It is not exactly a list of my personal favourites, but my personal taste certainly shaped it. Nor is this an objective rundown of the biggest singles of the year — I still hate #1 summer smashes “Cheerleader” and “See You Again,” and I’m ambivalent about “Bad Blood”— though chart statistics, cultural impact, and general ubiquity certainly weighed on my choices stereogum

Night Flowers – Sleep soaring as it sinks into your subconscious, Night Flowers’ new single is as enchanting as any lullaby… Soft without being delicate, the track’s driving rhythms and gliding chorus hooks give this four minute burst of dream-pop an entirely potent impression… “All your dreams, boy, safe right here, and we’ll be free,” Sophia Pettit sings – whatever worries may be hovering on the edge of consciousness, it seems that with Night Flowers, everything’s in safe hands.  thelineofbest

Young Romance – Wasting Time To say it is pretty damn good would be a gross understatement. First essential single of 2015 recordsillike

Jamie XX, Romy – Loud Places a love letter to both the records that shaped him (it’s built on a generous sample of Idris Muhammad’s joyous 1977 dance-funk track “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This”) and the people who helped him reach such lofty heights. “Didn’t I take you to higher places you can’t reach without me?” Croft sings just before the swelling nu-gospel hook kicks in. The answer is a grateful, emphatic yes. pitchfork

Tame Impala – Let it Happen Future music scientists (that will be a vocation) will come to study the shining jewel in the ‘Currents’ crown and marvel at its myriad of spellbinding disco-pop properties. That bass-y riff (actually recorded using a guitar with an octave pedal),the relatable lovelorn lyrical subject matter (fucking Trevor), the subtle instrumental flourishes which crop up every now and then (uplifting synths, the church bells, the ringtone guitars) — what more could you want? Those scientists will then be able to successfully determine that yes, this was the moment Tame Impala became one of the most genuine, inventive and wonderful bands of our era. What a bassline, what a song, what a band. Bravo, Kevin Parker nme

Mark Ronson – Daffodils (feat. Kevin Parker) the psych funk jam from my dreams, and recruited Australia’s own Kevin Parker from Tame Impala for vocal duties, just in case that wasn’t enough… the track is a perfect example of Ronson‘s infatuation with American R’n’B and funk in the 70’s and 80’s, working in Memphis at the time the track was made... Daffodils is the best of both artists – Kevin’s psych-pop penchant and space-age voice, and Mark’s undeniable knack for funk… The song also features some seriously trippy lyrics, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon “crank that vapour-wagon/start that kick and dragon beating” for example.

Belle & Sebastian – Nobody’s Empire The best introduction to late-period Belle & Sebastian is the first single from their latest album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. Lead singer Stuart Murdoch has called this the most personal song he’s ever written. It’s one of the few songs in which he foregoes inventing characters and imaginary situations and sings directly from his heart. Hearing him describe his experience overcoming a chronic illness in his early twenties to found the band that would save his life is a powerful and, ultimately, hopeful experience. thetalkingllama

Eskimeaux – Broken Necks Delivered with unshakable spirit and impeccable craft, the eleven-track album felt like a best friend from the outset; the kind that you grew up with, fell in and out of love with, danced with, laughed with, cried with. It felt, and continues to feel, monumentally important, like if you could surpass the sheer joy of the pop songs for long enough then buried within is some kind of message or elixir to the simple pleasure of life and living. goldflakepaint

Chorusgirl – Girls of 1926 What do Queen Elizabeth II, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author Harper Lee, actress Marilyn Monroe and musician Big Mama Thornton all have in common? Well they were all born in 1926 of course, and what’s the relevance of that? Well don’t ask us, we didn’t write a song about it, butChorus Girl did… The track is musically superb, all swooping vocal harmonies, glistening guitar lines and a sublime driving bass line thefatangelsings

Ought – Beautiful Blue Sky  a song centered around a series of observations — light clinging to someone’s shoulders, a high-rise condo, a big, beautiful, blue sky — but it’s also a multi-layered critique of development and unending consumerism. Another perfect happy-sad song stereogum

