This NY four-piece draw on their diverse backgrounds and interests, experimenting with African guitar music, the Western classical canon, hazy memories of Cape Cod summers, winters in upper Manhattan, and reggaeton. "Equal parts shruggy New York indie strumming and groovy Afro-pop, Vampire Weekend's organ-and-drum runs highlight narratives about relationships, punctuation, and...

King of the Beach, the new Wavves album is an adventurous and ambitious record. It cuts deeper into the bleeding throat zatharsis and '60s sunshine soul that Wavves is known for. It also unexpectedly flips out with elements of primitive electronics and psychedelic studio experimentation. Unlike Wavves' previously released material, recorded in I haphazard bursts on Williams'...

The full-length self-titled debut from enigmatic, pop due Cults was recorded and self-produced in the band's hometown of New York City. Working with engineer Shane Stoneback (Vampire Weekend, Sleigh Bells) the album is chock full of some of the most deliciously offbeat, slanted and enchanted songs you're likely to hear all year and includes some of the band's most coveted,...

Dum Dum Girls' second full length, Only in Dreams, is a great leap forward for a gifted songwriter and an equally gifted band. Only in Dreams blends deeply personal lyrics inspired by the death of singer Dee Dee's mother and the strain of separation from loved ones with the band's signature blend of '60s girl-gang pop, the primitive propulsion of the Cramps and the moody...

The Xx unique make-up is an inadvertent second nature marriage of 2009's urban/guitar tribes, in one corner fluttering new wave indebted reverberation, in the other, plumes of post-dubstep sub-bass and figuratively, their defining core of rich R&B vocal textures. The enveloping vocal partnership of Romy and Oliver is one that would've dropped-jaws in any decade this century,...