April 20, 2012 – Snoop Dogg, of all people, knows what day it is, and he doesn't beat around the proverbial not-quite bush in his latest video (via Yardie). "Stoner's Anthem," from Snoop's new digital-only Stoner's EP, is a predictably laid-back ode to, well, guess what, with a playful reference to Cee-Lo (Green, get it?) and the mind-expanding revelation that James Brown convinced Compton's mellowest not to cut his hair. Speaking of which, the simple visuals show Snoop hanging out in a yellow T-shirt and a hairnet, smoking, while the gratuitous displays of his healthy stash amount to weed porn. Calvin Broadus might have been somewhat overshadowed last weekend at Coachella by a projection of the late Tupac, but he'll be at it again on Sunday night — all the more reason for fans in the Indio, California, desert to stretch their supplies a couple more days.

April 20, 2012 – Feistodon is here, and as you might have guessed, it's a beast. Feist and Mastodon's covers of each others' songs, available as a 7" single for Record Store Day this Saturday (and featuring some thoroughly badass cover art), have surfaced online, via Listen Before You Buy. Who'da thunk: The Canadian singer-songwriter makes aggressive The Hunter pummeler "Black Tongue" her breezy, bouncy own, albeit with more than her usual grit, while the Atlanta metalheads do similarly with Feist's off-kilterer-than-usual Metals (hey!) racket-maker "A Commotion," seizing on the song's insistent pulse and throttling it half out of its mind. "The grudge has still got your heart," the prehistoric fellas repeat, maybe a touch more sweetly than usual. Match made.

April 19, 2012 – A third installment of the one-of-a-kind music-video saga Trapped in the Closet isn't the only sequel R. Kelly has in store for us this year. The powerful-voiced R&B singer-songwriter and recent Future collaborator has confirmed he's also working on a follow-up to 2010's fantastic Love Letter, which will apparently be titled Write Me Back. "Share My Love," the first single, first surfaced online in February, but its lighter-than-air positivity — and overwhelming reproductive urges — could hardly be a better fit for spring. The song now has a suitably celebratory video by hip-hop veteran Director X, last seen overseeing Drake's second bar mitzvah. Kellz, wearing dark shades and expensive-looking finery, sings and dances in front of sparkling lights, as other well-dressed people enjoy a lavish cocktail reception.

April 19, 2012 – When Arctic Monkeys first emerged as northern England's latest meat 'n' potatoes rock hope, they were easy to misunderstand because their music was so distinctly, defiantly regional. Now, four studio albums later, and fresh off a pair of headlining sets at Lollapalooza's South American festivals, the eloquently gritty Brit-rockers can be easy to misunderstand because they're swaggering too hard to stoop to explain themselves. "Electricity," the B-side of the limited-edition "R U Mine?" 7" the band will release this Saturday for Record Store Day, has surfaced online (via We All Want Someone to Shout For), and it has all the flickering intensity of its title. "Tell me something I don't already know / Like how you get your kisses to fill me with electricity," frontman Alex Turner sings warningly on the chorus, between live-wire guitar riffs and rhythm-section pummel.

April 19, 2012 – In the dial-up '90s, American fans who wanted to own Blur's intermittently fantastic B-sides had a couple of options: Pay import prices, or freak out your parents by giving your home address to complete strangers and asking them to compile the songs for you on a tape. The Britpop legends have since compiled and recompiled their hits many times, but it still isn't easy to find their obscurities all in one place (at least not legitimately). Now, as the reunited band heads into a

April 19, 2012 – Girls will be Girls. The enigmatic San Francisco pop-rock classicists, in between weekends of Coachella, appeared on Conan last night to perform gospel-tinged heart-wringer "Love Like a River," from last year's sumptuously skewed Father, Son, Holy Ghost. With three backing singers joining the Christopher Owens-led five-piece band, this rendition managed to stay faithful to the album version without losing its quavering, still-waters-run-deep emotion — we don't know exactly why this guy gets "down, real down," but we can feel it. After demonstrating why Girls put on one of the best shows we saw last month at SXSW, Owens handed O'Brien a bouquet of flowers and wished him a happy birthday.

April 18, 2012 – "Bros before hoes this time," Charli XCX writes. Last week the 19-year-old London electro-soul singer-songwriter unveiled her day-brightening Supergirl Superlove mixtape, which made room for Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Azealia Banks, Siouxie and the Banshees, and Kate Bush. Now she has posted "the boy version" of the mixtape, which runs from Lil Wayne's "A Milli" to Justice's club-shattering remix of Simian's "We Are Your Friends" en route to Ying Yang Twins' recently Bieber-imitated "The Whisper Song," with nods to the Leave Britney Alone Kid and Twin Peaks. In the battle of girls versus boys, the women might have won, but only because XCX didn't include what she reveals in the current issue of SPIN was her "song on the road" during her first U.S. tour: R.

April 18, 2012 – When the Pixies reunited for their first show in more than a decade on April 13, 2004, hardly anyone could've known it would start a trend. That we've since seen alternative-culture heroes from Pavement to Grandaddy get the band back together in recent years is just a testament to how successful the one-time 120 Minutes darlings' initial victory lap really was. As the second week of Coachella 2012 approaches, with a weirder kind of post-fame comeback fresh on our minds, the band has shared a free four-track digital EP from its 2004 performance in the Indio, California, desert. Hole-influenced scene-skewerer "U-Mass"! Leftfield hit "Monkey Gone to Heaven"! Doolittle deep cut "Hey"! Loudly off-kilter reincarnation rumination "Caribou"! All before the '90s-advancing youngsters from Yuck had even formed their teenage band Cajun Dance Party.

April 18, 2012 – "So long to this wretched form," James Mercer snarls — well, for him it's a snarl, OK? — on "The Rifle's Spiral," the first track from the Shins' recently released Port of Morrow. The Potland, Oregan-based songwriter gets his wish in the song's new animated video, directed by Jamie Caliri (whose career spans from Morphine's Grammy-nominated "Early to Bed" video to the end titles for Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, by way of Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy" clip). Rather than any of the reconstituted Shins lineup members' forms, wretched or not, we see a somewhat disturbing assortment of old-timey figures with dark magic powers. It wouldn't be the first time the Oh, Inverted World tune-smith pulled a rabbit out of a hat. As SPIN reported last week, this clip, which is running on Nowness for 24 hours, originally appeared via Nintendo's 3DS.

April 18, 2012 – "I like Zapp not Zappa," a Hot Chip member pronounces, backed by a down-pitched goblin version of himself, about two-thirds of the way through the gawky London party starters' wiggly new dance-pop single, "Night and Day." Although assuredly said with tongue at least halfway in cheek, it's a statement that bears a little unpacking: Do two brainy wits with broad-minded record collections and considerable verge-of-the-mainstream renown really have that much less in common with an R&B-loving, ostensibly humorous, once-critically-acclaimed autodidact than with the Roger Troutman-fronted electro-soul outfit that helped inspire G-funk?