June 7, 2012 – Radiant Baltimore dream-poppers Beach House have simultaneously announced a tour called "Frightened Eyes" and a new video, but the two don't necessarily appear to be related. In fact, the video for "Lazuli," one of many highlights on Beach House's slowly unfurling latest album, Bloom, in a weird way gives us another revealing way of approaching a song that can be as intense and yet ultimately impenetrable as the striking blue gem stone of its title. Here "Lazuli" is set against shadowy visuals of three strangers whose lives converge, via a set of supernatural circumstances, in a psychedelic, outer-space realm where Beach House is, of course, performing. Though not "frightening," the clip is definitely eerie, in keeping with director Allen Cordell's similarly bizarre video for "Walk in the Park," off of previous album Teen Dream.

June 7, 2012 – Supreme Cuts are based in Chicago, but it's decidedly present-day Chicago, complete with broadband and constant wireless access. Oh, for sure, DJs-producers Mike Perry and Austin Kjeultes draw on hometown influences: footwork music's staccato percussion, post-rock's precisely textured ambience, hip-hop's bone-rattling bass — hell, the duo's closest peers might be another forward-thinking Windy City electronic R&B two-piece, the-Drum.

June 6, 2012 – Even Lil Wayne should have no reason to grumble about this one. A lot of the discussion of The-Dream's latest collaboration with rapper Pusha T has understandably focused on their previous team-up, the Notorious B.I.G.-sampling beef launcher "Exodus 23:1," where the artist and featured guest roles were reversed. On the recently surfaced "Dope Bitch," however, R&B killa Terius Nash and the former Clipse half are both on their own familiar ground. (There's been no official word on whether this will appear on the-Dream's long-delayed Love IV MMXII.) Almost too familiar, but then, you could lob that same accusation at almost any of the-Dream's brilliantly blue slow jams or Clipse's virtuosic coke narratives — and still miss the point. The-Dream, who has shamelessly indulged his yen for R.

June 6, 2012 – Kanye West has unleashed the deceptively minimalist video for his recent G.O.O.D. Music single "Mercy," which seems likely to show up on his imprint's upcoming Cruel Summer compilation. As with the track itself, the visuals at first might not appear to involve anything flashy — just West with collaborators Big Sean, Pusha T, and 2 Chainz, all lurking about and looking chic in stark black-and-white. But there's one big exception: If the highlight of the audio is the moment where the synths lift off right before West's laconic verse, then that's where the video peaks, too — watch closely, or you'll miss two Wests lip-syncing for the price of one! Then guest rapper of the moment 2 Chainz steps up to bring the muscular, dancehall-tinged trunk-rattler home.

June 6, 2012 – Music and celebrity can be a volatile mix. Taylor Swift first caught listeners' ears with her sharply communicative storytelling and instantly hummable melodies, but by the time of 2010's heart-tugging Speak Now, she was also the woman who Kanye West famously interrupted at an awards show; the hinted tabloid references on the album risked preventing the songs from taking on a life of their own.

June 6, 2012 – "Coming into her own" might be the phrase that would come to mind about the tracks we've heard so far from Fiona Apple's first new album in seven years, if the singer-songwriter hadn't already established herself so definitively in her past work. Like the outro of a great song, our previews of Apple's June 19 LP bring together familiar pieces but cast them in a new light: "Every Single Night" takes her familiar inner turmoil and instrumental intricacy and triumphantly determines there's no conflict between the two, while "Werewolf" sumptuously details what sounds like a crumbling relationship and emerges with an uncanny serenity. "Anything We Want," which quietly surfaced as a New York Times related link a few days ago and has now hit YouTube, revels in the unruly sexuality that the music business once seized upon in a then-teenage Apple (read Fiona Apple's Return: Idle No More).

June 6, 2012 – Oxford, Mississippi, is home to Ole Miss, William Faulkner's fiction, and Fat Possum Records, but Dent May just might convince you it's a beach town. On 2009 debut album The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele, the Oxford-based singer-songwriter's indie-pop croon and wry exotica evoked a '50s or '60s tiki party. For his second album on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label, Do Things, due out on June 12, May brings his dry wit to a more contemporary vacation-postcard genre, with gorgeously multi-layered Beach Boys falsetto and funkily '80s-ish electronics that put "chillwave" back in its requisite air quotes (check out the deadbeat-summery "Best Friend" video).

June 5, 2012 – For a stretch in the '80s, Grace Jones parlayed her marble-weight voice, androgynous persona, and deeply chic sensibility into some excellent disco records, helped in no small part by her selection of top-notch Jamaican rhythm section Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. The model-actress-singer demonstrated she hadn't lost a step with 2008's Hurricane, but as recently as an interview that appeared in British magazine the Wire earlier this year, her former producer, disco luminary Tom Moulton, was slamming her as "Disgrace Jones." What a glorious reminder of her athletic gifts as a performer, then, was Jones' big-band performance of 1985's funky "Slave to the Rhythm" at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert on Monday (via Buzzfeed).

June 5, 2012 – Danny Brown has given us all another immaculate reason not to sleep on his euphoric free-download track "Grown Up." First posted online in March, the song sets sumptuously laid-back, organic-sounding production by Action Bronson collaborator Party Supplies beneath some of the XXX rapper's most introspective, instantly appealing lyrics yet. Directed by Greg Brunkalla, who oversaw the New York Times' Emmy-nominated "Screen Tests" series, the video is an equally outstanding work of storytelling. As Brown rhymes conversationally, in his distinctively pinched voice, about the distance between his rough Detroit upbringing and his recent acclaim, a young doppelganger for the MC swaggers around those self-same childhood streets.

June 5, 2012 – Waka Flocka Flame's rowdy, ad lib-heavy approach to hip-hop has plenty of similarities with early 2000s crunk. "People was like, 'Oh, Waka Flocka's the new Lil Jon. All his music crunk!' the Atlanta-based rapper told contributor Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in SPIN'S May/June cover story. "And I was like, my shit ain't crunk, man. This shit gangsta. But I listened to it, and I was like, damn, that shit is crunk, hardcore street music. So I just started branding crunk music again. I just found my lane." Paradoxically enough, then, newly surfaced track "Get Low" — which shares a title with a 2003 Lil Jon song that has since been granted boat-shoes-set immortality in Vampire Weekend lyrics — finds Waka Flocka expanding his lane.