August 29, 2012 – Who: Hailing from Brooklyn — via Brazil (Isabel Almeida, 27) and a woodsy suburb of Philadelphia (Derek Watson, 29) — Hunters met in late 2009 while working at an arcade in New York's Chinatown. "There was a rumor they had a live chicken inside the claw-drop game at one point," Watson says, "but I never saw that." The duo bonded during downtime over a mutual appreciation for doom-metal pioneers Pentagram and plotted infectious noise-punk domination over dim sum at the vegetarian Chinese restaurant across the street. Sounds Like: The results sound like a keg/key party attended by the Vaselines, early '90s Thurston and Kim, and mid-'00s Matt and Kim. Almeida and Watson provide fuzzy guitar and boy-girl vocals, and recruit friends to handle the low end for live gigs, which usually end with the pair rolling around in a pile of wires, limbs, broken instruments, and feedback.

June 19, 2012 – While most fans associate Neneh Cherry with her 1988 international pop hit "Buffalo Stance," the singer's past reads like an underground-punk guidebook: Raised on a commune in 1960s Sweden by an artist mother and jazz-luminary stepfather (Don Cherry), she spent her teens and early twenties ripping it up with Rip Rig + Panic and the Slits and dancing in Big Audio Dynamite videos. And in the early '90s, in between putting out a couple more hits ("Trout" with Michael Stipe and "7 Seconds" with Youssou N'Dour), Cherry maintained a close alignment with the Bristol trip-hop scene. Which makes The Cherry Thing, her recent album-length collaboration with European jazz trio the Thing — a collection of wildly diverse covers (e.g., Suicide, MF Doom, The Stooges) — not all that surprising.

May 31, 2012 – The self-titled debut EP by Peter LaBier and Co. shined like a still-wet painting leaning nonchalantly against a grimy Bushwick studio wall. Thick, tense vocals partnered up with terminally cool darkwave grooves on Psychobuildings' first release, and the effect was claustrophobic and fun, like the final dance party before everyone drinks the Kool-Aid. But with "Wonderchamber" (which actually is about a cult), each element is fully defined and three-dimensional — every syllable, every note stretched to its full potential, adding an irresistible and disturbing brightness to the "vibrant hell" being described. It's the second single off the collective's Hearts EP, out June 26 on WonderSound, but you can hear it here now:

May 24, 2012 – Since the early 1970s, punk godmother Patti Smith has served as the guardian of an idiosyncratic — and meandering — brand of artistry. After releasing four critically acclaimed albums (including her seminal 1975 debut, Horses), Patti Smith headed to Michigan with her husband, MC5's Fred "Sonic" Smith, for a quiet, 15-year stretch of family time. "I'm not career bent," she says. And this "strategy" seems to have worked out well for her, as she's earned, in the past five years, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids. Smith may have turned 65 last year, but she is far from retiring.

May 3, 2012 – Even during the raucous college-party days of their birth in 2006 in Syracuse, New York, Ra Ra Riot has always folded heartrending strings and yearning new-wave vocals into their restless indie-pop symphonies. Similarly, the now Brooklyn-based quintet has had more than its fair share of ecstasy and tragedy. An early CMJ performance and a particularly impressive opening gig for Art Brut prompted SPIN to tout them as "one of the best young bands we've heard in a really long time." Two months later, they were mourning the death of their 22-year-old drummer, John Pike. This past February, cellist Alexandra Lawn left the band on amicable terms, which led to a bittersweet back and forth on the band's Tumblr. And six weeks ago, the remaining core quartet headed south to Sweet Tea, the legendary Oxford, Mississippi recording studio that counts the Hives and Wavves among its previous clients.

April 18, 2012 – Within the first frenetic minute of "The Best," Starring fold a delay bubble into a Farfisa freak-out into a Neu!-ish buildup and shove everything inside a tiny room that's vibrating with processed drums and tattoo-gun percussion. Then, wait — was that a jazz flute solo? Like the alphabet-soup title of the full-length album it appears on, "The Best" packs a sundry spoonful of familiar sounds and sweet surprises into a restive five-minutes and change. Perhaps "the best" moment kicks in just under the three-minute mark, when singer Clara Hunter's stoned intonations melt into a hypnotic mantra borrowed from Tina Turner: "Simply the best, better than all the rest," she repeats, as somewhere a shiny pinwheel spins. But you are not getting sleepy. ABCDEFG-HIJKLMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ is out June 12 on Northern Spy. DOWNLOAD

April 17, 2012 – For a decade-plus, the otherwise discreet folkie M.Ward (né Matthew Stephen Ward), 38, has been exposing his undergarments of influence in interviews (his favorite Beatle: George; his favorite film: Being There) and his various musical projects (sunshiny girl-group pop with Zooey Deschanel in She & Him; rollicking Americana n his Monsters of Folk super group; his own melancholy solo output). We discovered a few more of the Portland, Oregon songwriter’s favorites on the heels of his first solo studio release in three years, A Wasteland Companion. Recorded in eight different studios in six cities, with plenty of special guests (Deschanel included), the album itches with the discomfort of being away from home, each scratchy layer of road dirt and accumulated wisdom counterbalanced by exhalations of humility.

April 2, 2012 – MEN, the Brooklyn art-performance team led by Le Tigre's JD Samson, is heading out this fall with CSS, supporting four EPs — all released without the help of a label or manager. "The industry just feels like it’s in this place where anything can happen," Samson says, as the registers of an Ohio Value World bleat through her cell phone's receiver, "We just thought, well here’s an idea. Let’s put out these EPs as we do them and see what happens. It’s kind of an experiment. We’re no stranger to being DIY, so I think it’s been easy for us to make that transition." The first EP in the series, Next, came out last month, and features a trio of dance-punk songs on the economy, apathy, protest, and undying hope tucked underneath an image of a busted-up penny, poor Abe's profile artfully scarred. The second EP will be produced by Alex Suarez of Cobra Starship, followed by XXXChange.

March 19, 2012 – After more than a decade of collaboration — first with his NYU roommate in Department of Eagles, and then as a group in the psych-folk harmonic wunderkammer known as Grizzly Bear — Brooklyn's Daniel Rossen has crafted a solo EP, a personal statement lightly dusted with curated contributions and unencumbered by compromise. "There's nothing shocking about the arrangement here," Rossen tells SPIN, but what carries the traditional singer-songwriter fare of Silent Hour/Golden Mile (imagine Jeff Buckley covering the Randy Newman Songbook) to the present day are very current themes of unease and indeterminacy.

February 24, 2012 – Since her 2009 debut, Because I Was In Love, and its stunning follow-up, Epic, Sharon Van Etten, 30, has been wooing intimate crowds with her sultry, honey-crisp alto over harmonium and guitar… and couch surfing. She spent her vagabond time well, developing a taste for fine wines, memorizing lines from Kicking and Screaming, and recording in the garage studio of the National's Aaron Dessner. Van Etten's got her own permanent Brooklyn address now, but she's not getting too comfortable. Earlier this month, she headed out on a tour of 46-and-counting not-so-intimate spaces in support of Tramp, a gorgeous collection of sparse confessionals and wavering feedback rockers that celebrates the simple pleasures — and complex anxiety — of life in the flux-lane. Favorite New Artist: Lower Dens from Baltimore.