October 3, 2012 – There was a time, not that long ago, when Natasha Khan would have rather been dealing with crust and filling than laboring over the third Bat for Lashes album. Exhausted from months of touring to support her breakthrough 2009 record Two Suns — which earned critical acclaim and nominations for both a Mercury Prize and BRIT Award — the singer returned home to her native England and decided that "baking pies" seemed more appealing than slogging through another album cycle."It was like, 'Oh my God, I never want to do music again,'" Khan says over the phone from a New York City hotel room following an afternoon of photo shoots.

September 7, 2012 – New album be damned, Amy Millan wanted to enjoy her summer. The Stars' frontwoman, who provides the high, honeyed half of the group's boy-girl vocals, managed to persuade her bandmates to push the release of their sixth LP The North from May to September 4 so she could spend time sunning herself poolside. "We're a fall band," she says from her Montreal home while her 17-month-old daughter cried in the background. "I really took advantage of it because for the next two years we're going to be on the road." That laidback attitude permeated the making of the veteran indie-pop band's latest release. After 10 years and half-a-dozen records, they have nothing left to prove. "We've been doing this so long we were like what's the point? Why are we doing this?" Millan says. "We looked at each other and said, 'Well, we make each other laugh.

June 26, 2012 – L.A. artist Dawn Kasper has cultivated a reputation for bold, bizarre, and sometimes painful performance art — from branding the words love and truth into her biceps with metal letters and a propane torch to slumping over in pools of "blood" and playing dead in highbrow galleries. But when she found herself living hand-to-mouth and without a studio for the first time, she felt like her entire résumé had been erased. Instead of resigning herself to plan B, Kasper, 35, pitched an idea to the curators of the Whitney Biennial that would solve her problem and earn her a coveted spot in the contemporary art show: setting up shop in the Manhattan museum, where she could work, interact with patrons, and store her belongings for the show's three-month run.

June 18, 2012 – The Girls fight is over! Or, at least, Girls frontman Christopher Owens appears to have set aside his grudge against the HBO show to license a cut from his Father, Son, Holy Ghost to the buzzed about series that shares his band's name, just months after directing a Twitter tirade at its makers for copping the moniker. Despite vowing their music wouldn't appear on the show's soundtrack (the exact Tweet: "I wonder what other indie bands' music they'll be playing on their show, not ours.") the San Francisco pop-rock act's plucky love song "Magic" was featured in last night's episode "She Did" during a surprise wedding scene as the mystery bride and groom emerged. (We won't spoil the bizarre twist.) The track wasn't just ambient background noise; a bumbling officiant called attention to it when he awkwardly instructed the off-screen soundperson to cue up the music.

June 13, 2012 – With economies around the world struggling in recent years, the live-concert business inevitably has declined and adjusted. As a result, music festivals have proliferated, allowing attendees to see multiple acts, and promoters to charge lofty ticket prices. But the logistics of these large-scale events — managing hundreds of thousands of people over the course of a weekend, often during volatile weather conditions — are obviously vast and complex. And last summer, saw a startling number of festival-related tragedies, in particular the collapse of at least three oversize stages, which killed 12 and injured dozens of fans. All of the disasters began with the sudden onset of violent weather or extreme heat, but the official cause of each incident varied.

June 13, 2012 – "I sound like a real dick right now," says Spencer Krug. The avant-rock whirlwind is smoking a pre-show cigarette and chatting on the phone from small Norwegian town where he just arrived with his collaborators Siinai, a proggy Finish rock act with whom he crafted With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery, his most recent effort, released this spring under his Moonface moniker. Krug can't recall the name of the tour stop, but that's not what has him worried. Instead, he's concerned about coming off cold, calculating, like a businessman tallying up fans, many of whom have probably had trouble keeping track of him as he's flitted from project to project over the years. "Wolf Parade had a real built-in audience by the time we hit our third record," Krug says of his beloved indie rock band, which dissolved last summer. "There were some really loyal, amazing fans that followed us along.

June 13, 2012 – Even after crafting five studio albums of beguiling cotton candy melodies and teeth-rattling distortion, Raveonettes guitarist-songwriter Sune Rose Wagner, who along with singer-bassist Sharin Foo is currently celebrating ten years as a band, is still a man without a plan when it comes to bringing his seductive noise-pop jams to life. "I have these moments of insanity where I just pick up stuff from people and the world around me," says Wagner about his writing process for the new Observator, due September 11 on Vice, "then I'll sit and think about what happened." Hey, whatever works. Disorganized as its genesis may have been, Observator is another dark, sterling collection of fuzzy guitars and boy-girl harmonies. Wagner spoke with SPIN about struggling to craft the record, a recent debilitating injury, and a decade of the Raveonettes.

June 12, 2012 – Even before she became quirky electro-pop live wire Grimes, Claire Boucher found it impossible to smoke and brood alone on her balcony in Montreal's Mile End neighborhood without attracting attention. But now, as the city's most buzzed-about export, it's become a bit of a problem."Everyone walking by is like, 'Hey Claire! How's it going? What's up?' and I get knocks on the door all the time," Boucher says from her mom's Vancouver basement, where she's seeking solitude before releasing her 4AD debut, Visions (out now in the U.S.), and embarking on an extensive tour of North America and then Europe. "Mile End is nice, but my one concern is it's too social, and it's hard to get stuff done."The pulsing heart of Montreal's loft scene is crammed into a three-block radius, where decades earlier a textile industry boomed. A few members of Godspeed You!

June 6, 2012 – Who: Veteran Brooklyn musicians Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm were between projects (Professor Murder and Don Caballero, respectively) in 2008 when they posted a one-off track crafted for a friend's art project online. "New Flowers," a furious mesh of skittering drums and atmospheric vocals, caught the ear of taste-making U.K. imprint Young Turks (home to SBTRKT and the xx) who offered to release it as a single, thus transforming Tanlines from studio experiment to full-blown band. "The fact that a complete stranger whose job it is to care about music was like, 'I want to do something with this,' definitely made us feel like, if we could do this when we're just sort of messing around, what could we do if we were taking it more seriously?" Cohen says. To that end, the pair took their time slowly piecing together their debut LP, Mixed Emotions, released in March via True Panther.

June 4, 2012 – For the first installment of their tongue-in-cheek YouTube video series debuting new songs from their third album, Piñata, out June 12 via the Leaf Label, Chicago art-rock trio volcano! choreographed a dance. In the clip, Aaron With, the band's singer and guitarist, turns from tapping a tambourine to explain the (fictional) origins of "Fighter," a herky-jerky pop track that includes the line "I wish I could turn my hands into knives." "We had a dance that we did in silence called the Knife Hands Dance, and we had to do our dance in silence because we didn't have a song to go with [it]," With deadpans. "We wrote the song "Fighter" to go with the dance." Naturally, the camera cuts to the group, clad in jeans and white T-shirts, demonstrating the ridiculous steps. "It was actually really hard," Sam Scranton, the band's drummer, says, laughing.