Where Manic Street Preachers’ 1994 album The Holy Bible was a creative peak and a tragic chapter in their tale, 1996’s follow-up, Everything Must Go, vaulted beyond expectations to provide them with a brilliant new start rather than merely a happy ending.

Had Neko Case, k.d. lang, and Laura Veirs recorded only the track “Atomic Number,” it’s hard to imagine them even considering not going further. With a stark acoustic guitar and electronic beat, they trade vocals to begin: “I’m not the freckled maid/I’m not the fair-haired girl/I’m not a pan of milk for you to spoil.”

Though William Tyler’s fingerpicking has always suggested open vistas, ragged coasts, and endless plains, the streamlined Modern Country summons the undying hum and manmade ingenuity of freeways and canals.

If any group can provide the soundtrack to a film about the nuclear age, it’s Mogwai. Along the way in their epic career they have periodically taken on the task of translating their spacious and magnificent rock orchestration into the auditory language of moving image.

What is punk pop? In theory, it is an impossible concept: its very name is, after all, an oxymoron. However you choose to define it, it is perhaps the best genre for Yung to very, very loosely hang their debut album on.

“I’ve been going through a change/I might never be sure/I’m just walking in a haze,” contemplates Julien Ehrlich as Light Upon the Lake clocks its tone-setting, ornate first minute.

Spencer Krug’s latest record as Moonface ditches the singer/songwriter nakedness of Julia With Blue Jeans On and the City Wrecker EP for a fuller sound. My Best Human Face lands close to the one-off ‘80s spirit of 2011’s Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped, sounding something like a drunken Tangerine Dream soundtrack.

There were no doubt a few fans out there put off by Tegan and Sara‘s nosedive into slickly-produced pop music with 2013’s mainstream breakout, Heartthrob—what with its radio-friendly singles which found the Sisters Quin cracking the Hot 100 for the first time in their two-decade career.

Every record that Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince have produced together as The Kills has been laden with a palpable tension that simmers between the two writing partners; on 2011’s Blood Pressures, that magnetic push-and-pull manifested itself into a superb collection of moody, hair-raising tracks where you can feel Hince and Mosshart feeding off each other’s energy.