When you really think about it, year end lists don’t always have to be so utterly timely. Or at least we don’t think so. Which is probably why we start making our year end lists roughly around the third week of January.

Usually, those lists incubate on a ledger pad or within a playlist. This year, though, we’re rethinking the process: As we officially enter mid-year, we plan on sharing one album a day that we think is among the best that 2010 has had to offer. We’ll add a new album every day in July and, each Monday, we’ll be looking deeper at the story behind some of our choices.

One thing to note, none of these albums are ranked. (We’ll save that for December.) Instead, consider this our way of saying that, for the next 31 days (and hopefully beyond), these records deserve your undivided attention.

This arty English outfit appeared in 2008 with Antidotes, a bracingly funky slab of precision-geared dance-punk that suggested Foals might be the death-disco band to beat. On their sophomore set, Total Life Forever, singer-guitarist Yannis Philippakis and his bandmates push past that modest, if admirable, goal on their way to becoming something bigger and more unruly: Think TV on the Radio for Brits, perhaps, or Talking Heads for kids who live in punk houses. Rather awesomely, the members of Foals reportedly cohabitate in a suburban-Oxford structure they call the House of Supreme Mathematics. (Its two doors down from the House of Jealous Lovers.) Yet Total Life Forever seems to have little to do with number-crunching. This is the sound of what happens once you cut loose from facts and figures.—Mikael Wood

If all had gone to plan, these post-hardcore pioneers would have been playing stadiums in 2010, had they not suspended their career in the late ’90s for reasons that still seem unclear. Their much anticipated comeback felt a bit shaky, too: When they re-emerged in 2008, it was with a hokey cover song, a move that virtually any rap-rock band from the early ’00s can tell you is often impossible to recover from. (Alien Ant Farm, we hardly knew you!) But At Night We Live is about making amends with all of that: True, their turn at “Pony” by Ginuwine still surfaces here, but within this unexpected triumph the men of Far stare down middle age with sincere alt-nation rally cries and poignant art rock atmospherics. And, throughout, these songs not only seem to apologize for the history that proceeded them, but also reward you for sticking through it.—Trevor Kelley

In theory, the songs on this scrappy rock quartet’s first album may have come as a revelation to the college-aged freshmen who crowded out a spree of Lower East Side bars to get a glimpse of them when they suddenly became the main attraction at the 2009 CMJ Marathon. But for anyone currently cropping their coif tight around the temples to diminish the gray hairs, Astro Coast probably felt a lot like falling asleep during an episode of 120 Minutes only to wake up during a re-run of Gidget. The guitars sound like they could have been played by Stephen Malkmus. Or Rivers Coumo. Or Dick Dale. Yet, beyond the vintage ’90s indie textures and surf rock breeziness that envelops Surfer Blood’s highly unlikely sound, these four barely legal scene stealers have learned a lesson that far exceeds their years: That being that everything old becomes new again.—Trevor Kelley

On the surface, Nas and Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley joining forces for this stirring collaborative album is a history seminar rooted in a simple recipe: Unite uplifting reggae hymns with introspective hip-hop rhymes. And it makes sense; after all, the former genre spawned the latter and Distant Relatives may be as close as we’ve come to a truly united effort between these father-and-son musical cliques. In its simplest form, the album is an exhortation on the ills of two men’s motherland. Yet, buried beneath is a typically troubled MC coming to terms with his place in the fold (“My Generation”) and a son carrying on his father’s message of unity (“Africa Must Wake Up”). This is one history lecture worth staying awake for.—Dan Hyman

In these bizarre and bloggy times, The Soft Pack should already be a faded memory: When the Pitchforks of the world moved on to the next hosanna-worthy buzz band and their original name made them practically un-Google-able (they used to go by The Muslims), it would have been understandable if this admirably workman-like indie act simply receded into the ether. But they cut one of the year’s most irresistible efforts instead; an album made for record store junkies by record store junkies. Throughout their eponymous debut, the San Diego-bred foursome wear their audiophile hearts on their sleeves, borrowing some furiously strummed minor chords from Peter Buck, those steely middle-eastern guitar lines from “Killing An Arab” and the rockabilly struts that John Doe excelled at once he began wearing satin Western shirts. But somehow, it still sounds so remarkably like them.—Trevor Kelley

If you’re going to trace the litany of obstacles that led up to the release of Diamond Eyes, Deftones’ sixth studio album, the toughest part might be figuring out where to start. Because, seriously—between a near break up, scrapping an entire album’s worth of material, suffering the loss of a band member to a traumatic brain injury and trying to convince your record label that you need more money to completely start over — it’s probably a miracle that this album exists at all.

“There were times during [the recording of the band's last album Saturday Night Wrist] where we could have easily just ended the band and I think everybody would have been like, ‘Next!’” confesses lead singer Chino Moreno, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “There was a time where I was just so fed up of working on that record. I was in the studio every day for months at a time and I wouldn’t even see the rest of the guys in the band. I was like, ‘Why am I here?’ I just wanted to make music that was fun again.”

