This duo – Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya and Swedish-born producer Johan Hugo – are so well-suited to produce hipster accolades, they invite suspicion before you’ve heard a note. But MTMTMK dispels doubts, improving on the debut with bigger hooks – see “Rumbae,” a synth-lashed dance track fun (and dopey) enough to fit into David Guetta’s DJ sets.

Listen to 'MTMTMK':

“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.”