The Mountain Goats – The Legend of Chavo Guerrero anchored by a triumphant chorus and a simple, slightly distorted acoustic guitar riff. It’s partially a biography of the titular wrestler and partly a first-hand account of why Chavo was such a hero to frontman John Darnielle while growing up. With brevity and humour, Darnielle manages to explain Chavo’s appeal; Guerrero was a dependable force for good at a time when Darnielle spent most of his home life dealing with an abusive stepfather popmatters

The Hermit Crabs – Bravado and Rhetoric It’s got everything one needs from the perfect indiepop track: bouncing rhythm, jangling guitars and charming vocals. I think those of you looking to be charmed will find your happy place hiding here in this track. austintownhall

Remember Sports – Washing Machine It might start off with lyrics about the laundry, but as the wash cycle starts to spin, so does the metaphor, drawing out suppressed exasperation at being stuck in a rut. “Will you stay with me? I’m having trouble breathing,” Carmen Perry pleads at the track’s end. “This is not my life,” she states, resounding with a desperation to break free. For the times things don’t always go to plan, for the down and out of luck, a track that bounds with the optimism that there’s a way out. thelineofbestfit

Dick Diver – Tearing The Posters Down so instantly beat magical, so crowd-happy alchemical, so blissfully ironic, it’s hard to imagine how it could be improved on. This is a future room-stomper. northerntransmissions

Matthew E White – Take Care My Baby the song builds to an exacting, ecstatic mix of soulful guitar, horn accents, and swelling strings. It’s a swirl of sounds that will feel immediately familiar to any fan of Big Inner, and that’s part of the point: it invites the listener to pick up right where that album left off. thelineofbestfit

Natalie Prass – My Baby Don’t Understand Me Prass, a member of Jenny Lewis’ backing band, recorded the album at Matthew E. White’s Spacebomb studio in Richmond, and the crew of musicians they rallied rounded out her deeply vulnerable, Joni Mitchell-esque folk-pop with orchestral grandeur. This thing gobsmacked me when I first heard it, so let it gobsmack you too strereogum

The Ocean Party – Light Weight the Melbourne six-piece’s fifth album in three years. This condensed time frame, though, makes for exciting permutations… One particular lyric dripped so much sadness, so much hard-won knowledge, that the rest of the song was cast in its shadow: “We caught a taxi back and I walked home from yours/ You said I’ll see you soon I said I wasn’t sure/ There was everything and nothing everywhere/ And I had the idea I deserved even more.”

‘Light Weight’ is an album that holds up well to repeat listens… presents itself as exactly as it is, and invites the listener to contemplate its ramifications, rather than convincing the listener of complexity via more and more noise. Even the album’s title is open to interpretation. ‘Light Weight’ as in not heavy, or as in unable to cope? aaabackstage

Young Guv – Crawling Back To You As the guitarist of brainy hardcore band Fucked Up, Ben Cook doesn’t necessarily come off as a fan of power pop. But he’s hardly a stranger to un-punk waters, having dabbled in everything from ’80s pop (Yacht Club) to dance pop (Young Governor) over the course of numerous side projects.

Still, the gulf between hardcore and power pop is a wide one, which makes Cook’s latest solo effort such a happy, unexpected surprise. On Ripe 4 Luv, Cook, threads the two genres together with enough string to make sense of the hybrid. Over the course of eight tracks, Cook makes generous use of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s pop sounds he clearly has a special affection for… The odes to Big Star, The Replacements, and Teenage Fanclub are impossible to look past, especially on grinding yet sweet-sounding tracks like “Crawling Back to You” and “Kelly, I’m Not a Creep”. consequenceofsound

Twerps – Back To You has all the inner turmoil the name suggests. It boasts a buoyant disposition, with whistling synths and steady riffs happily skipping along, hand in hand, but even on his sunniest days, singer Martin Frawley can’t shake his glum thoughts. “Somebody out there is doing better than me/ They’re feeling free, feeling free, feeling freer than me,” he sings. He’s simmering with jealousy, tied to a relationship that leaves him feeling anchored: “And it all keeps coming back to you,” he reminds himself in the chorus. Discussing the bittersweet song with Fader, Frawley quoted Neneh Cherry: “Somedays are better than somedays.” pitchfork

