Beach House rec­ords live up to their name: They're cozy retreats where you can curl up in warm, droning, reverb-drenched tunes and watch jellyfish bob in the surf. But on Bloom, the Baltimore duo's fourth album, there's a bitch of a storm blowing in. "What comes after this momentary bliss/The consequence," wonders siren Victoria Legrand on the opener, "Myth." What comes after is wasted parents, shaking walls, specters of death and things that "Make us suffer/Like no other." Bartender, another sea breeze! Yet the melodies, guitar­scapes and thrift-shop organ swells make for exquisite comfort. When Legrand chants, "It's a strange paradise," near the end, it's hard not to agree.

Listen to Beach House's 'Bloom':

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“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"