Anyone playing music inspired by ‘60s garage rock these days is aspiring to chin-up on what is nearly an impossibly high creative bar. King Khan & The Shrines take their cue from that work, but they know better than to drain their recording budget trying to achieve precisely the sound created decades ago by bands that had far less time and money.

As the “main” violinist (Marika Shaw is absent in studio, as is multi-instrumentalist Owen Pallett on tour) in Arcade Fire, Sarah Neufeld is a central player in the band’s enormous, cinematic sound.

Nobody Knows is probably the album Willis Earl Beal knew he had always wanted to make. And for those who heard his debut release, 2012’s Acousmatic Sorcery, and pegged him solely as an outsider artist, it’s probably not the one you expected.

Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado and Sam France have been on a manic creative tear. The band recorded and self-released several albums before the EP Take the Kids Off Broadway caught the attention of Jagjaguwar and Richard Swift in the latter half of 2011.

Arctic Monkeys have come a long way since their debut LP Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not dropped. Back in 2006 they were four fresh-faced Sheffield kids dousing snappy, colloquial couplets over irresistible hooks.

Goldfrapp’s sixth full-length can be boiled down to a simple equation: guitar, strings, and frontwoman Alison Goldfrapp’s ethereal soprano. It can also be reduced to a catchy band pairing: Vashti Bunyan recast by David Lynch. Or heck, how about a tagline: This fall, Goldfrapp explores…the Tales of Us. (Say it in your best announcer’s voice.)

Prior to this record, the recorded output of Volcano Choir—the collaboration between Collections of Colonies of Bees and fellow Wisconsinite and Bon Iver mastermind Justin Vernon—has consisted of just one record: 2009’s Unmap. But it doesn’t take long for Repave to render that record something of a blueprint.

Greek mythology album references aside, there’s something about Chelsea Wolfe’s work that brings Pandora’s box to mind. For all the crazy bullshit that pours out, there’s always a kernel of something hopeful to clutch onto.

Frontman Will Sheff has always sung with the conviction and passion of someone plumbing deep wounds, his voice cracking with the effort. Okkervil River’s seventh full-length effort, The Silver Gymnasium, finds the band a little more controlled, the emotions a bit more corralled, more focused.