S.C.U.M.
Whitechapel (Mute)
If you dropped a ghetto blaster playing a cassette copy of the Pretty in Pink soundtrack down a well, you might approximate the sound of S.C.U.M.’S reverb-saturated synth moping.

Patrick Stump
Everyday (Songmasters)
Left to his own devices, Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump bares his tender side (as opposed to his emo side) with a soft-focus take on one of Buddy Holly’s deathless hits.

Blitzen Trapper
Love the Way You Walk Away (Sub Pop)
Eric Earley and company go for maximum twang on "Love the Way You Walk Away". The lyrical reference to "this brokedown palace" invokes the ghost of Jerry Garcia, but you need not be a Deadhead to appreciate a good breakup song.

Metermaids
Graveyard Shift (Strange Famous)
Brooklyn-based rappers Sentence and Swell pay tribute to all those caffeine-fuelled night owls who toil while the rest of us sleep. Hey, someone’s got to guard the blood bank against marauding hordes of vampires.

Alex Winston
Velvet Elvis (Island)
You know those hideously tacky black-velvet paintings of Elvis Presley? Weirdo chanteuse Alex Winston loves one so much she’ll kill any bitch who so much as bats an eye at it. And she says as much in a disarmingly cute number.

Tycho
Hours (Ghostly)
We’re praying for another hot day before August is done. Partly so we can crank this hazy slice of heat-shimmer electro in an appropriate climate, but mostly because we fucking refuse to believe that summer is over so soon.

Trailer Trash Tracys
Dies in 55 (Double 6)
The group’s name suggests jokey country or ripped-spandex rock, but "Dies in 55" is more like that dream you had where Mazzy Star and the Beach Boys got mashed up by Philip Glass.

Library Voices
Generation Handclap (Nevado)
"You spend your whole life working on your health until one day your atoms disassemble and go on to form something else/Try telling that to your therapist". And that, friends, is why we love these Regina indie-pop geniuses.

Mister Heavenly
Bronx Sniper (Sub Pop)
Members of Man Man, Islands, and Modest Mouse come together for a downright harrowing tale of urban sharpshooting told over a burly blend of power-trio rock and bullets-over-Broadway cabaret.

Case Studies
You Folded Up My Blanket Like We Were Already Lovers (Sacred Bones)
Former Dutchess & the Duke member Jesse Lortz comes across as something of a low-rent Leonard Cohen, although Cohen would probably never open a song with a description of a woman hiking up her skirt and pissing in the street.

Zun Zun Egui
Fandango Fresh (Bella Union)
Britain is so excited about its newest shitmakers that they’re burning the place down in celebration of this transfixing mashup of free-jazz wormhole time signatures and sunny, avant-pop. Call it spasticalia, but with impenetrable lyrics about "sexy worms" .