Deftones ultimately spent three years on Saturday Night Wrist—which Moreno now admits is “ridiculously crazy”—so when it came time for a follow-up, the band was clear in its mission to correct past mistakes. They spent the bulk of 2007 writing an album called Eros and fixing what Moreno repeatedly refers to as their then–broken “work ethic.” By the following year, with a new album nearing completion, the band was reinvigorated. But everything came to a tragic halt on November 4, 2008, when bassist Chi Cheng was involved in a car accident that left him in a coma for almost six months. He remains in a semi-conscious state to this day.

“The hardest thing is that you see him and he’s there and he’s alive and he’s looking at you, and all you expect to see is some kind of facial expression,” Moreno says soberly. “Because you know he’s in there, but when you don’t get that response—that’s the toughest thing. That’s what we’re waiting for every day.”

The decision to shelf Eros, at least for the time being, was an easy one.

“When Chi’s accident happened,” Moreno explains, “it just felt like we could do something way more focused and way more meaningful of where we are in our lives.”

• • •

Diamond Eyes did not become a possibility—much less an actual concept—until the band finally reconvened at their Sacramento rehearsal space almost six months after Cheng’s injury. “It was the first time we’d ever been in that spot without Chi, and it was a weird feeling,” Moreno recalls, treading carefully. “But instead of us just sitting around talking about it—like, ‘Are we going to continue as a band?’—we didn’t really talk about that. We talked about Chi for a couple of hours, his accident, and how we were all feeling. It was a really heartfelt moment for all of us. There was laughter and tears, and when it got to the point where we needed to talk about the band and the future, there really wasn’t much talk. We got a lot of stuff out talking about Chi, a lot of emotion, and everybody just walked towards their instruments and started playing.”

For the remaining members of Deftones—Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, keyboardist Frank Delgado and drummer Abe Cunningham—the immediate aftermath of Cheng’s accident prompted months of self-examination and an increasingly critical look at Eros. It was, Moreno claims, a “very abstract record,” but it was also admittedly unfocused. “The songs would always start out somewhere really cool and then just go off into nowhereland,” he laughs, stretching the final syllables. “The majority of the stuff on that record never really felt like it came to fruition for what we were trying to convey.”

Enlisting the help of Sergio Vega, their friend and former bassist for post-hardcore pioneers Quicksand (who also filled in for Cheng once before in 1998), the band carefully set out to capture a moment—but somewhat surprisingly, they looked towards their early albums as a blueprint for how to do it. “Taking so long to make records is not healthy, and it’s not the way we used to work,” says Moreno, noting that the band spent a mere six months writing and recording Diamond Eyes. “We really saw [1997’s] Around the Fur as being a record where there wasn’t so much thought and pressure going into it. We had a fire underneath us. And that’s how it felt after Chi’s accident. It lit a fire under us, a little wake-up call that making records shouldn’t be like pulling teeth.”

The result is, in fact, easily the most cohesive and emotionally resonant Deftones album since 2000’s breakthrough White Pony; its tension deliberate and expository, more so than detached and bordering on uncomfortable. It’s also thematically engaging. Moreno’s lyrics repeatedly invoke the image of an unresponsive stare—eyes that are in a gaze or in a trance. Their immediate association with Cheng’s condition, he claims, was purely unintentional.

“I didn’t actually come up with the title of the record until a few weeks before it was going to print, but when I did finally come up with Diamond Eyes, I kind of looked back and saw that this was a common thread that runs through the album,” Moreno says, as if he hesitates to admit it. “It wasn’t a conscious effort. Whenever I’ve tried to make a conscious effort to write a song about a certain person or a certain scenario, I just can’t do it.”

• • •

Diamond Eyes has been out for barely three months, but Moreno is already looking back. “I love it,” he muses. “I’m not supposed to say that, but I’m proud of it for a lot of reasons.”

For one thing, Moreno says, he sort of put his entire career on the line to make it. “Financially, we were in a really hard place,” he recalls. “We’d already spent our whole budget to make the record on Eros. We had to go to the president of the label and explain to him where we were at. I said, ‘I want a chance to make another record. I wanna capture where we’re at in our lives and with this band on a record.’ He goes, ‘You guys have already spent almost a million dollars in making this record. If you’re going to do this, I’m going to hold you responsible.’ Like me, personally.”

Moreno instantly agreed to the terms, confident that the last four years of trials were behind them, and perhaps realizing that their love and concern for Cheng’s health had given the band an invaluable perspective. It’s this same palpable urgency that will likely come to define Diamond Eyes in the context of the band’s almost two-decade history. This fact is not lost on Moreno.

“What happened to Chi brought us closer than we’ve been since we were kids,” he resolutely declares, “and that’s a big part of making this record what it is.”

