Passion Pit's 2009 debut was a hog pile of neon dance beats and helium-falsetto hooks, undercut by Michael Angelakos' endearingly heartsick lyrics. Their second disc is roomier and more varied: "Carried Away" packs an afternoon of early-Eighties MTV into three minutes, and "Take a Walk" sets lyrics about the Great Recession to stomping disco pop, displaying Angelakos' gift for making pain feel like pleasure.

Listen to "Take a Walk":

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“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.”