Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser weren’t so obviously ahead of the curve when the duo’s debut album as MGMT arrived 11 years ago. Maybe that’s because their wild, baffling, possibly culturally insensitive hipster-shaman look on the cover of Oracular Spectacular seemed more suggestive of the “spectacle” component of their cryptic title rather than a reference to the Oracle of Delphi or any other seers of ancient times.Nevertheless, few could’ve known how prescient they turned out to be when it came to heralding the dippy, woozy aesthetic of so much music from this past decade. Likewise, recent singles like the mesmerizing, darkly witty “When You Die” (from their upcoming fourth album, Little Dark Age) arrive into a rather more crowded field of freaky, dreamy pop oddballs than either of them could’ve anticipated back when “Electric Feel” was everywhere in 2007. With equally ubiquitous early singles like “Time to Pretend,” the duo crafted a canny merger of elements that felt modern and retro at once. Along with fellow travelers like Ariel Pink, MGMT popularized a lo-fi take on psychedelia that soon begat terms like “chillwave” and “hypnagogic pop.” Yet they were also remarkably astute about their music’s potential chart appeal——perhaps more so than they would’ve liked, seeing as VanWyngarden and Goldwasser would famously retreat from the spotlight and dive into more willfully obtuse sounds for 2010’s Congratulations and 2013’s MGMT, the pair’s subsequent and far less commercially successful albums.As the original articles were content to return to the fringes, many more artists would come to frolic in the Day-Glo-colored playground they built with Oracular Spectacular. Some——like Foster the People, Passion Pit, and fun.——would have fewer reservations about using these previously subterranean strategies and textures to create ear candy with mass appeal. The likes of Portugal. The Man, Two Door Cinema Club, and Neon Indian felt just as free to get their respective electric feels on. Meanwhile, Tame Impala, Temples, and other retro-renegades would continue their own MGMT-like exercises in temporal displacement, jumbling together ‘60s, ‘80s, and ‘00s aesthetics to create psych-pop that belonged to no age in particular. And there’s been no lack of shimmering, sun-kissed pop slathered in vintage synths and analog effects thanks to Mac DeMarco, who collaborated with VanWyngarden on some thus-far unreleased recordings in 2016. Indeed, there may be a whole new generation of MGMT devotees judging by the off-kilter yet eminently catchy sounds favored by teenage sensations like Cuco, Superorganism, and Cosmo Pyke.So were those two luridly attired loons on the cover of Oracular Spectacular looking into the future all along? It’s impossible to say, but this playlist featuring the many inhabitants of MGMT’s musical universe might’ve made them the envy of Nostradamus.

Chances are it will never become a national holiday unless Jack White is elected president, a possibility that may not be so far-fetched given the universe we now live in. Regardless, Record Store Day has fast become one of the most cherished events on the calendar for a growing swath of music lovers. Back when it began in 2007, the event’s humble ambition was to celebrate the musical ecosystem fostered and sustained by the nearly 1,400 independent record stores in the U.S. But little did the participants know that vinyl sales were about to boom, making an unlikely climb from 1.88 million units in 2008 to 13.1 million last year. So what if the top-selling vinyl LP last year was by Twenty One Pilots? Nothing can spoil the sweetness of this comeback, not with new record stores becoming the surest sign of a gentrifying neighbourhood.Meanwhile, the number of special releases for Record Store Day has grown nearly as dramatically. Ranging from instantly covetable seven-inch singles to ridiculously lavish box sets—and from long out-of-print albums by heritage acts to obscurities by new favourites—the massively diverse slate for this year is another embarrassment of riches. To whet your proverbial whistle, here’s a selection of tracks from this years Record Store Day releases that can be yours. That is, of course, if you happen to be in the right store at the right time. Quantities range from the 5,000 copies for the new edition of David Bowie’s BOWPROMO—a long AWOL EP originally released as a teaser for Hunky Dory—to the mere 200 copies for an exclusive split single on Captured Tracks by Alex Calder and Homeshake, all proceeds for which go to the International Refugee Assistance Project. It’s up to you how to spend those dollars on Record Store Day, but make ‘em count.

