Their first one was the guitar album, the record that compounded Best Coast reverb with the verve of forgotten noisemakers Vivian Girls and the sloppy vulnerability of forsaken jangle-poppers The Replacements. Alvvays established the band as the latest in a long lineage of indie rock acts that understand the fleeting nature of the pop hook, but yield to it all the same. Singles like “Next of Kin” proved that Buffalo Springfield guitar work and Feelies chord progressions are an inspired combination.

More about: Alvvays

“When the businessman whom his acquaintance asks for a job refuses because conditions don’t permit it, he thinks he is referring to something purely objective and totally autonomous — reality itself. Since everyone else, including the petitioner, feels the same because the reality they themselves created through their social activity appears as something alien by which they must abide, it follows that there are many agents but no conscious and therefore free subjects of social conditions.

More about: Godspeed You! Black Emperor

New York City has been a fixture of Shilpa Ray’s art since her Beat the Devil days, but Door Girl puts the Big Apple front and center like never before. From the “New York Minute Prayer” of the opening track to the shattering of her heart by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at the album’s conclusion, the city that Ray both loves and loathes is never quite out of view. It’s this focus on her hometown that propels her sophomore solo album.

More about: Shilpa Ray

I can’t believe that this record didn’t already exist. Doubly so that the elevator-length description — “post-punk with electronics” — left any room for novelty whatsoever. Of course, it’s hard to communicate over the duration of an elevator ride that you intend to alter the very precepts of a genre. Sonically, Love What Survives is a sort of light-side answer to the churning industry of the never-quite-dead post-punk revival, akin in its position to the place of Mr. Mitch’s “peace dubs” among the broader, crueler landscape of UK grime.

More about: Mount Kimbie