Terry – Talk About Terry with its wistful clatter—a shimmying, delightfully off-key punk-pop collage about its lonely namesake. “I’m not a bad choice/ I’m not a bad choice,” went its cheeky refrain, sad and sweet pitchfork

Blur – Ong Ong feels like it was written in minutes, or as if it’s always existed somewhere in the ether. Perhaps it has – if you can stop yourself breaking into Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want To Be With You” during the chorus, you’re a stronger person than me – but it’s a pleasure all the same. The simplest and most brazenly populist song here by far, it’s one that revels in escaping the city rather than wallowing in its oddness, and on it Albarn comes across as warm, friendly, and in love with the world and the people in it – the same people he’s been so wary of the rest of the record, the contrary bastard. The return to the knees up feel of peak Blur will annoy some, but it’ll enrapture far more as soon as it starts getting performed in fields to beer users. thelineofbestfit

Westkust – Swirl The opening track from Westkust’s debut is not, in fact, the 1,500th shoegaze-y indie rock song to be named “Swirl”. You could understand the need to check the facts—this style of music loves itself some functional names, i.e., Lush, Curve, Ride, Slowdive, Whirr, Swervedriver, Glider, Hum, we could go on. And, yup, Westkust has co-ed vocals, somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen fuzz pedals, you know the standard procedure. So there are two ways Westkust will likely introduce themselves here: either as a dutifully formal, reverent band, or one with the confidence to believe that a shoegaze-y indie rock song named “Swirl” can actually sound exciting in 2015 pitchfork

Sleater-Kinney – A New Wave Following the band’s decade-long hiatus, “A New Wave” feels like one of Sleater-Kinney’s statements of principle on No Cities to Love, an acknowledgement of the movements that have helped give the band exposure in the past, but a simultaneous rejection that they remain bound to any of the expectations or conventions of those movements in the next phase of their careers. There’s some existential grappling here, as in the lines “Every day I throw a little party / But a fit would be more fitting / And every time I climb a little higher / Should I leap or go on living?” which is probably to be expected when one returns to a musical project with another 10 years of age and experience, but there’s also a sense of exuberance and excitement to throw off the shackles of the past. Brownstein speaks in the song of “leaving nothing” behind for those who would seek to deconstruct Sleater-Kinney, while also standing defiant in her proclamation that “no outline will ever hold us.

Low – What Part Of Me Most bands don’t have either the stamina or the creative drive to make it up to and past the 20-year mark. The ones that do rarely find new things to say. As its enters its third decade making music, Low has reached a comfortable but engaging stride creating music that consistently seems to be at odds with itself. Ones and Sixes is all at once beautiful, ugly, tense, warm, inviting and repellent. It’s an emotional and sonic juggling act where even the slightest bum-note would draw attention to itself. As always with Low, the beauty is all about the details. pitchfork

Girlpool – Chinatown The tiniest notes, the biggest sentiments: Girlpool make songs that feel audaciously small, like an eyedropper pointed toward the heavens… It is a quiet album of uncommon intensity pitchfork

The Amazing – Circles Dunrup mentions watching Beverly Hills Cop II, whose soundtrack contains songs such as”I Want Your Sex”,  which exist in a completely different solar system than the one occupied by “Circles”. But the impression given by Gunrup is that the same headspace that would lead someone to watching Beverly Hills Cop II in its entirety is similar to the one that’s amenable to Picture You—a fugue state where you somehow manage to be happily committed to your own incapacitation. pitchfork

Robert Forster – Learn To Burn as Forster admonishes on Songs To Play’s brisk opener, Learn To Burn, “you can miss details when you’re in a hurry.” Forster rarely writes obvious songs; the type that get your foot tapping and rattle around your head for days. Instead he writes songs, and records, that creep up and throttle you from behind. And he almost never writes duds. theguardian

Waxahatchee – Poison  there’s a casual feel to Ivy Tripp, something about it that’s unhurried and relaxed. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t ambitious or accomplished. This is one way it’s most reminiscent of the best ’90s indie rock: it never feels forced or like she’s making some kind of push. It’s unhurried and natural and real. You also get a feeling listening to these songs that Crutchfield is just getting started, and it’s exciting to hear a young voice rising so assuredly above the fray, one you can imagine inspiring kids years from now, and inspiring them to pick up guitars and sing and take control of their direction, too. pitchfork