A lot of dudes with beards and neck tattoos probably made albums in Asheville, North Carolina in 2010, but so far none of them were as good as Infinite Arms. While the group’s previous two releases had moments of grandeur, Band Of Horses‘ first release with a solid lineup (and on a major) sees them fully embracing their identity as the indie-rock version of The Band—and from sparkling ballads like “Laredo” to harmony-rich odes like “Older,” they find themselves living up to such a comparison. On intricately arranged tracks like “Way Back Home” the results are stunning in a timeless way, but ultimately the third Band Of Horses album proves that they are a band out of time. “Deep in the heart of the country was a house I built from logs,” frontman Ben Bridwell sings on “Compliments.” Ultimately, Infinite Arms will take you there.—Jonah Bayer

When Wolf Parade exploded on the indie rock landscape in 2005 with their debut full-length Apologies To The Queen Mary, they seemed like countless other indie bands: Just another act with “wolf” in their name, an overnight record deal and loose ties to a scene demigod. (In this case, Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock.) However, even Brock himself couldn’t have known that the band’s third full-length, Expo 86, wouldn’t just live up to their debut’s rampant praise, but in many ways, surpass it. From lush indie-pop experiments like “Little Golden Age” to the synth-driven demented pop of “Two Men In New Tuxedos,” Expo 86 retains all of the band’s idiosyncrasies but this time it’s as a more cohesive whole. Yesterday’s hyped new band, tomorrow’s legacy act.—Jonah Bayer

With their second full-length album, Tokyo Police Club took a chance and actually grew up—a possibility we all feared might take the naïveté out of their self-proclaimed “wide-eyed post-punk.” What we didn’t expect: It’s actually better this way. Whereas so many records confuse “maturity” with being out of touch, Champ succeeds with what feels like a newly refined model: Debut single “Breakneck Speed,” for one, is technically kinda slow by TPC standards, but its earnest lyricism delivers some much-needed reflection to their otherwise frantic canon, while the thoughtful detachment on “End Of A Spark” perfectly captures the sine qua non that alternately drives people to cry or do keg stands whenever “With Or Without You” comes on the radio. If growing up is part resistance and part resignation, Champ surveys that friction with dignity.—Norman Brannon

Damon Albarn announced the third Gorillaz album by saying it would be their “most pop album to date,” and the first thing we learned about this record is that he was lying. That’s not to say that Plastic Beach isn’t poppy—it most certainly is—but it’s also hip-hop and world music and Italo-disco peppered with Albarn’s emotive downtempo throughout. This, in case you’re wondering, is a good thing: Listening to Lou Reed sing over a vintage drum machine or hearing Bobby Womack’s voice on top of what sounds like a pitched-down Giorgio Moroder track is as close to a revelation as we might get all year. But none is more emblematic of Plastic Beach than the album’s sleeper track, “White Flag,” which teams up U.K. grime stars Kano and Bashy with the Lebanese National Orchestra For Oriental Arabic Music. “It reminded me so much of an old-school computer game,” Bashy told the Guardian earlier this year. But unless he was imagining Dizzee Rascal playing Pac-Man at a hookah lounge, he was lying too.—Norman Brannon

Ludacris might be the only artist in the world whose success somehow obscures the fact that he is—as much as Jay-Z or Lil Wayne—a lyrical rapper. If that’s difficult to discern, it’s most likely because he appears committed to a small list of topics that we generally associate with lesser MCs—things like drinking, women or drinking with women. It’s true that Battle Of The Sexes mines more from this material, but it is within this space that Ludacris consistently makes diamonds from ashes—like the way his effortless flow allows him to rhyme things like “Tony! Toni! Toné” and “Obi-Wan Kenobi” with the kind of confidence that Chingy was only fronting about. It’s not that Ludacris needs the critical accolades, but for someone who has as many clever metaphors for sex as Clipse do for cocaine, he certainly deserves them.—Norman Brannon

White Stripes records tend to improve in direct proportion with their sweetness: What makes 2003’s Elephant so arresting is the way that Jack White contrasts his little boy lovesickness with his love for two-dollar guitar noise. (See “It’s True That We Love One Another” for proof.) As one-quarter of The Dead Weather (his psych-blues supergroup with Alison Mosshart of The Kills, Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs and Dean Fertita of Queens Of The Stone Age), White couldn’t appear less interested in such thematic tension. On Sea of Cowards, the band’s killer sophomore disc, he and Mosshart use their freak-metal fury to illustrate dark tales of sexual obsession and religious confusion. “All the white girls trip when I sing at Sunday service,” White sings in opener “Blue Blood Blues.” It’s a confession, but it sounds an awful lot like a boast.—Mikael Wood

The story of Blue Sky Noise has all the makings of another tired rock n’ roll cliché: A promising young band prepares to write their major-label debut, caves under the pressure, and thus decides to abruptly go their separate ways.

Except, in the case of Circa Survive, not only did that last part not happen, the turmoil surrounding the making of their third effort is directly responsible for bringing the band members closer together— allowing them to pen such a complex and cerebral masterpiece. The album, which has become by far the Doylestown, Pennsylvania five piece’s most critically acclaimed work to date, also marked a career high in terms of first-week sales, when it debuted at Number 11 on the Billboard Album charts this past April.

