April 5, 2012 – Just in time for Passover, Brent Knopf's Ramona Falls has unveiled a fidgety, guitar-scraped piano-rocker that evokes the holiday's Moses-era origins. "I put the lamb's blood on my door," the former Menomena member intones earnestly on "Sqworm," from Prophet, due May 1 on Barsuk. The album is Ramona Falls' second, but the first since Knopf left Menomena to focus on his new band, which notably includes new Menomena member Paul Alcott on drums. The previous Prophet track to surface, "Spore," was stately, universe-contemplating indie-pop that also served as a fanfare for Knopf's leap into the great post-Menomena unknown: "Ready or not, here I come," Knopf sang. "Sqworm" takes on a darker edge, with jarring rhythms, abrasive guitars, and creepily low-pitched backing vocals.

April 5, 2012 – Jimmy Tamborello, a.k.a. Dntel, is probably best known for the kaleidoscopic digital tapestries of laptop beats and indie-pop earnestness he pioneered in the early 2000s with the Postal Service. When not reissuing this format's 2001 breakthrough, Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities, Tamborello has quietly continued to release Dntel remixes of a more fragmented nature, for the likes of Swedish popster Lykke Li and San Antonio producer Ernest Gonzalez.

April 5, 2012 – "Sixteen Saltines" is the more muscular, rock-oriented song out of the two that have emerged — in non-balloon form, at least — from Jack White's April 24 solo debut Blunderbuss. But in the song's new AG Rojas-directed video, he's as much the passive victim as he is in the mellow advance track "Love Interruption," in which the former White Stripes frontman sings of being bitten, stabbed, and having his mouth split open. This time, it's actually much worse: His hands are bound with rope, and a tribe of feral, depraved youths, at least one of whom somehow possesses the ability to fly, are about to — well, we won't spoil it.

April 5, 2012 – Move over, Kanye West. Make way for ... Kanye West? As Yeezy's G.O.O.D. Music label gets set to release a new single, "Mercy," on Friday, April 6 — which also happens to be the actual Good Friday holiday — the hip-hop heavyweight has let slip a new collaboration with well-connected Florida shouter DJ Khaled. "Theraflu," which features extra tags and bombastic sound effects to let you know it premiered via Hot 97's Funkmaster Flex, is aggressively seething enough to withstand all the additional cacophony. Set to ominous beeps and crunk-echoing thuds, in the dark-twisted royal mode of "Niggas in Paris," the track allows West to fume, boast, and confess as only he can, without even a hook to interrupt him.

April 4, 2012 – "I don't know which me that I love," Marilyn Manson groans on stomping industrial rocker "No Reflection," from May 1 album Born Villain. Directed by The Killing Room cinematographer Lukas Ettlin, the song's new video shows Manson in two guises, one the leather-clad frontman performing with his band, the other a less-made-up Manson in austere suit, sharing wine with several younger women at a dinner table. Suddenly, the table levitates, the women start vomiting up something like bile, Austere Marilyn looks deeply sad, and it seems unlikely any of his female companions have survived. As with Shia LaBeouf's visuals for Born Villain's title track, the video is sumptuously stylized and deeply creepy — a harbinger of what to expect on Manson's first tour since 2009?

April 4, 2012 – Too often overlooked in the discussion of Sweden's elegantly wasted, capitalization-eschewing indie-pop duo jj is the possibility that they, you know, mean it. That they litter their crystalline Balearic-house jawns with knowing hip-hop references because they genuinely love the music, and want to participate in that culture the only way they can — by expressing their own truth just as unabashedly.

April 4, 2012 – For Emma, forever ago: "So many days have come and gone," Racing Heart mourns on "Emma," from the Brooklyn-based indie-folk group's debut album To Walk Beside the Ghost, due out April 20 on Movemountains. Oslo transplant and prime creative force Mathias Tjønn's distant muse feels just as irrevocably lost as Justin Vernon's, though this chamber-pop construction's elaborate wash of harmonies more closely recalls Grizzly Bear, Local Natives, or even Maps & Atlases. Members of St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens' bands, in fact, contributed to the album's recording. There's an intricate allure in the interplay between Racing Hearts' rippling auto-harp, precisely shaded drumming, and queasy analogue synths. But the head-spinning moment on "Emma" is the chorus, where multiple voices join in singing the title character's name.

April 4, 2012 – Just your typical video for a Kosovo-born British chart-topper performing a song written by Drake with a guest verse from another proud owner of a U.K. No. 1 single. Rita Ora scored her chart victory in late February with DJ Fresh's "Hot Right Now," an over-the-top hi-NRG dance single centered around frenzied drum-and-bass breakbeats and "throw your hands up" robot choruses. Ora's first solo video selection, Drake-penned "R.I.P." (via Rap-Up), declares the old her dead and starts intriguingly anew. As the England-based, Albanian-descended singer preps for her May-June opening slot on Coldplay's European tour, "R.I.P." makes it amply clear why she would be a good match for the Rihanna-collaborating British softies. The patiently spaced, simple yet distinctive seduction lyrics and lilting, RiRi-like melody have songwriter Aubrey Drake Graham's signature all over them.

April 4, 2012 – Garbage will see your The Artist and raise you one Un Chien Andelou. The band's first music video in five years — for hook-crammed alt-rocker "Blood for Poppies" — reaches back into the last century and then some, taking its textured black-and-white look from classic silent films. In addition to Luis Buñuel's eye-slicing surrealist landmark, watch out for apparent allusions to Georges Méliès' 1902 Le Voyage Dans La Lune — you know, the one with the brand-new soundtrack by Air (there was also a Smashing Pumpkins video). In a Ustream chat announcing the new clip, singer Shirley Manson acknowledged the influence of Buñuel and fellow surrealist René Magritte.

April 3, 2012 – Put them in, coach. They're ready to play. Foo Fighters, My Morning Jacket, Miranda Lambert, and other big-name artists are teaming up with John Fogerty for his fall album Wrote a Song for Everyone, the former Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman has announced. Billed as a "celebration of Fogerty's iconic songbook," the album combines newly recorded songs the California roots-rocker's hugely influential back catalogue with an unspecified number of totally new tracks. One of the albums from CCR's terrific late-'60s/early '70s run was titled Willy and the Poor Boys, but the new record's list of contributors is nothing if not rich with talent.