Daddy Issues – Glue Sniffer Sometimes life gets in the way. Opportunities too good to pass up take us in places we never imagined, and in the end, we’re richer for the adventure. That’s what happened to 2 members of North Carolina’s Daddy Issues. Portland beckoned, and a slot in medical school couldn’t be passed over. Missing two key members, the band decided to call it quits. Their swan song, an 8-track surf rock masterpiece stands as a testament to what could have been. thespsychedelicdays

Courtney Barnett – Depreston According to TripAdvisor, there are precisely five “Things to Do” in the Melbourne suburb of Preston—and coming in at number two on that list of attractions is…the local library. This is the humdrum setting of “Depreston”, which finds Courtney Barnett considering a move away from the town’s quaint coffee shops to a place further out, where green space is plentiful. But whereas previous generations found solace in the predictability of tree-lined streets and boxy houses, this 28-year-old can’t help but feel depressed while eyeing the innards of a deceased estate, the ghosts of the past tugging at her in the form of left-behind war photos, sugar cans, and, most pointedly, a handrail in the shower. The house may have been someone’s dream, but not hers.

The minor tragedy plays out in Barnett’s calm, scratchy drawl along with a vaguely country-fied guitar and backbeat. “Depreston” could not be more low-key if it tried, like an old Jeff Tweedy demo, but this does not make its emotional climax any less devastating. When the hook finally comes around—”If you’ve got a spare half a million/ You could knock it down and start rebuilding“—Barnett’s scattered observations come into focus. This is a song about not being able to own things. About letting go of ancestors’ desires. About the price of denying death. It’s a generational anthem that’s not anthemic at all pitchfork

Emma Kupa – Consequences Warm vocals and classic rhythms carry six songs of family remembrances.  And because they are about family and are honestly crafted, the stories cover the range of happy and sad, triumphs and hardships.  But the tunes are infections, the vocals endearing, and the sincerity that infuses the project makes this one of those wonderfully intimate musical treasures that come along every so not-often-enough. whenyoumotorway

Mammoth Penguins – When I Was Your Age The sniping of older relatives is shrugged off with an escalating list of successes they had under their belts at the same age the band now find themselves. This comparison between generations has probably pecked all our heads at some point and so creating a shield of ever-fuzzier guitars and dodging the bullets with wilder dance moves is a brilliantly executed defence. louderthawar

Joanna Gruseome – Honestly Do Your Worst A song about espionage, rival groups and the radical possibilities of peanut butter spread, the single is the perfect encapsulation of the band’s combination of hyper-melodic pop music and sonic violence northerntransmissions

Grimes, Bleachers – Entropy Despite the lyrics being a bit of a bummer (Everything I’ve ever known is wrong, oh, what’s the matter with me?), “Entropy” is the flipside of the coin, full of trickling piano and guitar riffs and an anthemic beat. It’s exactly the kind of sky-high pop you’d expect from a guy who co-wrote Taylor Swift’s “Out Of The Woods” and an artist who recently revealed she scrapped a whole album “cuz it was depressing.” Hands in the air, let’s sing it loud: a lack of love or empathy leave me lonely! thefader

Frog – Judy Garland On Kind of Blah, melodies, once buried deep, emerge to take you suddenly by surprise; playful teasing guitar lines work their way into your subconscious and all the while rhythms buoy you up and carry you drunkenly forward, laughing all the way. Lead single Judy Garland is the perfect encapsulation of Frog’s sound, bursting with imagery and cultural references, and rendered in glorious Technicolor goldflakepaint

Father John Misty – The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt Although it makes room for moments of genuine sweetness and connection, Father John Misty’s great I Love You, Honeybear is a very bitter, very funny album, and “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment” is perhaps its bitterest and funniest song, a petty, scathing laundry list of a lover’s flaws. It starts out amusing — and it keeps being amusing — but as it drags on and on, it becomes almost uncomfortably mean-spirited, and then you realize that, hey, this guy is kind of a dick — but that’s the point. Josh Tillman himself is guilty of the same crimes he’s accusing this poor girl of, and the song is a testament to the thinness of the line between narcissism and self-loathing. stereogum

