical provocateurs, whose beefs with artists Madonna and Grimes have drawn outsized attention in recent months.

The “Picture Me Gone” video isn’t going to answer any questions, or tame Pink’s public perception. A baffling psychodrama featuring Latex-masked humans, including one resembling Pink, a little light S&M, the beach and a graceful interlude at a skating rink, it’s scored by a Pink song that, like his best work, sounds like an unknown AM radio ballad from a 1970s that never was, or ever could have been.

Mr. Oizo, “Machyne,” (Brainfeeder). This new jam by the versatile musician/filmmaker who produces songs as Mr. Oizo hits from the first measure: an infectious, motorized electronic track featuring ringing telephones, a sampled male voice chanting, “Answer, answer, answer,” in rhythm, big echoed hand claps and, in a grand climax, the voice of a woman repeatedly heeding the call with, “Hello?”

Born in Paris as Quentin Dupieux, Oizo is known both for a string of classic dance tracks stretching back to the late 1990s, the best of which, “Last Night a DJ Killed My Dog,” predicted a micro-sampling movement in which snippets of sound could be woven together into minutely imagined and very funky patterns. Since then he’s been an electronic instigator able to go deep and dark one moment, and light and giddy the next. “Machyne” is the latter, a teaser from a new full-length album “The Church,” which arrives on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint on Nov. 17.

Jon Hopkins featuring Raphaelle Standell, “Form by Firelight (with Raphaelle Standell),” (Domino Records). Hopkins is best known to mainstream pop fans for producing Coldplay’s most recent album, “Ghost Stories,” but the musician’s own work comes from a whole other perspective. “Form by Firelight (with Raphaelle Standell)” is a mesmerizing, gentle new reworking of a work from 2013’s lauded instrumental electronic album “Immunity.” Blending influences that suggests the sonic gauze of early Cocteau Twins, shoe-gaze hums of Seefeel and Aphex Twin’s ambient works (Hopkins works closely with Brian Eno), the new “Form” remix is a swirl of bliss highlighted by the layered voice of Braids singer Raphaelle Standell. It’s one of four remixes on the “Asleep Versions” EP, out Nov. 11.

Follow Randall Roberts on Twitter: @liledit