Some bands sweat away in the studio for four years perfecting their high-hat sound. Others take a long rest before reassembling to swiftly bash out an album in somebody’s soggy basement.

Phil Elverum recently posted a response on Tumblr to a complaint from somebody who’d bought an album from the Mount Eerie merch table and was disappointed to discover it sounded nothing like the set they’d played on that particular night. “A fundamental aspect of art is that it is wild and unpredictable,” replied Elverum,

Inside Lleywn Davis, the latest film by the Coen brothers, is set in the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. It has already scooped awards at the Cannes Film Festival and with T-Bone Burnett producing the soundtrack as well as a selection of A-list guests, this record is likely to have a similar impact.

Perhaps you know Bryce Dessner as one fifth of indie rock laureates The National. But don’t assume the Ohio-born guitarist cut his teeth plucking out grunge tunes in his parents’ garage—Yale doesn’t hand out master’s degrees in music for nothing, after all.

Edinburgh four-piece The Spook School take their name from a group of Scottish artists whose work was ridiculed for being too dark and gothic.

It’s questionable whether or not there has ever been an album released so apropos of a band’s name than this. Mid-tempo, middle of the road, and indeed middling, Antiphon nonetheless sounds aquatic and crystalline. Reverb ripples from the shimmering guitars and the percussion splashes pleasantly, but the album never manages to enchant in the manner of the previous album, 2010’s folky, psychedelic The Courage of Others.

San Fermin is the brainbaby of Brooklyn composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, who wrote this ambitious debut record while holed up for six weeks in a studio in a Canadian mountain range.

Nils Frahm‘s approach to making music has developed in line with his attitude to the performance environment, and the German composer’s audience remains an integral part of his first live album.

It looks like Breathe Owl Breathe have finally decided to grow up. Here, on album number six, the Michigan-based trio have replaced the idiosyncrasies of past records with a tonal consistency that runs throughout these 10 folk-pop strains.