The ghost of Amy Winehouse haunts this hit LP, from Paloma Faith’s heady retro-soul vocals, to her Susan Sontag-in-Bride of Frankenstein bouffant, to the lyric “I know a girl who drinks herself to sleep at night/You can’t change her.” Yet faulting a modern U.K. diva for channeling Winehouse is like faulting a punk band for sounding like the Ramones. Faith blends a fierce old-school vocal attack (the Dusty in Memphis drama on “Beauty of the End”) with new-school flexibility (the disco-diva turn on “Blood, Sweat & Tears”). The material, featuring production by U.K. soul vet Nellee Hooper (Soul II Soul), could be more memorable, but give her time: Winehouse took a while to ramp up, too.

Listen to 'Fall to Grace'

“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.”