Gradual change is rare for most groups, but Duluth, MN trio Low has morphed from a slowcore band into a folk-tinged rock outfit over its 20 years of existence. Like most indie bands, Low will trot out a new production style or genre experiment alongside each full-length release.

After an 11-year dearth of new material, Britpop’s pompous progenitors are back from what we’d long feared might be the musical hereafter.

Set in London, 1962, amid the specter of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this coming-of-age drama from writer-director Sally Potter (Orlando) otherwise begins wistfully enough, with friends Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert) indulging in teenage-girl behavior, cavorting about town together, rebelling against their mothers, smoking cigarettes, and laughing about kissing boys.

The Mary Onettes has been releasing dreamy indie-pop from Jönköping, Sweden since Swedish label par excellence, Labrador, put out the band’s Lost EP in 2006. Seven years and two albums later, the band has decided to change its tactic a bit.

Since his 2002 debut LP, Oh Me Oh My…, a glorious tangle of lo-fi tape hiss and acoustic vignettes, Devendra Banhart has traversed myriad stylistic avenues.

Unlike My Bloody Valentine’s similar release of m b v, rumors hadn’t even existed of a new David Bowie record before The Next Day‘s announcement on the artist’s 66th birthday. After a decade of fan speculation that Bowie might be done or—worse—dying, it seems our fears were for naught and our patience has been rewarded.

Brooklyn’s Ex Cops differentiate themselves from legions of neo-shoegaze acts on their debut LP True Hallucinations, thanks in large part to one key strength—intuitively gorgeous harmonizing.

Clocking in at almost 50 minutes, The New Life is a long-form evolution for Girls Names. The band’s 2011 debut Dead to Me was filled with staccato bursts of ‘80s indie pop clangs, thrashed out with the sort of breathless urgency that suggested the Belfast trio-since upgraded to a quartet-had its eyes on something much more substantial. Turns out it did: the follow-up.

Rachel (Julia Garner), a 15-year-old Mormon girl living in 1990s rural Utah, believes she’s been immaculately impregnated after listening to rock music on a cassette tape for the first time.