But no one would have predicted any of this when Circa began writing Blue Sky Noise in the summer of 2008. In fact, after six years and two genre-defying albums together, the band—which also includes guitarists Colin Frangicetto and Brendan Ekstrom, bassist Nick Beard and drummer Steve Clifford—were in the midst of a major career transition. After parting ways with their longtime manager and signing to Atlantic Records, Circa had signed on to work with Grammy Award-winning producer David Bottrill (Muse, Tool), making the stakes for their next album that much higher.

“It felt like this opportunity to do something amazing,” Green says today, when reached at his home in suburban Pennsylvania. “None of us felt like we had anything on our records that was even close to the potential that was inside of all of us. We knew that we were either going to make a record that was going to make us feel accomplished or we were going to stop making records.”

That said, it’s hard to fault Green—who had toured non-stop behind both Circa’s 2007 sophomore album On Letting Go and his 2008 solo debut Avalon—for being emotionally drained as the writing process behind Blue Skye Noise began. “For months we would just write stuff and try to give it a chance to grow,” Green says, “and it just wasn’t happening. It was hard for me because I felt so nervous about making everybody happy, [but] I didn’t have the confidence to make it happen. Once you start doubting yourself, and let it manifest in your life, that’s when it becomes true.”

Faced with a debilitating case of writer’s block and reeling from sizeable personal travails—Green’s wife miscarried twice during the process of writing Blue Sky Noise—the singer’s anxiety escalated to the point that he sought out professional help.“I drove myself to the Corrections Center at Doylestown Hospital and was like, ‘I’ve been thinking about killing myself an unhealthy amount of times,’” Green recalls. “People think about that shit constantly and it’s a normal thing. But I was definitely going through an unhealthy amount of self-loathing.

“[But being in the hospital] inspired me a lot,” he is quick to add. “I was doing therapy every day, all day long, and seeing and hearing some of the weirdest fucking shit I have ever seen or heard. It was a truly amazing experience for my mental well-being.”

Once he left the clinic, Green started to look at the band’s next album with fresh eyes. He insists that one turning point was when Frangicetto brought in the song ‘I Felt Free,’ a heart-wrenching take on personal renewal engulfed in a sea of languid guitars,  sending its inspirational chorus skyward.

“We started playing that [song],” Green recalls, “and being able to sing his lyrics and love them and believe in them—it reminded me of why we do this. Seeing him love that [song] reminded me that [writing] wasn’t as complicated as I was making it out to be.”

In other words, the song lived up to its title.

• • •

Looking back on the past few years, Green remains thankful that his bandmates and family stood by him—and claims that the experiences he went through during the making of Blue Sky Noise helped tighten the bonds in his life. “We’re a completely different band now than we were on our first two albums,” Green clearly proud of this statement. “We communicate differently and we’re constantly working on our relationship.”

“It’s like my marriage in that sense: Sometimes you come up against super huge barriers, but it’s how you manage to get around, or through, or over those barriers that ultimately determines if your relationship works or not.”

These days Green is in a far healthier place when it comes to both his music and his state of mind—a far cry from the trying times that went into what may end up being his band’s defining album. “When I listen back to the record there isn’t one thing I would want to change,” he says. “I couldn’t be in a better place. Today is the most beautiful day I can remember in months. The weather’s perfect. We practiced a little bit this afternoon. My wife and I got lunch. I went home and played guitar and now I’m doing this interview.

“Shit is good.”

We’re hardly in the business of recommending divorce to anyone, but there’s no denying the inspiration Usher clearly took in ending his marriage between 2008’s Here I Stand and this year’s Raymond V. Raymond: Where the earlier album was bogged down in reflective slow jams about domestic life, this follow-up moves quickly from one sex-drenched club track to the next, re-introducing the R&B mack daddy who’s been quickening pulses since “You Make Me Wanna.” (Possible alternate title for this thing: Lady’s Man v. Lady’s Man.) Amongst the heavy-breathers—including his recent number-one hit, “OMG”—Usher does slip in “Papers,” a surprisingly frank depiction of his pre-divorce mindset. But then it’s back to the party with “So Many Girls.”—Mikael Wood

Brooklyn’s Yeasayer exist firmly in the post-Animal Collective universe of effects-distended vocals, tribal beats, blasts of psych-noise and hallucinogenic textures. But their second album turns it all into a weird slice of glorious vintage MTV pop—think Tears For Fears or Hall And Oates—thanks to the crystalline, theatrical pipes of frontman Chris Keating. Each of Odd Blood’s 10 tracks are monumentally deep, swirling with polyrhythms gleaned from African pop while modern electrodrums pound in erratic blasts. But then it all gets dragged right back into the world of New Romantic pop once Keating starts swooning and emoting like every song is Ultravox’s “Vienna.”—Christopher R. Weingarten

According to B.o.B., there are two sides to the Atlanta rapper’s fanbase: Those who knew about him before “Nothin’ On You” and “Airplanes” became two of this year’s biggest hits… and, well, everybody else.

