Indie

Whats This Playlist All About? Atlantas finest indie/experimental rock band have committed to curating a list of "interesting Spotify finds" every Sunday night. Perhaps their goal is to distract us from any hopes for a new Deerhunter album.What Do You Get? Since this mix changes weekly, we cant get down to specifics too much, but do expect smoky jazz from legends like John Coltrane, pleasant field recordings from far-off places, ancient instrumental song from even farther-off places, regrettably forgotten 80s art-rock, and pleasant harmonies from familial favorites like the Everly Brothers and the Carter Family.Greatest Discovery: So far, weve enjoyed dynamic jazz experiments from the George Russell Sextet ("Theme") and some calming contrabass compositions from Bertram Turetzky ("Reflections on Ives and Whittier").Is This the Best Way to Spend Your Sunday Night? Its a pretty ideal weekend unwinder, better than, say, "Netflix and chill."

The only thing better than listening to a song you love, is playing that song for someone else you THINK will love it and being right! For several years in a row, my girlfriend and I have spent New Years Eve just sitting around a couple bottles of wine and taking turns playing songs for each other that we love and think the other person maybe hasnt heard. Passionate speeches ABOUT the song and why we love it or think its important is a BIG part of the presentation. Thats what this list is! Its me playing you tracks that have had a huge impact on me, and telling you WHY theyre so important to me (or why theyre important more generally). Its QUITE varied, so I doubt youll like it all, but I am sure that almost everyone who listens to this will find at least one song they love that the didnt know before!

This week, Hookworms release their long-awaited third album, Microshift (via Domino Records), which, for the Leeds, UK quintet, heralds a major shift from stormy psych-punk to radiant electro-rock. For his Dowsers playlist, the band’s guitarist JW shines a light on his favorite under-the-radar acts. “We’re about to go on tour with a short stint in mainland Europe as well as various UK dates over the next couple of months. Heres a playlist of bands were excited to play with on these dates. As part of the tour, were doing a couple of two-night residencies at The White Hotel in Salford and at our favourite venue and second home the Brudenell Social Club—were curating the line-up for both of these shows, so heres a collection of my favorite songs by those artists. Theres a bonus Virginia Wing track as theyre kindly supporting us on all UK dates—Merida and Chris from Virginia Wing both played on Microshift, too.”

Of the infinite subgenres crammed under the rock ‘n’ roll umbrella, no two feel as diametrically opposed as country-rock and glam. The former is a emblematic of authenticity, traditonalism, humility, and lonesome landscapes; the latter is the product of artifice, stardust-speckled futurism, flamboyance, and seedy inner-city alleyways. But on his two solo releases to date—2016’s Dolls of Highland and the new Full Circle Nightmare—Portland-via-Shreveport tunesmith Kyle Craft effortlessly initiates a holy communion between roots and ritz, casting his audacious, satellite-chasing voice and saucy narratives in a downhome brew of teary-eyed guitars and barrelhouse piano rolls. And he’s just the latest, most visible participant in a long conversation between these polar-opposite aesthetics.Before they became ‘70s pomp-rock icons, David Bowie and Elton John cast their vivacious voices in more rustic settings on their early records, while their peers in The Rolling Stones wallowed in southern-bordello sleaze on Exile on Main Street. And ever since, glam-loving rock acts from The Flaming Lips to Jack White to Girls have twisted heartland sounds to suit their own whimsical worldviews or, in the case of The Replacements, expressed solidarity with gender-bending outsiders. There is, of course, also a deep history of openly queer artists—from renegade troubadour Patrick Haggerty (a.k.a. Lavender Country) to doomed glitter-rock sensation Jobriath to avant-disco polymath Arthur Russell to modern-day indie acts like The Hidden Cameras and Ezra Furman—who’ve infiltrated the notoriously conservative arena of Americana, balancing sly subversion with sincere appreciation. Follow the lipstick traces into the heartland with this playlist of artists who serve up the glitz with a side of grits.

