This San Diego foursome's rhythm section was in an emo band called Noise Ratchet; as Delta Spirit, they've embraced rootsiness but maintained that gloomy emo urgency: It's no surprise that their second disc opens with a mordant evocation of 9/11. Frontman Matthew Vasquez wraps his harried croak around folk rock that recalls darkest Bright Eyes, raining doom like a black-hatted backwoods preacher with images of blood and chains. The murder-stuffed "Ballad of Vitaly" pushes rustic miserablism to an extreme. But they've kept some of the noise from their youth: "Bushwick Blues" is a great punk-rock addition to the canon of lost-in-NYC songs.

“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.”