When members of Midlake, Franz Ferdinand, Grandaddy, Travis, and Band of Horses started exchanging ideas via email in 2013, they probably didn’t care that they were taking part in a long, if sometimes neglected, tradition in the music world. Nor should they—the idea of putting together a supergroup for its own sake is pretty dumb, unless you’re Sebastian Bach. This motive tends to be secondary to the usual reasons that musicians get together, like playing with others whose company they enjoy or taking a break from the pressures of maintaining a major act.That this particular congregation of musicians savored the chance to play together and socialize is reflected in the title they chose for the project: BNQT, pronounced “banquet.” The nods to the Traveling Wilburys in both the album title and the jangly folk-pop sound of BNQT’s debut release, Volume 1, suggest that they’re well aware of the historic code of the supergroup. We can only assume that the question of who got to be Roy Orbison was determined by rock-paper-scissors.They’re hardly the only example of a group in recent years who have abided the same code, one that gave us Blind Faith and CSNY at the best of times and Damn Yankees at the not-so-best. Certain musicians, such as Jack White, Damon Albarn, and Dave Grohl, have been repeat supergroup-participators, evidence of their many musical interests and extrovert tendencies, and the century has also seen a boom of free-floating collectives whose members have many extracurricular activities—Broken Social Scene, The New Pornographers, UNKLE—but who nevertheless swagger like a supergroup whenever they deign to convene.Contemporary definitions of a supergroup can also stretch to contain side projects like EL VY, fronted by The National’s Matt Berninger, or Nice As Fuck, featuring Jenny Lewis, though traditionalists may reserve the term for more conventional matchups between musicians with equally illustrious resumes, like Divine Fits (Spoon + Wolf Parade + New Bomb Turks) and Minor Victories (Slowdive + Mogwai + Editors). Even if these equations don’t always result in the irrefutable chocolate-and-peanut-butter deliciousness we hope for, supergroups can still be super, as these choice cuts prove.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Whether working on her own recordings or with friends like Peaches, Chilly Gonzales, or Broken Social Scene, Leslie Feist has always been more of a serial collaborator than a solo artist who likes to keep it solo. That’s one reason why the stripped-down sound of her fifth album, Pleasure—the Canadian chanteuse’s first in six years—is so striking.Recorded in rooms in Paris, California, and upstate New York, her performances are as raw and unadorned as any she’s recorded, with her usual crew of helpers pruned down to producer Renaud Letang and longtime musical foil Mocky. That said, some friends did stop by to add a few touches, like the sprinkling of keys from Gonzales and horns from Arcade Fire collaborator Colin Stetson. She also enlisted Jarvis Cocker to deliver a cameo at the close of “Century”—reminiscent of Vincent Price’s voice-over in “Thriller”—one of the most unbridled songs on the new album, after the libidinous, PJ Harvey-channeling title track.So maybe Pleasure isn’t such a lonesome experience after all, though its starkness still marks a bold shift from the chic sheen of 2007’s The Reminder and the stormy swells of 2011’s Metals. More intimate recordings from her early days, both with and without pals, point the way to Pleasure, as do other pieces by singers she loves and by equally gifted peers who’ve left their traces on her work.And lest Pleasure seem like “one of those endless dark nights of the soul,” as Cocker quips in “Century,” the new album still contains many cheeky gestures, including her occasional dives into Pulp-worthy theatrics and her use of a Mastodon sample at the end of “A Man Is Not His Song” (after the release of Metals, she formed a mutual admiration with the Atlanta band and covered their “Black Tongue” on a split single for Record Store Day). Thanks to Feist’s ability to seamlessly integrate these many elements while maintaining a spare aesthetic, the pleasures of Pleasure are nothing if not the sophisticated kind we’ve come to expect.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Few filmmakers ever displayed as much savvy about music—or were so eager to show off their sheer love of it—than Jonathan Demme. The director, who passed away on April 26 at the age of 73 after a battle with cancer, established his impeccable and impressively diverse tastes long before indie-movie hotshots like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson followed suit in the 1990s. Of course, he did that most prominently in his many music docs, a rich bounty that ranged from his epochal Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense (1984) through the sorely underrated Robyn Hitchcock curio Storefront Hitchcock (1998), his three lovely films on Neil Young, to one of his final projects, the JT Netflix spectacular Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (2016).That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Demme’s music mania. The soundtracks of his early efforts were the handiwork of a deep fan—who else would’ve loaded up a road comedy like Melvin & Howard (1980) with Crazy Horse, Faron Young, Eddy Arnold, and the Sir Douglas Quintet? For Something Wild (1986), he lived up to the film’s title with a brilliant hodgepodge of killer salsa and dub reggae tracks along with the Fine Young Cannibals and the Feelies. Appearing on screen as a cover band playing a high school reunion, the latter group were one of many faves Demme actually used as actors, a tradition he’d continue with Chris Isaak in Married to the Mob (1988), his pal Hitchcock in The Manchurian Candidate (2004), and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe in Rachel Getting Married (2008). Don’t forget the many music videos that bear Demme’s imprimatur, too, including “Streets of Philadelphia” by Bruce Springsteen—originally commissioned for his 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia—and New Order’s haunting “The Perfect Kiss.”It’s no surprise that music often a played a major part in his characters’ lives, too. One such signature moment comes in Demme’s biggest hit, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), when actress Brooke Smith’s ill-fated character drives down the highway hollering along to Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” happily unaware of the nastiness that awaits when she stops to help ol’ Buffalo Bill. (Demme used songs by The Fall, Gang of Four, and Wires Colin Newman to enhance the horrors to come.) Demme evidently loved the Petty classic so much, he put it in the repertoire of Meryl Streep’s Chrissie Hynde-like rocker character in the 2015 comedy Ricki and the Flash. That’s why both versions deserve pride of place in this tribute to a man who may have loved music even more than he did movies.

