The Futureheads - The Chaos

Producers David Brewis, of Field Music, and Martin Glover Youth, let them get on with what they do best, packing the energy densely into these songs like dark matter. The title track is full of oblique references to society’s woes and the refrain. They are made of the sort of hooks that snare themselves in your brain for weeks and then make themselves so at home you’ll feel like they’ve been around for year. – DrownedinSound

Music Go Music - Expressions

They understand how to make the sort of pop music that bridges the generation gap, what is best about the Californian trio is that they do it without even a whiff of irony. The key however, is Gala Bell’s voice and the delights it brings, which boast hooks and melodies galore, the sort that lodge themselves in your head for days, using your brain as a dancefloor. - DrownedinSound

Surfer Blood - Astro Coast

It’s a great guitar album like Weezer’s Blue Album, Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret, or, more recently, Japandroids’ Post-Nothing. Its snowblind-ish reverb is still disorienting– especially contrasted with its crisp, power-chord hook. Topics of concern include confusion about romance, confusion about friendship, confusion about the future, confusion about religion. But ambition can just as easily manifest itself as a desire to create a relentlessly catchy, “classic indie” album. - Pitchfork

To Rococo Rot - Speculation

German trio To Rococo Rot build from subtle static drone to thick bass dribbles before introducing Faust’s Jochen Irmler, playing his sad, swirling self-made organ. Now on their eigth album, they have developed their template of post-rock instrumentation augmented by electronica flourishes. – DrownedinSound

Delorean - Subiza

Delorean helped define the bright, beachside vibe of last summer’s indie landscape, but they also deserve to be placed in a broader context. On their new album, Subiza, the Spanish four-piece deploys the build-and-burst tempos of 90s house and techno music, and they do so explicitly, never shying away from arms-in-the-air piano bridges or incandescent raves. This music is proudly informed by the resiliency and vigor of classic club music, and its title (named after the Basque town in which the album was recorded) recalls the famously nightclub-centric Ibiza and the Balearic dance music that originated there. - Pitchfork

Dr. Dog - Shame, Shame

If their previous album, Fate was Mercury Rev, all rural imagery and natural wonder, then Shame, is The Flaming Lips, a little more vibrant in colour and mystical in its outlook, with its woozy, looping keyboards and strained, reedy vocals giving the song a beautifully wistful mood. Built around looping, fluid basslines and loose, expressive drums, songs range from delicate and dreamy, to gruff and bluesy. - DrownedinSound

Caribou - Swim

In his decade-long career, Dan Snaith has fluidly moved between genres like folktronica, shoegaze, krautrock, and 1960s sunshine pop, assimilating their most familiar traits until they’re practically in his DNA. His albums have felt warm, loose, and ecstatic (especially 2003′s still-career-best Up in Flames), Swim, is even heavier on the precise sonic detail, and it’s all the more impressive for it. - Pitchfork

The Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme

The Radio Dept. have the kind of surreal trip-hop bounce of latter-day Blur, another group once tagged as indebted to the ghosts of shoegaze past, JAMC-Joy Division. It nestles down on a beautiful bed of gently picked guitars before a sample cuts in. Gears swiftly shift gorgeously creating more modernistic instrumentation, which could be one of Belle and Sebastian’s mellower jams. – Popmatters

The Goldheart Assembly - Wolves and Thieves

They strive to write conventional pop songs, while descending into a slightly sinister web of high-pitched laughter, and the whole of the album is brushed with this sense that a mass of ideas are being crammed into the space of 12 songs. Delights in finding new paths for their ideas is best found on the ‘Engraver’s Daughter’. Starting as a sparse acoustic strum, it soon picks up pace and starts to glide down a sunkissed American highway like a long-lost Seventies rock classic. – DrownedinSound