Flyte :: "Words Come Easily"

Four-piece Flyte, purveyors of 1980s throwback pop, channel a slow-drive on latest release "Words Come Easily." All build up and no payoff, the band hollows out the chorus, giving the title lyric negative space in which to ricochet. It's all a reversal: a pop song about the effable, the facility of language rather than the difficulty of it. The melody hints at the opening moments of Alphaville's "Forever Young," but this is a more than forgivable footnote. Bombast is never courted here, a lasting and shocking prestige never emerges, the drums never really kick in; it's just this, something easy to describe.

Wolf Alice :: "Blush"

Wolf Alice continue their assault on the fuzz rock pantheon with slow jam, "Blush." A brittle and slow opening gives way to feedback-drone pathos, singer Ellie Rowsell repeating the meaningless and meaningful hook, "punch drunk, dumb struck, happy happy." It unwinds like slow-dance Smashing Pumpkins, reverb-heavy guitars sluicing backwards as the dreamy Rowsell mummers "happy" like a mythical panacea. Her final indictment, "curse the things that made me sad for so long," this, the last dance of dire times.

The Meaning of Life :: "Laura V"

Brooklyn's everything-is-happening-all-of-the-time dreamy post-punkers, the Meaning of Life soften the edges of the existential on "Laura V." In what could easily be the song structure of a Silversun Pickups song, the band kicks out the windows with break-beat drums and racing strum pattern. The vocal winnows its way through to your ears, ethereal and unremembered, coming on like a lucid and feverish dream. An acoustic guitar provides the texture, perhaps the grounding even, keeping the arrangement level in the background, making the unreal, real. The pick ups are lightning, the hooks gentle, a pleasing nihilism. What does it all mean? Likely nothing, likely everything.

High Hazels :: "Hearts Are Breaking"

The deployment of "to be" as a helping verb in the title of High Hazel's single, "Hearts Are Breaking" obfuscates some of the crime. Who is breaking these hearts, and how is it done? It also implies something of the moment, not "Broken Hearts" or the cautiously prescriptive, "Hearts Break", instead, in the ever unfolding now, "Hearts Are Breaking", an anonymous and complicated negligence. Sure, it sounds a lot like the Smiths, the most obvious comparison for this Sheffield four-piece. Inside this derivation there lies something of the timeless as the band wistfully works its way through lyrics like, "even in skies of different hue/I won't forget you" as plaintive 1950s rock guitars weave their way around the hook. Ultimately, High Hazels craft a mixture of the resurgent present amid winking odes to the past, a balance of time and tense.

Children of Pop :: "I Know"

A big, psyched-out circus tent, Children of Pop's "I Know" slams forward on the back of big guitars and a head-trip chorus, "Take control of your mind." Maybe it's the seeming lack of a preposition that engenders an aesthetic of absolute immediacy, the word, "of" smashed and then lost in the urgency of the hook. Maybe in the spiraling world of the refrain, there isn't time for grammar; maybe there isn't a need. Like the Flaming Lips blended with Death From Above 1979, "I Know" is an edgy and memorable jam, built for the sky and the losing of the self in it.

Wildcat! Wildcat! :: "Garden Greys"

As with their previous work, Angelinos Wildcat! Wildcat!, the trick here is done as a scale model, everything in seeming miniature, an arrangement large and small at once, a ship in a bottle. The snappy and winsome "Garden Greys" roots itself in the band's quintessential keyboards before spinning off into the sky in the chorus and in the final movement. It shouldn't necessarily work in the era of crushed attention and messianic expectations; something so discrete should be ignored, but sounding like a college radio Passion Pit, Wildcat! Wildcat! refuse this calculation, demanding attention and scope without seeming to demand it at all.

Hilang Child :: "Gold Isle" and "Green Arrow"

The most delicate pop in the world emerges from the mind and hands of Ed Riman, the architect of Hilang Child. Giving nods to Bon Iver, early Rogue Wave, and Fleet Foxes, Hilang Child builds a Jenga tower of silky vocals and seemingly distant instruments, all so precariously placed and tenuously settled that it seems the whole thing could collapse in a moment. But it holds together with a specific and gentle gravity, the glittering flourishes of "Gold Isle," a worldly pop song equal to anything in the Justin Vernon universe. Amid all the fragility lies a central firmness, a timelessness even, and just because everything feels like it might break doesn't mean it's broken.