March 27, 2012 – "Even though I pronounced the album dead, I guess I still wanna do another one," Billy Corgan said this past fall when he announced the Smashing Pumpkins's upcoming Oceania. And now, even though he all but pronounced the major label system deceased, Corgan's band has signed a deal with EMI Label Services/Caroline Distribution to release Oceania throughout most of the world on June 19. The world is a vampire, still. The Chicago alternative rock giants' ties with EMI go all the way back to debut album Gish in 1991. As Corgan has said before, Oceania is "an album within an album" and part of the Smashing Pumpkins' ongoing 44-song Teargaden By Kaleidyscope project. Corgan has said the 13-song release, which he produced himself, will run for about an hour.

March 27, 2012 – Ready for seven-plus minutes of one of Canada's most wonderfully oblique indie-rock yelpers fronting "Finland's greatest krautrock band"? Of course you are! Moonface a.k.a. Spencer Krug (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake) has already unveiled one taste of his upcoming Moonface collaboration with Helsinki quartet Siinai, the sounds-like-David-Bowie, name-checks-Stevie-Nicks ambient-rock chugger "Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips." Krug's latest track with the band behind SPIN Essential album Olympic Games is at once far huger and somewhat smaller: Krug's quavering vocals address a faltering relationship with disarming specificity, but Siinai's spaced-out keyboards and unremitting stomp are big enough for a Hollywood blockbuster (though, it must be said, probably not Appalachian enough for The Hunger Games).

March 27, 2012 – "Another one," echoes an announcement at the start of DJ Khaled's new "Take It to the Head" (via In Flex We Trust). The first cut from the well-connected hip-hop shouter's summer album Kiss the Ring does appear bound to be his latest hit to dominate clubs and airwaves in the warm-weather months. It's by no means anyone's best work, though. As with last year's "I'm On One," which featured Drake's smoothly melodic singing along with rhymes from Lil Wayne and Rick Ross, "Take It to the Head" applies party-starting production and out-of-this-world star power to a hook built around suggestive wild-night-out slang that doesn't, as far as we know, have an objectionable meaning in Europe.

March 26, 2012 – Silversun Pickups recorded their follow-up to 2009's Swoon within shoegazing distance from where frontman Brian Aubert grew up. On the first radio single from the atmospheric Los Angeles rockers' May 8 album Neck of the Woods, that childhood proximity shows in more ways than one. Musically, "Bloody Mary (Nerve Endings)" recalls the way M83 manages to construct the ethereal guitar textures and romance-glistening synths of the John Hughes era into something distinctly modern. Aubert's wistful chorus, meanwhile, alludes to the spooky sleep-over game that South Park updated several years ago to involve Biggie Smalls. This five-minute dream-popper has more live-band muscle than your average chillwave '80s reverie, though the bittersweet emotional state it conveys isn't necessarily any easier to articulate.

March 26, 2012 – If you lived here, you'd be home now. From Dum Dum Girls to Cults, a recent batch of rising Internet-beloved popsters have been leaving Southern California for New York City, but Best Coast isn't having any of it. The title track from May 15 album The Only Place, the follow-up to the L.A. band's 2010 debut Crazy for You, is an unabashed ode to the West Coast that even David Lee Roth or Katy Perry should appreciate. "Why would you live anywhere else?" frontwoman Bethany Cosentino repeats, as she lays on the fun-in-the-sun imagery just too-thick enough. The first studio recording to emerge from Best Coast's sophomore LP (via Pitchfork) is as polished as you might expect, adding a slight rockabilly tinge that brings to mind combustible Midwest country-punk Lydia Loveless as an ideal potential tourmate.

March 26, 2012 – Cool-hunting DJ/producer Diplo is dangerously ubiquitous these days ands shows no signs of slowing down just yet. His recent Usher collaboration "Climax," which also featured orchestral arrangement by avant-classical wizard Nico Muhly, sets a new career milestone of potentially "Paper Planes"-rivaling magnitude. With a new book, 128 Beats Per Minute, due out in April, and a couple of other fine tracks (both solo and remixing Philly band PO PO) lately, Dip has now teamed up with Breaking Out rapper-singer Azealia Banks. The result of the hotly touted duo's collaboration, "Fuck Up the Fun," keeps both Diplo and Banks moving forward at their current torrid pace. Diplo's snare-heavy production is basically all percussion, with a steady house pulse eventually joining the marching-band fanfare.

March 26, 2012 – Pop fans have no shortage of reasons to try to love Justin Bieber's new single, "Boyfriend," which you can buy on iTunes here. First, we'll probably be hearing it a lot: With 18.9 million Twitter followers, Usher's 18-year-old Canadian protégé isn't going anywhere. Second, teen idols like Bieber have proven the haters wrong before: Who would've guessed a decade ago that indie-rock snobs would still be spinning Justified on vinyl (or is that just us)? Third, the kid has the ability to command top-flight talent: The guest list for his follow-up to 2010's My World 2.0 expected to include everyone from Pharrell, Timbaland, and Danja to Drake, Diplo, and more. There's a lot of smart money riding on this guy. We have the blogs, but the Beliebers have the numbers.

March 26, 2012 – "Anthemic" is a made-up word that almost every music critic has probably used at least once. It's a phrase that's especially appropriate to the Arcade Fire, whose records have a particular orchestral grandeur and chest-stirring earnestness that can make them feel like national anthems for the stalwart independent underground: not Montreal, not Williamsburg, but some vague, free-floating confederation of anti-corporate humanists.

March 23, 2012 – New non-commercial radio stations are now one step closer to popping up on the FM dial in communities across the country. Earlier this week, the Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules implementing legislation signed last year by President Obama. The FCC's move clears the way for untold numbers of new low-power FM radio stations, particularly in urban areas where licenses for such LPFM stations were previously unavailable. Sure, in an era of streaming audio and constant online connectivity, the idea of terrestrial radio stations that might reach no further than a couple of miles maybe doesn't sound like much. But of course, many people still don't have access to the Internet, and LPFM can provide communities with an intensely local experience in a way commercial radio rarely if ever does in these post-consolidation times.

March 23, 2012 – Although 4AD isn't especially known for hip-hop, the venerable label's recent signing of woozy Miami rapper/producer SpaceGhostPurrp is almost too on the nose. After all, the once-unlikely intersection between shoegaze druggy atmosphere and hip-hop druggy atmosphere has attracted increasing attention the past few years — as critic Ian Cohen was probably first to point out on Twitter, Midwest nightmare-pop misfits SALEM have been doing this for years now. And SpaceGhostPurrp's vowel-averse mixtapes have been just as much about the type of foggy gloom that has long been a mainstay of the 4AD sound — or, to an extent, that of Southern rappers like Three 6 Mafia — as they are about this A$AP Rocky associate's sneering, free-associative rhymes.