Parquet Courts’ new EP starts out on familiar territory with the first two tracks’ laid-back, irreverent garage punk, and then it all gets a little bit weirder.

Paul Pope’s Battling Boy has been talked about as the artist’s next big project since 2006; plenty of beautiful art’s been teased for years as well. Even with the long anticipation and hype working against it, this first in a two-volume series of original graphic novels blows the lid off of expectations.

We’re all familiar with the enigmatic struggle of sophomore albums. There is an unfair expectation for a band to stick to what they know—or, more accurately, what we know—and also the need to expand to new horizons and stretch the boundaries.

Kevin Barnes is clearly not a man for taking a break. Over the last 16 years, of Montreal’s leading light has rattled off close to a record a year. And these are never just any old long-player; each is antithetical to its predecessor, a bleeding statement of Barnes’ thirst for forward-thinking pop melodies.

The Beauchamps are a witching family. Freya (Mrs. Channing Tatum, Jenna Dewan) and Ingrid (Rachel Boston) are daughters to Joanna (Julia Ormond) and nieces to her sister, Wendy (Twin Peaks’ Mädchen Amick), all of whom are witches.

Joining Girls and Frances Ha in the young-artist-moving-to-New York zeitgeist is Five Dances, a film about the world of downtown Manhattan dance.

Nils Frahm took the stage at the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles on Tuesday night with one simple request to the lighting engineer: that the moody pink and blue colored lights be replaced with a single white spotlight.

CHVRCHES thrilled to a near-packed house in Philadelphia.

Followers of comics writer Alex DeCampi’s Twitter will find her occasionally grumbling about her lack of paid work in comics. Her career-sized output coupled with her hobby-sized income is an even deeper injustice when one considers the quality of her work, and Smoke/Ashes may in fact be her best.