As a rule, with some admitted exceptions, I tend to like chicks better than dudes.

EMA
Past Life Martyred Saints
Bailing out of underground cult act Gowns, Erika M. Anderson goes the solo route, refashioning herself as ever-inventive guitar warrior EMA. The meticulously detailed aural sculptures on her debut range from scraped-raw ballads to distortion-flared art-star laments, the results as beautiful as they are painfully unflinching.

Dum Dum Girls
Only in Dreams
Dum Dum Girl Kristin Gundred delivers an echo-drenched triumph that’s part love letter to her husband and part touching ode to her departed mother. Think crystalline pop and doom-generation surf sung by an up-and-comer who sounds thrillingly like the spawn of Chrissie Hynde.

Tom Waits
Bad as Me
At a point in his career when he should be shuffling off to the Sunset Lounge Retirement Home in a bourbon-scented haze, Tom Waits recaptures the feel of his ’80s landmarks like Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years. One of pop music’s true originals, he’s crazier than a shithouse rat, but his genius remains undiminished by time.

Myths
Myths
Sonic experimentalists Lief Hall and Quinne Rodgers hunkered down in the basement of a haunted-looking East Van house, set the synths for circuit-frying, and then fused ethereal electronica, death-march industrial, and grave-robbing goth to create something truly terrifying. This is what real-life nightmares play out like.

Cage the Elephant
Thank You Happy Birthday
The pride of, um, Bowling Green, Kentucky, puts on a classic ’90s-style clinic in unhinged genre-mashing, hyperactively bouncing from surf’s-up rawk to cracker-slacker hip-hop to cheeba-fried freak pop. As an added bonus, the band traffics in a brand of guitar violence that suggests someone has a thing for the early teachings of Greg Ginn.

Austra
Feel It Break
Canada’s electro-gloom breakout act of the year will leave you confused as to whether you’re supposed to be hitting the club floor in a black-hearted trance, or curled up in a dark corner sobbing uncontrollably. The answer is probably both.

Thao & Mirah
Thao & Mirah
Indie underground queens Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn and Thao Nguyen join forces and promptly abandon their respective comfort zones. The only rule here is that there are no rules, the songs serving up everything from whisky-scorched alt-country to jungle-sick Motown to space-dream pop, proving two is sometimes better than one.

tUne-yArDs
w h o k i l l
Always wanted to travel, but been too afraid to get on a plane headed anywhere more exotic than Hawaii? Let Merrill Garbus be your tour guide to far-flung lands, as w h o k i l l combines fever-soaked African jazz and tribal world beat with North American grime punk and serrated indie rock. Move over, M.I.A.

Manchester Orchestra
Simple Math
Sometimes Manchester Orchestra seems of the opinion that one can never have enough Crazy Horse–calibre grunginess. And sometimes the American-gothic prog-country punks seem like they should be setting up at a southern small-town roadhouse two hours past last call. The only constant is the way the drama-drenched sermons of Andy Hull are never less than captivating.

Little Scream
The Golden Record
Laura Sprengelmeyer’s debut is one of those releases that lives up to its name, the Montreal-based singer mixing and matching styles with stunning self-assurance. Ethereal indie rock, Delta-swirled blues, and elegant chamber pop all come together in a way that makes you think that maybe, just maybe, Montreal isn’t a total cultural wasteland after all.