Click to listen to Sleeper Agent's 'Get It Daddy'

"We gonna have a ball/But we ain't got no need for chains," Sleeper Agent shout on their debut. The Kentucky sextet aren't the first band to hearken back to bygone notions of teenage abandon—they're just really great at it. In their retro paradise, Strokes guitars and Pixies power surges bump up against overheated Sixties-rock riffs, lusty Seventies bubblegum bluster and girl-group cuteness, while 18-year-old frontwoman Alex Kandel sings about raunchy hookups ("Get It Daddy") and her restless legs ("Love Blood"). If lines like "And this lust was built in/Straight into my bones" imply extracurricular interests that keep her parents up nights, the band's musical know-how would do its elders proud.

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“The A Team”

This debut track from the then-20-year-old British singer-songwriter has a dark story behind it. Sheeran says he culls songwriting inspiration from "viewing other people's situations," which, for the heroine in "The A Team," involves drug addiction and prostitution that began as a teen. Sheeran paints the woman's trials with haunting imagery such as "But lately her face seems/Slowly sinking, wasting/Crumbling like pastries." "I did a gig at a homeless shelter, [and the song] is about one of the women there. It's her story," he said.