What do you do when you realize you’ve been stuck in a charade? When Caroline Rose felt the squeeze from her dusty rockabilly outfit, she ditched the lacey poetry and embraced her Cadillac red swagger.

Overconsumption of information has lead to infinite narratives that will never be tied together. A belief in obscurity eliminates anxiety, for relevance is no longer a priority. Calexicolurches toward this new definition of freedom in nothingness on their nineth studio album The Thread That Keeps Us.

It’s fair to say that Richard Russell has paid his dues. By this point, the record producer and co-founder of XL Recordings, has spent 20 years out of the studio whilst his label landed some of the biggest starts in music—including Adele, Radiohead, and The White Stripes.

U.S. Girls is the moniker of Meghan Remy. The American-Canadian musician has previously released a trio of increasingly-improving albums, showing off her unique propensity for making noise pop an art form that is in one moment sensual and intoxicating and, in the next, bitter and twisted.

Fischerspooner burst onto the pop scene in 2001 with the preliminary release of #1, an album that essentially defined their careers. At the time, few people anticipated the impact the record would have. A smash hit, it was subsequently re-released two more times, a six-track remix EP of the single “Emerge” was put out, and Fischerspooner were suddenly members of global art and fashion high society.

Like many of us, El Perro Del Mar’s Sarah Assbring is terrified at the state of world affairs. Her newest EP, We Are History, enchantingly asks, “What can we do to improve things?” She might not have the answers, but with an electronic tabla box in hand, she makes searching for them a far less stressful process.

Marlon Williams’ self-titled debut album was, out the gate, a fast-paced, foot-stomping, folk/country rush of blood that knocked you off your feet. Now, coming nearly two years to the day after its predecessor, Make Way for Love launches the young New Zealander in a completely different direction.

Unconventional rhythms, melodies, and instrumentations drape themselves across the tracks of the self-titled full-length debut by Loma, a recent signing by Sub Pop that consists of Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater and Cross Record’s Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski.

When you’ve carved out a solid career for yourself as a cult-favourite of California’s throbbing garage psych scene, and are capable of releasing more good material in a single year than most artists could hope for in a lifetime, where do you go next?