

On his first solo effort without David Bowie, punk icon Iggy Pop branches out as a songwriter. “Billy Is a Runaway” is a blues-driven rumination about Iggy’s persona and its casualties. He creates a late-’70s pop masterpiece with the jangly guitars and swelling backing vocals of “Tell Me a Story”; the track’s slick production, though, belies a sad tale of Iggy’s past. New Values is an album as complex as it is honest, as sincere as it is impossibly funny.