"Ethically, it's pretty fucked," coos Friends singer Samantha Urbani on "Sorry," weighing her guilt over a sketchy love affair before shrugging, "I want you to come over to my house." Sure, we're in! The sexy Bushwick, Brooklyn, outfit sounds less conflicted elsewhere on a debut that often recalls New York's Eighties downtown glory days, when punk, funk and disco commingled on labels like 99 and ZE. Percussion-packed rhythms rule on Manifest!, and Urbani's raplike verses sometimes favor flow over literal meaning – see the call-and-response holler "Van Fan Gor Du," which nearly means "What the hell are you doing?" in Swedish. The band's sweet B-side reading of Ghost Town DJs' 1996 hit "My Boo" is sadly absent from the album. But these guys clearly don't need covers to throw a killer rent party.

Listen to 'Manifest!':

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• Photos: Random Notes

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.