Birmingham, UK art-rock brooders Editors return with their sixth album, Violence, this March. To get you pumped up for it, the band has shared the music they use to get pumped up. "Music is a big deal in our dressing room. From late afternoon, on show days, we normally have the speakers set up playing a wide variety of records from varying genres and styles, both new and old. But it’s an hour before stage time where things really step up a gear, so the playlist I’ve selected here is a greatest hits of what we listen to before we walk out on to stage. Crank it LOUD."——Elliott Williams, Editors

Whats This Playlist All About?: The Söderberg sisters, whove been charming us with their angelic harmonies for a decade now, have returned with their fourth album, Ruins, a gloomy collection of vintage-hued break-up laments. Aside from devastating heartache (experienced by younger sister Klara), this is the music that inspired it.What You Get: A delicately crafted blend of poignant baroque pop from cult heroes Neutral Milk Hotel, vintage country pomp from eccentric mavericks Tanya Tucker and Lee Hazlewood, and sweeping indie folk from quiet warriors like Big Thief. But you also get a taste of artists who appear on the album itself, including R.E.M.s Peter Buck (on guitar), Midlakes McKenzie Smith (on percussion), and Wilcos Glenn Kotche (ditto).The Track That Defines It All: The most gorgeous nihilistic breakup song of all time: Skeeter Davis softly sweeping "The End of the World."Biggest and Best Surprise: More bad-ass sister synergy with Hearts powerhouse rocker "Crazy on You."Will This Leave You an Emotional Mess? Definitely, especially by playlists end with Songs: Ohias raw, rusty epic "Farewell Transmission," featuring the late Jason Molina.

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.

Whats This Playlist All About?: The psych-pop duo gives us no context beyond the title, so we can only presume this mix of old, obscure tracks is somehow linked to their recent single "When You Die," a barbed and bitter psychedelic journey into permanent darkness.What You Get: An organ- and synth-infused distillation of MGMTs own dark, sardonic fascination with death. Youll float through ancient worlds with buzzing, blipping sounds from minimalist mastermind Terry Riley, Arabic pop star Ahmed Fakroun, and Nigerian electric-organ virtuoso Mamman Sani, then make pit stops through retro-futuristic realms dominated by doomy 80s synth bands.Greatest Discovery: This playlist is full of fascinating finds, but lets go with XEX, an 80s band from New Jersey doing icy, androgynous synth-pop long before the likes of Ladytron could even hold a synth. According to their Bandcamp page, the group could not afford to release their 1981 album xex:change, and thus it sat in obscurity for over three decades.Is This an Appropriate Soundtrack for Your Funeral? Absolutely. Its dark, sometimes nightmarish, and may have your more metaphysically minded loved ones feel like theyre escaping their bodies right alongside you.

Where oh where did all the dance-punk bands go? In the first decade of the new millennium, amid the countless other genres that looked back at older music through rosy glasses (chillwave, freak folk, neo-psychedelia), few dominated both the mainstream charts as well as the underground as heavily as dance-punk did. Though the sound’s essential properties came down to a fusion of punk and disco, its purveyors ranged from award-collecting pretty-boys (Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chefs) to aging hipsters carving out new territory (LCD Soundsystem, Le Tigre). Some groups leaned more heavily into their funk forebears (Electric Six, VHS Or Beta), while others embraced a pop-friendly mix of acoustic and electric instrumentation, shooting for the festival stages while riding a steady wave of blog buzz (Matt And Kim, Two Door Cinema Club).Though often fairly accessible (it is dance music after all), bands that practised the sound often thrived on an indie-schooled sense of cool, never straying too far from their rock roots as they attempted to bring guitar music into the 21st century. You can still hear the echoes of the sound in indie rock today, even if most of its original architects have been left by the wayside. But with dance-punk luminaries Franz Ferdinand returning in February with their fifth album, Always Ascending, we took the time to revisit some of the genre’s most definitive moments. Hit play, and bust out those MySpace moves.

What You Get: A peppy, poppy potpourri of feverish classic funk from James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone and a whole lot of squelchy 80s synths that range from delectable cheese (The Pointer Sisters) to silky, saucy confessions (Grace Jones) to the inimitable Purple One. Theres also a good deal of warm vintage soul (Otis Redding) and singer-songwriter sorrow (Randy Newman). It all may seem a bit random—if you werent familiar with Field Musics own synth-funk-baroque-pop amalgam, that is.Guiltiest Pleasure: British 80s sister act Mel & Kims dizzying dance-pop single "Respectable," an anthem for all shoulder-padded independent women.Sweetest Surprise: Deerhoofs shuffling, Spanish-sung electro-pop deep cut "Desaparecere."Can It Inspire Hope in a Post-Brexit U.K.? If bringing together English legends like Led Zeppelin, Roxy Music, George Michael, and Kate Bush cant offer hope, nothing can.