#1 CRUSH

August 3, 2012 – Late-night lover's muck comes to dreamy fruition in this debut single from Los Angeles duo Frank + Derol, whose angel voices scratch an itch somewhere between Ellie Goulding and Warpaint — they're giving us dark moods but reaching heavenward nonetheless. The just-minimal-enough spiritedness of "Barely Love You Too" does their sweet pop melodies justice, while the exasperation of their spurned lyrics give them bite.

July 31, 2012 – Lady Gaga hasn't dropped a major single this year, and maybe that monster void is why pop star Svetlana Loboda has been able to dominate the charts in her native Ukraine lately with her No.

July 24, 2012 – Mashup artists often try to highlight just how derivative pop music can be (ahem), but sometimes, the songs they create can give stars a nudge in the right direction.

July 5, 2012 – You may remember K-Pop chartbusters 2NE1 from our 20 Favorite Pop Albums of 2011 or logging two albums in our 21 Greatest K-Pop Songs of All Time or for being more famous than anything right now.

June 27, 2012 – Stateside Little Monsters, you've been given notice — Lady Gaga was so impressed with how many super-fans were in her audience last night in Melbourne that she debuted a brand-new, unreleased song for them, according to Buzzfeed. "When we did [the] Monster's Ball [North American tour], there would be five or maybe ten kids that would come to, like, 20 shows in a row in America," she tells them in the video below.

June 25, 2012 – "A record is not just a record, records can hold memories," a friend assures the narrator on "My Sweet Friend," the swooning final track on 2012's Europe LP by Allo Darlin'.