Since forming in 2007, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have released three full-length albums along with a series of 7” singles and EPs. While the albums are all very good to excellent, they tend to try out ideas that would be otherwise out of place on their EPs and occasionally that leaves weaker material.

Fred Armisen and Bill Hader spend much of their time during their day jobs impersonating others as comedians. So it’s no surprise—and a pretty natural extension—when they decided to form their own soft rock spoof band The Blue Jean Committee.

Swedish indie pop pioneers Club 8 celebrated 20 years as a musical couple (which included several years as an actual couple) in 2015. That experience and chemistry are easy to track on the veteran band’s release of Pleasure, a new eight-song LP that

It’s safe to say that in the less than two years since her old band Vivian Girls announced their official breakup, Cassie Ramone has been busy. Christmas in Reno, her first (yes) Christmas album and second solo album overall, follows last year’s The Time Has Come and stylistically is quite similar.

This overdue compilation collects obscurities from Cass McCombs’ unruly songbook. It’s a motley patchwork, but one that never fails to fascinate, with a tracklist that skips from White Light/White Heat-style rave-ups to Beatles-esque grandeur to modern protest music.

Gimme Fiction was a landmark album for Spoon, another big leap in the middle of a career that had already made two or three big ones. Coming three years after Kill the Moonlight, a collection of roughshod soul sounds, Fiction sounded slick and rich, laying down massive piano and bass grooves and riding them through to the three-minute sunset.

The instrumental duo returns from hiatus with a new LP of hard-driving prog and ‘80s horror/sci-fi score-inflected tracks; it’s their first of several written live in the studio, giving it an immediacy that their two preceding records lacked.

Baroness’ first outing on their own Abraxan Hymns imprint finds them plumbing the depths of the well of harmonic Southern-tinged prog metal they first tapped to enormous success on 2009’s Blue, and yet further on the 2012 double albumYellow & Green.

Multi-national shoegaze unit Cheatahs’ latest dials down the volume for a psychedelic, textured sound that’s a leap forward from their already-impressive debut album.