At 3:32 of Pinned‘s anthemic opening track, “Never Coming Back,” a single guitar tone with the deceptive appearance of an army decimating any enemy within its radius of destruction ties A Place to Bury Strangers’ past to its present.

So prolific has Laura Veirs been over the past two decades, it’s easy to forget the last solo album came five years back, although that hasn’t stopped her working. Two years ago, she was forming a supergroup with k.d. lang and Neko Case, and before that she was helping Sufjan Stevens with Carrie and Lowell.

For the second time around Holy Fuck founding member Brian Borcherdt trades the synthesized jagged thump of his main gig for the dusty glare of his side-project, Dusted. And yet again the lo-fi world of drum machines, scuzzy guitars, and lightly distorted vocals are as surprising as they are captivating.

Following on from a late-career flurry of brilliance with the 1-2 combo of melancholic Rewind the Film (2013) and the surging Futurology (2014), Blackwood, Wales’ finest have returned with an album that savvy bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire stated back in October 2017 would possibly never happen, their “creative juices” sapped by the endeavors of the aforementioned records.

Some bands do exactly what you expect, while others seem to slip away on an entirely unexpected course. Then there’s Wye Oak, active for over a decade, who manage to bring life to Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknown fable.

Attempting to work out which direction an Unknown Mortal Orchestra track is about to head off in is as easy as trying to catch the wind in your hand. It’s not even possible to pin down the broader style Ruban Nielson and the rest of this New Zealand-born/Portland-based band are going to employ at any given moment.

Philadelphia’s Hop Along has always been a notoriously difficult band to pin down. Even from Frances Quinlan’s first solo record under the extended name Hop Along, Queen Ansleis, she was vaguely recognized as the short-lived freak-folk movement.

Kate Nash charmed us on her first three releases with her blithe indie pop by introducing bits and pieces from various standard rock genres and merging them with a saucy attitude and recapitulating it in an altered form. Often resulting in something new and fresh, but just as often resulting in a hot mess.

To paraphrase a former British Prime Minister, Hinds were the future once. The infectiously enjoyable garage rockers from Madrid came with a compelling story and blisteringly delightful debut record, 2016’s Leave Me Alone.