Beach House – PPP channels Lennon’s vocal sound and melody from “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” with the singing so dreamy it sounds somnambulant, underscored by a lovely dose of slide guitar and finishes with a wonderfully euphoric coda thelineofbestfit

Bill Ryder-Jones – Two to Birkenhead His vocals are still relatively hushed, but where once the backing was equally subdued, now the likes of Two to Birkenhead and Satellites are unapologetically rock, albeit of the skew-whiff type at which Pavement once excelled theguardian

The Libertines – Anthem For Doomed Youth The third Libertines album arrives 12 years after its predecessor. Like many resolutely British products, including Royal Doulton china and Dr Martens boots, its production was actually outsourced to Thailand: on one track, you can hear the sound of the waves breaking on the beach at Bang Saray. Moreover, it was recorded with Jake Gosling , whose charge sheet includes producing One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful, co-writing Ed Sheeran’s multi-platinum album + .

Few bands have damaged their own reputation in quite the way the Libertines managed. The excruciating tabloid horror show seemed to go on far longer than their career, dwarfing it to the point where it was difficult to remember why people had thought they were any good in the first place. Anthems for Doomed Youth isn’t perfect, but it succeeds in redressing the balance, reminding you that before Doherty became an embarrassing red-top fixture, he and Barât were genuinely great songwriters with a uniquely skewed vision. It might represent a new start or a full stop: either way, it’s a huge improvement on the way the Libertines’ story seemed fated to end. theguardian

Wolf Alice – Bros When Wolf Alice first put out ‘Bros’ in early 2013, they went from a bunch of hopefuls to a Seriously Exciting Band. The hype was already firmly place, but this sent Ellie Rowsell and co. into the stratosphere. Few groups pen hooks like the one ‘Bros’ centres around in a decade, let alone within months of forming… Less a rehash, more a reaffirmation of the magic this song possesses, ‘Bros’ is all grown up. Additions include a couple of new lyrics (“Are your lights on, are your lights still on?”) and an actual definitive chorus. But it’s still the same song that put Wolf Alice on the map, and given their current situation – on the brink of actual, world-conquering stardom – it’s an ace in their sleeve that’s being played again at the perfect time diymag

Chvrches – Leave a Trace Mayberry has mastered a move more effective than wounds and weaponry: the coolest of indifference. “Take care to tell it just as it was/ Take care to tell on me for the cause,” she jeers at a calculating ex who she knows will try and keep score long after she’s dropped the mic. The blame she accepts, though, is key to her recovery. “I’ll admit that I got it wrong/ And there is gray between the lines,” she sings stoically, over a cold darkwave tremor that shows off Chvrches’ newfound embrace of simpler arrangements, and not at the expense of impact. Those ineffable, imprecise gray areas can be the sites of revelation, which Mayberry seizes in a pitch that’s all transcendent ASMR tingle: “I know/ I need/ To feel/ Relief,” she gasps, finding that liberation way outvalues the puny spoils of being right or wrong. pitchfork

Majical Cloudz – Downtown on one level, a song about the good times in a relationship, when things are flush with excitement and discovery and everything seems perfect: “Nothing you say/ Will ever be wrong/ Cause it just feels good being in your arms.” But the way Devon Welsh sings the words, and the way Matthew Otto’s skeletal instrumentation floats around them like a ghost, makes you think that at least some of it can be placed in the past tense. The line, “There is one thing I’ll do, if it ever goes wrong, I’ll write you into all my songs” may be the one thing that exists in the present. pitchfork

John Grant – Global Warming finds him on the horns of a dilemma, disparaging sun-worshippers who don’t suffer in the heat like him, yet at the same time voyeuristically admiring their tanned torsos theindependent

Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat – Street Pastor Colloquy, 3am Like some long-lost outtake from The Commitments soundtrack, as narrated by a blootered fuckup straight from the pages of Irvine Welsh, it ladles horns and a groovy church choir on top of its swaggering chassis. The result is a kind of anti-gospel, its tale of rejecting the consolations of the sacred in favour of the comforts of the profane – “Oh devil all I need is you” –  consecrated by the bubbling euphoria of its arrangement. louderthanwar

Sufjan Stevens – Death With Dignity one of the most chilling yet comforting melodies in the history of Sufjan Stevens. As the opening track on Carrie & Lowell, the sound of it is like a balm to me: When I hear those first few polite pluckings, I know I’m about to hear an album I hold very dear. What follows the beautiful instrumentation is a series of stacked metaphors about hens and chimneys and semi-precious gems. But before you have much time to think about what it all means, Stevens hits you with the line, “Is it real or a fable?” It’s ultimately about the untimely death of Stevens’ mother (who, if you’ve paid much attention to his music, you know had a complicated relationship with her son), but it also possesses a fleeting feeling about death in general—and the potential for beauty in it. “What is the song you sing for the dead?” Stevens asks. That melody sounds a little different for everyone. pastemagazine

The Tallest Man On Earth – Sagres It’s the calls of “come on” that really get you…  shares little of the sunshine of the Portuguese village named in the title – Matsson is in the darkness, looking for a bit of that light. Those two words, repeated throughout the track, aren’t rousing cries of joy but an anti-vamos, the sound of Matsson pleading to be pulled out of “this sadness, I suppose”, to be guided away from being more than “these savages” and to rid himself of “all this fucking doubt”, the heart-wrenching phrase which dominates the track.. if I was to speak immediately after hearing ‘Sagres’ for the first time it’d be a croak or a choke that would splutter forth. So how Matsson gets his voice to soar after it almost breaks, desperate and lost, at the bridge, is a thing of wonder much like the rest of this beautiful song. goldflakepaint

Cina Polada – Y.D.D.M Like great pop should be, ‘YDDM’ (You Don’t Deserve Me) is imperfect in all the right places. It is radiant, but not overly polished to the point of being dull. Our heart strings are effortlessly played too as the song skips defiantly along, reminding us that we are not worthy of its attention. Maybe we’re not, but it’s an endearing listen all the same goldflakepaint

Diet Cig – Scene Sick Just the little shuffle of drums that eases us in to ‘Scene Sick‘ is enough to demand interest; that the track quickly unravels across 100-ish seconds of sweetly memorable guitar pop is further verification that Diet Cig are the first great discovery of 2015. Yep, that good… Led by a candied vocal display which soon dissolves in to a vehement unloading of displeasure, Scene Sick channels youthful spirit and defiance in to a glorious racket of sentiment and influence goldflakepaint

Martha – Chekhov’s Hangnail the light at the end of the shitty tunnel that is life, is of course, music, and more particularly, cutting and unflinching DIY punk… you have to wonder if Martha could possibly do a better job of exposing the core of British small town life, and the complexities of the relationships, and hardships, it fosters goldflakepiant

Florence + The Machine – Ship To Wreck Right when Florence Welch announced her ‘How Big How Blue How Beautiful’ album, she told Zane Lowe that she had something of a “nervous breakdown”, without going into too many details. Constant touring and a one-album-after-the-next cycle had clearly taken effect, but ‘Ship to Wreck’ is the first of her new songs to directly address the in-limbo stage that struck LP3. “Did I drink too much? Am I losing touch?” she sings, before – as is custom with anything Welch does – bursting into a gigantic chorus. diymag

Gwenno – Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki This is music that the listener can plunge into and summon up her own images and sense from. If you’re fortunate enough to be a Welsh and/or Cornish speaker then perhaps you will experience this album in a fuller more rounded way. But that is certainly not to say that you won’t also get huge enjoyment and enrichment from Gwenno’s music otherwise. Sorry google: bad translations not required. drownedinsound

The Chills – Warm Waveform It’s taken 19 years for Martin Phillipps to get round to releasing the fifth Chills album (and the previous four took 16 years to make)… The Chills always sounded very particular – spindly guitar lines atop organ-drenched backing, the whole thing slathered in reverb, with Phillipps spilling out words on top – and Silver Bullets fits snugly into their sparse back catalogue… The Chills’ appeal always lay in their ability to combine brightness and murkiness – they sound almost like the musical embodiment of autumn, part windswept and part golden – and that’s very much present on Silver Bullets, a minor triumph of an album. theguardian

