Imagine if Sonic Youth's noisy classic "Teen Age Riot" had been written by actual teenagers — high on hormones, petulant, giddy. That's what you get from this L.A. art-punk duo, whose 2008 breakthrough, Nouns, turned SY's oceanic drone into blurry bubblegum. Their third album is their most conventionally songful. "Glitter" roughs up Toni Basil's "Mickey" beat, and the plaintive, acoustic "Chem Trails" tries its hand at romance. It's a disconsolate vision of love, but also a welcome change of pace.

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”