Perhaps all Craig Finn needed was a slight change-of-scenery—his latest solo album is his best work since The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive. Instead of chugging bar rock and singalongs, this album is filled with quiet moments and character studies.

The 24-year-old Cape Town, South Africa artist Yannick Ilunga’s music isn’t little and it isn’t dark. Sure, the music he’s released as Petite Noir is full of miniature percussive cheers and ominous bass, but Ilunga is more about titular contradictions than he is straightforward parallelism.

Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk and their bassist (Steve Garrington has served in the role since 2011) have long been making only two kinds of records; completely essential, passionate, cohesive and cogent statements, or those that are merely excellent and serve as a nice collection of tunes.

Zach Condon has one of the most recognizable voices in contemporary music, a somehow both lush and nasal delivery that instantly stamps a track as Beirut’s.

As creator of that song—that song being one of modern pop’s greatest moments, “Call Me Maybe”—Carly Rae Jepsen‘s destiny was seemingly carved out: a one hit wonder, flash in the pan with very limited shelf life. But that’s not how things have mapped out. Today Jepsen is the pet project of a creative hipsterati that’s determined to prove pop is cooler than you, or I, could possibly ever imagine.

For years, decades even, Yo La Tengo have inhabited the role of the indie mainstay; “business as usual” could describe any of their albums since the mid-aughts at least. That makes Yo La Tengo sound like a band who sticks to one successful sound, however, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

On Painted Palms’ second album, Horizons, the duo updates its sound by 20 years; moving from the ‘60s pop-psychedelia of its debut full-length, Forever, to the fritter-y synth-pop of the ‘80s. And boy, do Painted Palms love their synths.

Whether you think the world needs another Public Image Ltd record depends entirely on how you feel about John Lydon. The cantankerous master antagonist rarely invokes an ambivalent reaction in people: it’s either love or hate.

Shaun Fleming’s second solo album under his Diane Coffee guise, Everybody’s a Good Dog, has as many personas as it has tracks. Fleming doesn’t worry himself about timeframes or styles—or cohesion, for that matter.