Tigercats – Sleeping in the Backseat the track was Duncan Barrett’s attempt at writing a driving song – despite not having a license (hence the backseat, I guess) goldflakepaint

Belle & Sebastian – Paper Boat a previously unreleased B&S song written around the same time as 1998’s The Boy With the Arab Strap. The song is accompanied by a video directed by longtime B&S collaborator and Looper member Stuart David, featuring footage of Stuart Murdoch and the since-departed Isobel Campbell on vacation in Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 1998. The song was released in anticipation of David’s new memoir of the band’s early days, In the All-Night Café.

Jad Fair and Norman Blake – Two Hearts Together ticks all the boxes you’d expect; Jad unleashing adorably wide-eyed spiels of squeaky-voiced positivity, while Norm’s sweet, hummable arrangements keep the sugar down to palatable levels. It’s quietly marvellous. theskinny

The Spook School – Binary questions gender-norms and suggest there’s more to life than a straight choice between, “bowties or high heels”. The track asks us to, “let it be complicated and hard to understand” and to, “make them uncomfortable and challenge their ideals, because their antiquated notions are blinding what is real”. That would all be well and good, but if the tune wasn’t there the message might get lost, luckily it’s an absolute blast, from the shout-along, “I am a bigger than a hexadecimal” chorus, to the tremendous bass breakdown and spine-tingling drum build up, it’s a track that’s just impossible not to love. fortherabbits

Pumarosa – Priestess a throbbing, thrilling call to arms with one foot in the underworld and the other striving for the mainstream nme

The Leaf Library – Tilting There’s something innately ghost-like about The Leaf Library. The band’s dream-like aural sculptures seem to float past on the breeze, half-there and half-not. Pastoral and deeply English, their spectral meditations touch on everything from meteorology, the seasons to the Suffolk coastline. clashmusic

CocoRosie – Lost Girls Whilst they have undoubtedly produced many a moment of weird beauty over the last decade or so, CocoRosie are rarely a cosy listening experience. Sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady have a history of tapping into the uncomfortable, taboo and offbeat, both musically and lyrically… There are moments when Heartache City has the ability to make hairs stand on end, such as the surprisingly earwormy chorus to ‘Lost Girls’. After spoken word rhyming, which is in danger of sounding a bit twee, the track comes into its own as the instrumental textures build and the gorgeous chorus is sung. Maybe the lines “stick out your thumb and lift up your skirt/someone’s gonna stop here soon” shouldn’t sound so beautiful, but they do. drownedinsound

Laura Marling – Strange Just 25, with five albums under her belt, Laura Marling has grown up on record, writing elliptical songs about inner lives that belied her scrawny year-count… Strange, one of the highlights of Short Movie, is a top finger-wag, in which Marling makes like Bob Dylan, sneering at some schmuck who doesn’t know himself, but loves Marling nonetheless. “When you fall in love with me/Your love becomes my responsibility…. Do you know how hard that is?” she spits theguardian

Tobias Jesso Jr – Without You there are certainly moments during Goon when you start to wonder if it might not be nice to hear something by an acclaimed American singer-songwriter that sounds like it was recorded in 2015, rather than 1974. Equally, however, there are moments when the sheer loveliness of Jesso’s melodies transcends the wilfully retro atmosphere, or where his songwriting lives up to the artists he’s indebted to: what’s great about Without You isn’t the fact that it sounds like John Lennon, but that it’s a song you suspect Lennon would have been happy to come up with theguardian

Robert Pollard – Up and up and up with the latest break up of Guided By Voices, Robert Pollard‘s prolific songwriting is beginning to take many forms… While the track shares a similar power pop pedigree as much of the GbV catalog, Pollard’s voice seems a bit shaky, stretching to hit the higher notes. Is decades of hard living finally catching up with Pollard? survivingthegoldenage