Kevin Parker told The Guardian last year that he didn’t think there was such a thing as an Australian psych scene. It seemed an oddly Trumpian (i.e., easily disproven) thing for the Tame Impala mastermind to say, given the amount of evidence to the contrary oozing out of Oz in recent years.Then again, musicians are always wary of convenient labels from the media; being lumped together with a bunch of other bands whom they may not know personally, and who play music that may only be tangentially related to their own bag. From Parker’s perspective, the only community that he can see the links in is the one he helped foster in Perth, which eventually yielded a series of bands and projects with overlapping memberships, who all share a taste for brain-melting acid rock, florid Syd Barrett songcraft, headphone-ready atmospheres, and the hard, Angus Young-like edge that’s fundamental to Aussie rock.Though Tame Impala and Pond have risen the highest in terms of international profiles, they keep close ties to the likes of Mink Mussel Creek, The Growl, and GUM. Over in Melbourne, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have their own posse of like-minded travelers, such as The Murlocs, Pipe-eye, and The Babe Rainbow. Elsewhere on the continent, there are more clusters of eager young freaks, as well as institutions that support their activities, like the Sydney Psych Fest.Whether all this glorious Technicolor weirdness constitutes a scene is up for debate, but it most definitely is a “thing.” What matters is the abundance of inventive music that transforms the gnarliest of ‘60s/’70s psych-pop and rock elements into something vivid and vital—that’s certainly the case for Pond’s giddy new album, The Weather. Here’s a selection of songs by young Australian bands who may not constitute a scene per se, but who share an eagerness to take you on a trip.

For all his antics, gags, and occasional pantslessness, Mac DeMarco has always been a sensitive soul. Of course, this isn’t news to anyone who’s ventured past his wild-goofball stage persona and dived into the dreamily intimate and playfully askew pop songs that fill all of the Canuck’s releases. DeMarco’s first full-length album in three years, This Old Dog, may be his richest and smoothest to date, showcasing his growing love for vintage synths and his increasing skill in using them to enhance the shine and shimmer of his deceptively casual melodies.The candor he displays in many new songs—in which he reflects on a fraught relationship with his father—is one element that evokes his ‘70s singer/songwriter heroes, a pantheon that includes James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Harry Nilsson. Yet the music’s effervescence and spirit of playfulness demonstrate his deep devotion to mavericks like Jonathan Richman and Yellow Magic Orchestra just as clearly. All the while, he inches closer to his long-stated ambition to make an album as strong as his favorites, with Neil Young’s Harvest and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band as a couple he often cites.Any way you slice it, This Old Dog is a shockingly mature effort for a guy who remains famous for interrupting a gig to stick a drumstick up his butt. Several key Mac tracks show how he got here, along with songs by the icons who inspired him and some from friends and collaborators like Ariel Pink and Walter TV.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

As music scholar Tim Lawrence brilliantly makes the case in his recent book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983, disco couldn’t die no matter how hard the haters tried. Instead, as the new decade began, disco mutated into a variety of exciting and scintillating new strains. Though Lawrence’s book is primarily concerned with the influence of hip-hop and post-punk experimentalism on what dance music was becoming—as well as the wizardry of DJs like Larry Levan and the socioeconomic conditions in New York itself—there were also developments of a more technological nature.It’s easy to hear how the plush strings of Philly soul were giving way to layers of synthesizers and sequencers: This was funk and R&B for a new space age, the latest sonic innovations creating a dramatic spike in the bounce-per-ounce ratio. Sadly, Roger Troutman never provided a firm indication of the winning ratio, not even on the opening track of Zapp’s epochal 1980 debut album, but he did help provide a synth-funk blueprint that continues to yield some of the plushest and most pleasurable music known.Nite Jewel—the Los Angeles singer and musician otherwise known as Ramona Gonzalez—has been one of synth-funk’s foremost purveyors in contemporary times, since her music began showing up on MySpace in 2008. With such fellow Angelenos as her husband and producer Cole M.G.N. and the ever-industrious Dâm-Funk, she’s fostered a sparking new golden age for synth-funk fantasias like the kind that used to flow freely from the likes of Zapp, Mandré, and the SOLAR Records stable. As Nite Jewel drops her fourth album, Real High, it’s high time to head deep into the neon-lit nights this music evokes.