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.

British songwriter and singer Jamie Lidell returns after a three-year hiatus with a record that shows just how easily he can combine heart and technology. Shedding the more experimental touches of 2010’s Compass, Jamie Lidell harks back to the cocktail shaker of soul music that brought him worldwide attention with Jim (2008) and the Motown-tingedMultiply (2005).

As a term of musical reference, symphonic pop feels faintly oxymoronic. Pop in its most instinctive form is not meant for grand statements; it’s short, stabbing, and to the point. Overblown orchestration shouldn’t really come into it.

After breaking out in early 2012 with a pair of buzzed-over EPs, 20-year-old Chicago-based producer Nick Zanca sequestered himself in his family’s Vermont lake cottage to record his debut full-length.

The Madchester scene and Factory Records may well be the single most overrated and unwarrantedly praised era British music has ever seen.

Last night, Tame Impala set the club on fire. No, really.

Back in 2007, an indie hit came out of nowhere and from an unlikely source. Disco Romance, released that year in North America, was the debut album from the Swedish duo of producer Johan Agebjörn and a reclusive singer going by the pseudonym Sally Shapiro.

Shout Out Louds’ third album Work was an exercise in businesslike austerity. (Read: nice, but nothing worth sending a company-wide memo about.) Their newest effort sees the Stockholm-based five-piece making up for lost time. Bigger, richer, and more fun than its predecessor, Optica drips with hyperactive lyrics, icy synths, and string arrangements that frontman Adam Olenius giddily described to Under the Radar as “like warm mayonnaise.”

f you’ve ever seen Radiohead live (or watched the “Lotus Flower” video), you’re aware that Thom Yorke really likes to dance. But as opposed to graceful, purposeful movements, jerky gyrations and sudden twitches fill Yorke’s dancing.