This Icelandic six-piece pull off a neat trick: They make whimsical sound tough. Their debut is full of familiar indie-pop gestures: wintry, finger-picked guitars; lyrics full of woodsy imagery; tunes that swell into campfire-style singalongs. But Of Monsters and Men put muscle behind their prettiness, turning songs from cute to grand, and their dippy hippie-isms – "The forest of talking trees, they used to sing about the birds and the bees" – sound mysterious, and vaguely menacing.

Listen to Of Monsters and Men:

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• Photos: Random Notes

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.