“Used to be when people would come up and tell me they were a huge fan, I’d ask them which of my mixtapes they liked,” says the man born Bobby Ray Simmons, Jr. “Then they’d name off a ton of my songs. Now, when I ask a fan what their favorite song is, they say ‘Airplanes’ or ‘Nothin’ on You.’ I’ll say, ‘Do you have the album?’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, no!’”

The public’s focus on a single song or two is, of course, the pop star’s burden to bear. (Oh, Orianthi, we already miss you.) And the insanely infectious nature of “Nothin’ on You,” B.o.B.’s easy-breezy summer-love collab with singer Bruno Mars, certainly makes it easy to avoid digging into the rest of the MC’s major-label debut, B.o.B. Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray.

But such pedestrian listeners are missing out on the complete picture of one of 2010’s most appealingly eclectic long-players, an album that somehow finds room for a Dr. Luke-produced power-pop jam (“Magic,” featuring Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo), a straight-up Dirty South rap joint (“Bet I,” with T.I. and Playboy Tre), and a chopped-and-screwed quasi-Vampire Weekend cover (“The Kids,” featuring Janelle Monáe). That doesn’t even include “Airplanes,” in which Hayley Williams of Paramore shows up as the unlikeliest hip-hop hook girl since Dido graced Eminem’s “Stan.”

“The eclectic feel of Bob’s record is, to me, a good example of what a versatile artist he is,” says Williams, who adds, “I like to be a part of music I believe in. It wouldn’t matter if it was hip-hop, punk or country. ‘Airplanes’ is just a good song.”

Indeed, what’s perhaps most remarkable about The Adventures Of Bobby Ray is that, despite its stylistic variety, it never feels like it was conceived in a marketing meeting to scoop up a sort of broad-spectrum demographic—in other words, to be all things to all consumers. B.o.B. sounds equally comfortable in tracks like the emo-grungy “Don’t Let Me Fall,” which he produced himself, as in “Fame,” a Knux-produced banger that samples “Summertime” from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy And Bess.

Atlantic Records’ Senior Vice President of A&R, Mike Caren, helped put together The Adventures of Bobby Ray and he’s quick to add that the varied guest list was a natural result of the rapper’s wide circle of associates. “T.I. and Playboy Tre are close personal friends of Bob’s,” Caren says. “Rivers was brought into the picture by Dr. Luke. Janelle and Hayley are labelmates. And Eminem has been a longtime supporter.

“Considering how creative he is,” Caren ads, “I don’t think the collaborations are particularly eclectic for him.” Next time, then, let’s hope for some cameos from Michael Bublé and the guys from Grizzly Bear.

As for B.o.B. himself, he sees his hit debut as merely a sampling of the music he’s made since he signed to Atlantic in 2006. “For the last four years I’ve been recording, traveling, putting out mixtapes, working online. I’ve been rapping since I was 14-years old, but this is the year I finally reached a critical mass.” His goal on Bobby Ray, he says, was simply to “go with what I felt like doing.”

“As a human it’s natural to want change, and I get bored easily,” he admits. “I’m always making something different.” The rapper’s success this year—among other achievements, “Nothin’ On You” topped Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, while “Airplanes” has so far risen to the Number Two slot—has changed his life in a very tangible way.

In fact, when we reached B.o.B. for this interview, he was leaving a workout at the gym and was forced to pause our conversation when a couple of fans begin chatting him up. “I guess it’s taken some time getting used to,” he said of his newfound fame. “I didn’t think people would recognize me as quickly as they do.”

With any luck, those starstruck fans will soon know him for more than just a couple of hits on the radio.

American Slang isn’t a flashy album and chances are it isn’t going to have a hit single on it—although the album’s opening one-two punch of “American Slang” and “Stay Lucky” is a pretty captivating combo. Instead, The Gaslight Anthem’s third opus highlights all of the band’s best traits without being as derivative as they have been in the past. Earnest frontdude Brian Fallon is all about consistency here, and while the songs themselves may vary from upbeat punk anthems (“Orphans”) to soul-driven left turns (“The Diamond Street Choir”), the record is still surprisingly unified. When taken as a whole, American Slang sees Fallon’s songwriting, and his band’s overall sound, elevated to places where The Gaslight Anthem only hinted at with prior releases. And, maybe even more impressively, this is the one album of 2010 that sounds like it’s actually deserving of the hype bestowed upon it.—Jonah Bayer

The latest major label identity crisis from these former punk lifers has their biggest hooks and biggest production to date—leap-frogging right over their Bruce Springsteen moment (see 2007’s New Wave) to their Bon Jovi moment. Not that this is a bad thing: Everything is brighter, more polished, more immediate and gleaming with major keys. It’s a huge record, from the “Born To Run” glockenspiels to the “I Melt With You” countermelodies. Frontman Tom Gabel has grown out of trying to justify his life as crust-kid-turned-rock star, and has become downright nostalgic for it, shouting, “Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?” Consider this a melancholy triumph for those who currently cover up their star tattoos with long sleeve shirts.—Christopher R. Weingarten

