Music Genres: EMO, FUNK, METAL, POP – familiar categories with a twist, leaving ROCK for another group.
Slang Opposites: BITE, BLOW, STINK, SUCK marked failure, while EAT, ROCK, RULE, SLAY celebrated success.
Contemporary Composers: CAGE, ENO, GLASS, REICH – the toughest set, drawing on avant-garde and minimalist music.
NYT Connections today seeks to find a balance between lighthearted wit and challenging logic. The grid for Saturday (Puzzle #743) leaned strongly into the vocabulary of music, slang, and contemporary culture, combining easy categories with one particularly evasive set that needed greater cultural awareness. What initially appeared to be light wordplay turned out to be more complex, a challenge of recognition and also restraint.
Some solvers may have tripped up on words like ROCK or BITE, which seemed at home in multiple categories. Others might have breezed through the musical genres only to stall when confronted with names like REICH or ENO, which lie far outside the pop-culture mainstream.
Whether this puzzle felt like a quick solve or a frustrating detour, here’s the full breakdown of today’s NYT Connections groups and the logic behind them.
BLOW, GLASS, FUNK, STINK, METAL, ROCK, BITE, EAT, CAGE, EMO, ENO, RULE, SLAY, SUCK, POP, REICH
Yellow: Music Genres, EMO, FUNK, METAL, POP
This was the easiest set to approach, using familiar music genres. The only trap was not giving in to the temptation to place ROCK in this group, which the puzzle neatly saved for another grouping.
Green: Not Be Good, BITE, BLOW, STINK, SUCK
Here, the puzzle tilted towards negative slang. Each of the words functions as slang for disappointment or failure, although taken in isolation, they easily lend themselves to other meanings, so this set was more difficult than at first glance.
Blue: Do Exceptionally Well, EAT, ROCK, RULE, SLAY
The reverse side of the Green set, this group referenced admiration voiced in both vintage and contemporary slang. ROCK and RULE sound distinctly 1980s and 1990s, while SLAY and EAT comprise more recent parlance, forming a good generational connection.
Purple: Contemporary Composers, CAGE, ENO, GLASS, REICH
The most challenging group by far, this collection required expertise in the composers of avant-garde and minimalism. Philip Glass was the sole recognizable name to many, but once named, the collection showed itself to be unified as a reference to modern classical innovation.
Saturday’s NYT Connections answers highlighted the game’s capacity to span registers, from the quotidian slang of ‘sucks’ and ‘slays’ to the lofty titles of avant-garde composers. Its design neatly opposed contraries (failure to success, popular to avant-garde), highlighting how language works across culture and time.
For some, the solution may have depended on identifying a familiar kind of music; for others, it involved a jump into classical modernity. Either way, the grid again showed the joy of Connections: that exhilaration of finding unlikely affiliations lurking in plain sight.
Until next time, happy connecting.