The Dum Dum Girls' 2010 debut, I Will Be, was girl-group rock cut with low-fi guitar frizz. This disc is all hi-fi, sonically and emotionally, piling on Phil Spector echo and Go-Go's gloss as singer-guitarist Dee Dee Penny mourns a faraway lover and a fatally sick mom: "Death is on the telephone/I lie and say she isn't home," she sings, somewhere between the Shangri-Las and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. The six-minute "Coming Down" repeats the phrase "I think I'm coming down" almost 20 times, each falling like a hammer.

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“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"