The Urban Outfitters crowd finally gets a working class hero of their own, thanks to New Jersey five-piece Titus Andronicus. Their second album is a 66-minute meditation on depression, booze and suburban New Jersey using only the biggest and brightest hooks of bands like Big Country, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Pogues (and when they get to the refrain of “You will always be a loser,” they couldn’t possibly sound more ecstatic). Frontman Patrick Stickles has the world-weary whine of The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, which he uses to recontextualize Dylan and Springsteen lyrics with a rapper’s mischievous aplomb. The operative word in describing The Monitor is epic as Titus’ soaring melodies meet Stickles’ throaty scream on the 14-minute closer “The Battle Of Hampton Roads,” which climaxes with an acid-damaged bagpipe solo and a sea of madly pumping fists.—Christopher R. Weingarten

“Our headlining shows are pretty violent,” says Derek Miller, guitarist for the comically abrasive, increasingly famous Brooklyn duo Sleigh Bells. “Which is great. We like that.”

Miller is only five days into his band’s first ever headlining tour and it’s already exploding with reports of unhinged chaos. (Hipsters beware: There have even been rumors about actual moshing.) Miller and vocalist Alexis Krauss are bubblegum sweethearts to the bone, cuddly art punks who sing about trips to the beach and getting straight A’s. But with Miller’s corroded distortion and Krauss’s dervish enthusiasm, the deceptively simple sound on their debut, Treats, has managed to define a generation’s dance music as something decidedly more aggressive.

And, yet, they’ve managed to do this without any major injuries. “I’m sort of surprised,” Miller admits. “I recently bought a Jackson, which is a classic shred guitar and it has a really pointy end stalk. I’m sort of terrified for Alexis. Sometimes we’ll run into each other and it’ll be really close… I could easy stab her in the head, but it hasn’t happened yet, thank God.”

• • •

Sleigh Bells’ rise to fame has become something of an Internet legend. After Miller logged four years in the Florida post-hardcore band Poison The Well, he shuttled from city to city trying to get his new noise pop project off the ground. Eventually (and, perhaps, even predictably) he landed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

While waiting tables at a Brazilian restaurant, he struck up a conversation with Krauss’s mother about his tireless search for a singer. Mom pointed at her daughter, a fourth-grade teacher who had once done time in a teen pop group called Rubyblue. And that was essentially that.

The pair spent the summer recording demos in Miller’s apartment and began slowly leaking them online. They caught the ears of director Spike Jonze, who featured them on a blog he was overseeing, and thus ignited a powder keg of hype that eventually exploded around their performances at the 2009 CMJ Festival. The shows resulted in adulatory praise and, somewhere along the way, M.I.A. signed them to her N.E.E.T. imprint.

Treats quickly followed and, really, that’s where things get interesting. Sleigh Bells’ debut is an album that is loud at any volume, an irresistible mix of aggression and ecstasy. The songs perfectly mirror the album’s sticky-sweet title, but Treats actually has a surprisingly literal origin. “I would show up every day with a huge bag of candy—sour gummy worms, Sweet Tarts, just junk food to eat throughout the day while you’re tracking,” says Miller. “It just seemed apt.”

Miller pieced together the demos for Treats last summer in his “quote-unquote studio”—essentially a coffee table holding some drum machines and a laptop. “Alexis would come over and I would just be drenched [in sweat],” Miller says, referring to the balmy summer climate in Brooklyn. “She’d just be like, ‘Oh, God, here we go… ’” As Miller moved from apartment to apartment, he would bring along his low-fi recording techniques. “We didn’t even have a mic. We just had a laptop set up on a big bar stool on top of a bunch of books. That was it. She would just kind of shout into the internal microphone.”

Chunks of these laptop demos remain in the final mixes of Treats—including the “Infinity Guitars” vocals screeched into his laptop and bits of “A/B Machines.” Early single “Crown On The Ground” is identical to the version Miller recorded in his apartment. The raw, caustic, home-recorded nature of Treats ended up working. When it was released in May, it became one of the most unlikely records to break into the Billboard Top 40 this year. “It was, like, a really weak week for music,” Miller says with a laugh. “But I couldn’t believe it.”

Even more impressive is that Treats pushed so many copies solely on the strength of a download—physical copies didn’t arrive until a month later. It was also quite possibly the first record in the blog-rock era to not leak before its official release. “We mastered the record and put it out about 10 days after that,” Miller says matter-of-factly. “Most of the time you press a bunch of watermarked records and then you send them out to whatever media outlets and do a two-to-three month lead-up. For some reason it felt really wrong for us.”

Of all the songs on Treats, the one that has been getting the strongest response has been the one that sounds the least like the rest of the album. “Rill Rill” is a sun-dazed, super-mellow, near-chillwave sway built on a sample of the 1971 Funkadelic ballad “Can You Get To That.” And a lot of its magic, it turns out, had to do with the tiny living quarters it was recorded in. “We were in Alexis’ old apartment in Greenpoint and it had these wooden floors that had a very particular sound to them,” Miller remembers. “The vocals sounded so good in there and she was singing very softly, a lot of the subtleties were picked up.”

