It’s hard to believe Vince Staples is only 22. His interviews sound like they’re coming from a tired, middle-aged man who’s seen it all.

Everything Everything is a U.K. band that makes the kind of music now championed by slightly younger groups like alt-J and Adult Jazz. Their first two albums, 2010’s Man Alive and 2013’s Arc, were experimentally-minded approaches to pop that took pure melody and shoved it through a digital filter of off-kilter chord progressions and unusual, reverb-less falsetto vocals courtesy of frontman Jonathan Higgs.

Refused were a Swedish post-hardcore punk group who split up in 1998 after failing to overthrow capitalism. Eventually, they succumbed to temptation and embraced the whole lucrative reformation package.

As a sort of kabuki take on early aughts emo, Desaparecidos satisfies. But that baseline satisfaction is like a single coat of paint that wears thin over an entire LP’s length.

It is easy to think that Paul Weller gets a harsh deal from music critics. After all, he’s one of British music’s touchstones; from his revolutionary and genuinely original work with The Jam, via the enjoyable, breezy pop of The Style Council through to his solo career, which produced Stanley Road and Wild Wood—two of the more passable albums of the Britpop fad of the ‘90s.

In 2004, Sweden’s Moonbabies, the duo of married couple Ola Frick and Carina Johansson Frick, quietly released one of the best indie pop albums the genre had seen in The Orange Billboard, a full-length that exploded with vibrancy and life, its melodies, harmonies, and musical interplay creating an album that has far outlived any hype that the Swedish indie scene was experiencing at the time.

Plagiarism may be considered the greatest form of flattery, but it’s never a good look for the perceived offender. It’s something Cayucas know only too well.

Last June, out of nowhere, Los Angeles-based pop-singer nobody Ryn Weaver released a song called “OctaHate” and overnight became a somebody.

The marriage of noise and pop is as old as garage rock itself, but few recent bands have wed sonic assaults and bracingly gorgeous melodicism as convincingly as Joanna Gruesome.