After tearing up the New York post-punk scene in the early 2000s, the Liars reappeared as Berlin electronic experimentalists and L.A. industrial groove things. Their fifth album lays claim to L.A.'s pulpy occult mythos with glowering noise brutalism and evil chant-singing that suggest TV on the Radio as a hippie death cult. Angus Andrew intimates violence everywhere: There are dead-souled stoners on "The Overachievers," and he's blasé "counting victims one by one" on "Here Comes All the People." Some Velvets-style beauty surfaces near the album's end, but the sense of comfort collapses into "Too Much, Too Much," a song welcoming death.

“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?'"