Everyone from the San Francisco Bay Guardian to The Stranger has pegged “Rill Rill” as a resolutely summer song, a tag that Miller doesn’t deny. “That’s what it sounds like to me,” he says. “Like, when I hear it, I go, ‘Let’s go swimming!’” But, he quickly adds, “At the same time, the lyrics are pretty dark. There’s some weird shit in there.” When they perform “Rill Rill,” Miller leaves the stage and lets Alexis take over. It often turns into the biggest sing-along of the night. “It’s always really funny to me because the song is about youth, drugs, Satan… weird stuff,” Miller says. “It’s mostly about confusion. And I’m totally for people to remain semi-deaf to that fact.”

For now, people can be content to just let the beats and riffs engulf them: From the looping sample in “Rill Rill” to the Run-D.M.C. asphalt-breaking beats of “A/B Machines” to the garage-rawk earworm chug of “Infinity Guitars.” Miller will be the first to admit that it’s best to let Treats soak in and not think too hard about it. “It’s very simple music,” he insists. “It’s not very heady. It’s not cerebral. It doesn’t require too much intellect.

“Keep it simple, stupid,” he says. “That could have been the name of our record.”

> Click here to listen to Treats

If you’ve ever been stuck wandering the streets of New York City in the rain trying to reclaim your soul, then you have already lived out at least one song on High Violet. Despite its inherent bleakness, however, The National’s fifth album is strangely satisfying. Having started out as an Americana-inflected indie act, the dour Brooklyn vets have slowly evolved into a moody post-everything act with a keen awareness of dynamics. Granted, orchestrally augmented ballads like “Runaway” and paranoia-driven sonic experiments such as “Afraid Of Everyone” are still endless bummers, but High Violet manages to avoid falling into the sad bastard music category by breaking up its most melancholic moments with syncopated rockers like “Anyone’s Ghost” and “Bloodbuzz Ohio.” Consider this is a private, cinematic score for whoever is listening.—Jonah Bayer

Avi Buffalo make the type of sun-dappled, optimistic and completely unjaded indie rock that can only come from the impossibly young. (Frontman Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg is 19 and the oldest member of his band is just barely old enough to buy booze.) But there’s nothing young, unpolished or naive about their sound. It’s a woodsy frolic that recalls the unpretentious indie pop of Built To Spill or The Shins mixed with a bit of back porch strum. But they’re also smart enough to temper everything with the cerebral drones of avant-indie weirdos like Fursaxa and Nels Cline. Throughout it all, Zahner-Isenberg’s voice seems harrowingly breakable, which makes it all the better when he chooses to exercise a hilarious filthy streak with it.—Christopher R. Weingarten

These resilient art punk stalwarts continue their decade-long winning streak with their fifth completely dissimilar album in a row. Always rising to meet whatever textures and mystical grooves are floating their colorful boats, Liars have absorbed a healthy chunk of the Los Angeles loft scene that spawned bands like No Age and new BFFs Fol Chen. (Some of the bands members call the West Coast home.) Throughout Sisterworld, they use their insular mush and cymbal-bashing abandon as a ragged starting point until former Jon Brion engineer Tom Biller fills everything with expansive waves of orchestration. But mostly, they paint sunny LA as a broken, dystopia biting its tongue through polished teeth.—Christopher R. Weingarten

To produce its fourth studio disc, this sprawling Canadian indie-rock collective recruited an outsider from another highly interconnected scene: Chicago’s John McEntire, who in addition to his permanent membership in Tortoise and The Sea and Cake has played in and worked on records by a boatload of other Windy City indie bands, including Gastr Del Sol, Eleventh Dream Day and U.S. Maple. True to McEntire’s post-rock background, the result of their collaboration is Broken Social Scene’s grooviest outing yet, with intricate little guitar lines slinking around percolating beats that stretch out songs like “World Sick” toward the seven-minute mark. But by the standards of this alternate universe jam band, Forgiveness Rock Record is also unusually songful, with catchy, instantly memorable choruses and assured vocal performances that don’t just view vocals as one more instrument in the mix.—Mikael Wood

Looking to crown hip-hop’s hardest working MC? With over 30 albums in 15 years, So Cal vet Murs leaves fellow mixtape croonies coughin’ in the dust—both in terms of the quality and, at times, quantity of his contributions. After making the major label jump with 2008’s MURS For President, he has returned to the familiar indie-glory of 2006’s Murray’s Revenge and brought along production partner 9th Wonder for the ride. Always one to twist irony into introspection, Murs stays true to the course on Fornever, whether he’s dishing on his Asian lady fetish (“Asian Girl”), his propensity to brush up with porn stars (“Vikki Veil”) or his inability to fight off temptation (“Cigarettes and Liquor”). And, of course, dude keeps things amusing. Hell, on “Let Me Talk” his LA cohort Suga Free even manages to mix in a “medulla oblongata” reference, which is nothing if not impressive.—Dan Hyman

