Following on the heels of 2014’s explosive Hour of the Dawn, La Sera (now officially a duo with band leader and former Vivian Girls bassist Katy Goodman teaming up with Hour of the Dawn producer and guitarist Todd Wisenbaker) returns with their Polyvinyl debut after three albums for the Hardly Art label.

After original frontman Daniel Blumberg departed Yuck between the 2011 debut and 2013’s follow-up Glow & Behold, the London four-piece carried on and promoted guitarist Max Bloom to band leader. It was an unusual move and one that has saddled the band with possibly unfair comparisons to itself.

There is a strange parallel between Suede and David Bowie. Both made comebacks in 2013 after decade-long absences-the former with Bloodsports, the latter with The Next Day. Both were warmly hailed as successes even if they did not have fans falling over themselves, and it felt fitting given that Suede were probably the closest thing Britpop ever had to Bowie’s androgynous outsider.

True to form, Quilt‘s third studio album, Plaza, is a psychedelic jet plane ride back in time to the late ‘60s. The Boston-born group’s sound is hypnotic, a mellow, feel-good experience to be shared with friends in a colorful room adorned with lava lamps, and upon first listen, one might assume the band tours the country in a 1967 VW Bus.

Violinist Sarah Neufeld is best known as a member of Arcade Fire, but her compositional style couldn’t be more distant from that band’s dramatic bombast. It’s minimalist and repetitive, strikingly gorgeous and textural.

Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz’s Keep It Together is a beautiful third studio album from the young Indianapolis sisters. The duo’s career took off just a few short years ago after producer and Zero Boys frontman Paul Mahern discovered their YouTube videos, in which they gorgeously covered songs by Adele, Mumford & Sons, and others.

The films of Alejandro González Iñárritu have been scored with keen awareness of the agency of sound design, to intensify atmosphere and to emphasize the physical experience of character. Given this philosophy, the presence of a film’s music can give it a role as integral as any other, an argument never more convincing than in The Revenant.

Extended periods of silence have been known to do strange things to people. A long spell without speech has the power to drive an individual to a word-drunk eruption of over-sharing. Conversely, it can transform a person into a Paris, Texas-esque husk of a human being, directionless and no longer capable of expressing oneself in any meaningful way.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, Life of Pause, Jack Tatum’s third full-length as Wild Nothing, is a work that makes quite a fuss over sounding less fussy than the records that preceded it. Perhaps sensing that he’d reached an absolute dream pop peak with 2012’s immaculately produced and composed Nocturne, Tatum has begun struggling against his perfectionist instincts, resulting in an album that’s willfully rough-hewn, scattered, and label-resistant.