Salad Boys – Dream Date packed with catchy melodies and a speedy jangling rhythm that refuses to mellow out. It closes with a minute of head-banging worthy guitar riffs, whaling and echoing to the sunny pop-rock vibes. It’ll bring out your cool concert dance moves — or head nods if that’s more your style stereogum

Titus Andronicus – Dimed Out a blood-churning, all-hands-on-deck punk anthem-as-march to battle, stuffed with lyrics about the importance of staying earnest in an illogical world pitchfork

The Go! Team – What D’You Say starts with the sound of a can of something fizzy being opened and its contents poured into a glass – an apt way to introduce the Go! Team’s frothy confection theguardian

Francis Lung – Oh My Love With Iberian-flecked guitars and soft crooning, Lung paints a chilled-out picture of balmy summer afternoons and sun-baked escapades. It erupts around the one minute mark into something considerably more dreamy, though no less Iberian – the likes of El Guincho and Delorean have similar, albeit synthier tones. thelineofbestfit

Destroyer – Dream Lover a burst of energy to share with people un-cynical enough to see themselves in the double entendre of the song’s title. It’s the morning peeking over the horizon. “Aw, shit, here comes the sun,” he sings, surprised as anyone else pitchfork

Katie Dey – Fear O The Dark One evening last week I was feeling tired and gloomy on the train home after work, thinking about the future and life and stuff. Thinking about how coffee might eventually stain my teeth. How much printer toner I will inadvertently breathe over the years. Suddenly, and fortunately, I remembered that I had earphones in my coat pocket (I’m not very good at taking earphones anywhere). I plugged them into my phone and listened to asdfasdf and rested my head on the train window. Closing my eyes, what was initially a gloomy train ride turned into something more cathartic…

‘fear o the dark‘ feels like a hangover from the previous track, with its growly low guitar chords and semi-indecipherable vocals meandering towards no particular destination, as an occasional halo of synth pokes its way through the murk. I opened my eyes at this point and looked across the countryside. The fields were full of lambs. Nature is cool. goldflakepaint

Shopping – Straight Lines consumerism critiques you can dance to thelineofbestfit

Expert Alterations – You Can’t Always Be Liked breezes in with bits that sound like The Sundays and bits that sound like The Wedding Present. After a careful and deliberate intro passage, it’s pure perfection all the way. Chiming, catchy, and all kinds of awesome apessimistisneverdisappointed

Milky Wimpshake – Sexual Deviant Still indebted to the unfailing euphony of C86, Encore, Un Effort! is smart, noisy and typically lyrically hilarious londoninstereo

wished bones – witty boys make graves Instantly evocative, the kind of furled retreat that makes this kind of lofi, skeletal pop music so vital. The vocals are distant but rich; a scorched tongue folding itself around so many beautifully quotable and pulse-quickening word-runs that you’re buried deep within their world in the blinking of an eye. “love the way you hug the sea, I love the way your shirt fits me, So I’ll write a letter and hope to see you soon, But everything is black and white if you look at the moon” goldflakepaint

The Treasures of Mexico – Stars the latest band arising from the embers of The Dentists that have been glowing in various guises  since their late 90’s demise. In this incarnation founder members, Mark Matthews and Bob Collins, re-acquaint artistically to bring some of the most concentrated modern jangle-pop for many years. janglepophub

Mikal Cronin – Made My Mind Up as endlessly likable as anything he’s ever done, a smartly assembled and briskly executed blast of guitar-pop goodness stereogum

Julien Baker – Something doesn’t sound desperate so much as fitfully resigned. “Something” chronicles the aftermath of a hurried goodbye, the kind of departure that upends your insides and makes the world feel like it’s caving in on itself. The kind that you’ve seen coming for a long time. In the case of this single, that goodbye happens in a parking lot as Baker’s narrator watches a beloved one drive off without hearing her parting words. “I should’ve said something, I couldn’t find something to say/ So I just said nothing, sat and watched you drive away.” But Baker’s pain transcends her internal, cavernous well of thought and into her tangible surroundings: “I should let the parking lot swallow me up, choking your tires and kicking up dust/ Asking aloud why are you leaving? The pavement won’t answer me.” stereogum