Let’s be honest: The opening lyrics to Contra—the ones about “horchata” and “balaclava”—are kind of hokey. This is certainly not the worst thing that’s ever been said about Vampire Weekend and, in fact, it might rank among the nicest; their 2008 self-titled debut was probably as viciously criticized as it was canonized. But if we’re going to talk about why this album matters, it makes sense to acknowledge the fact that this self-aware “hokeyness” is part of the reason we love Vampire Weekend in the first place. Despite the critical demand for a demurely reverent approach to multiculturalism, Contra rejects the pretense of authenticity and delivers a passionately nerdy love letter to their record collections—deploying ’80s synthesizers and West African percussion alike. At its best, Contra is the hugely successful follow-up album in which Vampire Weekend’s execution finally exceeds their intentions. And really, if there was a melody in 2010 more blissfully hypnotic than “Giving Up The Gun” we missed it.—Norman Brannon

The teen actor-turned-rap sensation allowed over a year to pass between the appearance of his breakthrough mixtape and the release of his official debut, driving expectations to a level nearly impossible to meet. Somehow, though, Thank Me Later delivered, setting Drake’s post-Kanye rhymes (most exploring the dark side of fame) over sleek melodic grooves. Many detractors—and there were plenty, as even a cursory Google search reveals—bemoaned Drake’s narrow focus. Many wondered how a young, rich superstar had so much to complain about. But there’s no denying the devastating way Drake assays a fraying friendship in “The Resistance,” where even a money tree in the backyard fails to distract him from his interpersonal troubles.—Mikael Wood

When they initially broke onto the scene, Crystal Castles were perfectly happy in their cult-like confinement—dance along to their pain, if you must. But along the way their 2008 self-titled debut became one of the most polarizing albums of the past few years, leaving fans happily swept up in a euphoric dustbowl of Ethan Kath’s eight-bit electronic fuzz, while naysayers were abhorred by Alice Glass’ incessant squawking. It appears, however, that the Canadian electro-punk duo have seen the outside world and taken in its various moods. Palatial-sized despair is still served up on this sophomore effort, but Glass often trades in her processed shrieks for poppy vocal flourishes (“Suffocation”) and trance-tinged dance club distortion (“Not In Love”). On “Celestica” Glass insists, “If I’m lost please don’t find me/If I jump let me sink.” Crystal Castles may never locate a massive sea of people to party with, but they may just find an army of loyal sufferers.—Dan Hyman

The ArchAndroid is at once 2010’s most head-banging R&B record, 2010’s most funky avant-garde record and 2010’s most perfect concept album. It’s impossible to describe what exactly it is, since it seems to be the best parts of everything: Combining the Gnarls Barkley school of genre-smashery with an indie composer’s zeal for tangled arrangements and a classic rocker’s ambitious double album story arc. (In this case, it’s about a paranoid android’s robotic lovelife). It’s 68 wild minutes that crosses every barrier, from minimalist Sign O The Times funk to acid-damaged psychedelic rock, from funk metal swing revival to blissed out Disney orchestral suites. Leading this journey is The ArchAndroid herself, whose voice is just as assured and mesmerizing whether she is soulfully wailing or acting in monotonic robot tones. God bless her.—Christopher R. Weingarten

James Mercer of The Shins and Gnarls Barkley member Danger Mouse first joined forces in 2009 for a track on Dark Night Of The Soul, Danger Mouse’s multimedia project with David Lynch (as well as the recently deceased Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse). Yet the duo’s self-titled debut as Broken Bells suggests that these two psych-pop adventurists have been working together for years: It’s a sweetly laidback slice of retro-tinged songcraft, with Mercer’s twisty-turny indie rock melodies (and his lyrics about ghosts inside and trips to nowhere) set against his partner’s understatedly funky electro-folk arrangements. (Think Beck circa Mutations and you’re getting close.) Their collaboration yielded an appealingly modest record: Broken Bells’ first album probably won’t change your life. But it’s virtually guaranteed to brighten it a bit.—Mikael Wood

God bless LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy for having his existential crises on record, so all us aging hipsters can feel better about our own. His third album is essentially a self-vivisecting relationship record for people so jaded that break ups are more annoying than heartbreaking. Crossing the coolest, most euphoric lines of new wave, post-punk, disco and house, Murphy turned his feel-bad existence into a feel-good triumph. As he continues to endure the slow slog of losing his edge and watching everyone get younger, he just wants to feel alive through dancing or sex—or whatever. This Is Happening’s reoccurring mantra is take me home, which Murphy pleads in some variation on four different songs. One place he goes for comfort is Eno-era David Bowie records, which he gently pillages for their enveloping guitars, moody croon and washed out studio tricks. Although, come to think of it, his version of “Heroes” would be framed as a seven-minute disco edit full of comforting Kraftwerkian bleeps and a few choice lines about how love is a curse.—Christopher R. Weingarten