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Back in 1984, when he was the Aussie post-punk poster boy for heroin chic, no one would’ve expected Nick Cave to last another decade, let alone more than three. Nevertheless, Cave has not only survived but thrived, making remarkably productive use of his time both as frontman for The Bad Seeds and with his many other musical and literary endeavors. A new compilation has arrived, Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (1984-2014), ahead of his band’s North American tour later this month. It’s a valuable primer on the singer’s history with the quasi-supergroup he initially formed in London in 1983 with members of Einstürzende Neubauten, Magazine, Foetus, and Cave’s original cadre of degenerates, The Birthday Party.But even though the compilation is curated by Cave with help from his longtime foil Mick Harvey, it only tells one part of the saga. A fuller picture requires digging deeper into the music he made inside and around the edges of The Bad Seeds’ mighty oeuvre—this includes key Birthday Party tracks that anticipate his trajectory, as well as the many covers he’s recorded of such heroes as Lou Reed, Serge Gainsbourg, and Leonard Cohen, all of which bear Cave’s thumbprint just as dramatically as any of his originals do. He’s also been an eager collaborator and musical partner for a wide array of fellow mavericks, including the veteran UK cult group Current 93, Marianne Faithfull, and his ex-girlfriend Anita Lane, with whom he and a few of The Bad Seeds cut a majestic version of the Sister Sledge hit “Lost In Music.”Another early song recorded with Lane, Mick Harvey, and Blixa Bargeld, “A Prison in the Desert” comes from the soundtrack of John Hillcoat’s 1988 drama Ghosts… of the Civil Dead and anticipated Cave’s latter-day career as a prolific film composer with his trusty partner Warren Ellis. And of course, there’s Grinderman, the ferocious Bad Seeds side project that helped rejuvenate the mother ship with its rude demonstrations of middle-aged lust and the savage wit that’s as fundamental to Cave’s artistry as any of his melancholy qualities. Some similarly indispensable studio and live tracks from The Bad Seeds that are sorely missed on Lovely Creatures complete our alternate history of this surprisingly hardy alt-rock icon.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

The Joshua Tree wasn’t one of those albums that quietly arrived on record store racks one dewy morning, attracting a few raves and then enjoying a gradual build before changing the world. Instead, U2’s fifth studio album elicited a reception that in contemporary terms would be described as breaking the internet ten times over.Speaking as an ‘80s kid who listened to his cassettes of War and The Unforgettable Fire obsessively and could sense that something big was on the launch pad, I can tell you that everything about the album felt massive from the get-go. Sending the mass media and the band’s fast-expanding audience into maximum overdrive when it was released in the spring of 1987, The Joshua Tree was the subject of heavy promotion and hype, such that U2’s music and image seemed everywhere at once. According to a Newsweek story published the same week the band made the cover of Time, Island spent $100,000 in 1987 dollars on store displays alone. Not even Bono’s cold-ravaged voice put a damper on the hysteria when the band opened its sold-out North American tour in Tempe, Arizona, on April 2. That show included the first live performance of “With Or Without You,” which became the band’s first American No. 1 single a few weeks later. It would help drive sales for an album that eventually shifted 25 million units worldwide.And the rest is history, which, if we know anything about history, means we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s repeating itself in the form of a summer anniversary tour this year. It too feels massive—over one million tickets were snapped up in the first 24 hours of going on sale—even if no rock act will dominate the pop-culture landscape as forcefully as U2 once did. Indeed, just about every subsequent effort to achieve the same level of impact by U2 or later contenders reeked of an unseemly hubris or—in the case of that iTunes debacle—sheer stupidity.Yet The Joshua Tree is still huge and intimate all at once, which is a testament to the production skills of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (whose thumbprints were far more overbearing on The Unforgettable Fire) and to the big leap in songwriting acumen by a band who had mostly got by on bravura up to that point. True, there were glimmers of what was to come on songs like “40” on War and “I Threw a Brick Through a Window” on October, which now seems like a dry run for “Bullet The Blue Sky.” But this album is where U2 indisputably became U2, achieving the greatest synthesis of their various punk and post-punk influences—especially Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the sorely underrated The Chameleons—and the most anthemic rock of Springsteen and The Clash. Bono also talked up his blues, gospel, country, and folk inspirations at the time, but thankfully they had yet to result in the kind of stodgy Americana that clogs up Rattle and Hum. Here’s our exploration of the fertile ground around the biggest of U2’s big moments.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.