Hard techno stabs, soft-rock piano, polyrhythmic dance-floor clatter, steel-drum solos, New Age-y samples of burbling water: In Gang Gang Dance's search for bliss, all kinds of unlikely musical bedfellows hop into the sack. These New York avant-gardists emerged from the same early-2000s noise stew as Animal Collective, and like that band, they've moved gradually from hallucinogenic freakouts to tighter song form. Singer Lizzi Bougatsos weaves riddles of devotion ("Adult Goth") and recites nursery rhymes with demonic glee ("MindKilla"). The music's hard to classify, but one word might sum it up: ecstatic.

Listen to "Adult Goth":

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“Let My Love Open the Door”

A peppy, hopeful love song, "Let My Love Open the Door" became a U. S. Top Ten hit for Pete Townshend in 1980, anchored by the kind of repeating synthesizer figures that he'd used in some of the Who's recordings in the previous decade. Although Townshend brushed the song off as "just a ditty" in Rolling Stone shortly after its release, in 1996 he revealed it was about love of the holiest sort. "It's supposed to be about the power of God's love," he remarked. "That when you're in difficulty, whether it's major or minor, God's love is always there for you."