Click to listen to The Joy Formidable's The Big Roar

Love is "the ever-changing spectrum of a lie," sings Ritzy Bryan on her band's full-length debut. It's a fascinatingly jaded notion. But the 27-year-old frontwoman could be praising gas chromatography for all it matters when her guitar erupts, its bee- swarm noise blasts careening into multi-orgasmic crescendos. The Big Roar recycles and magnifies tracks from Joy Formidable's 2009 EP, A Balloon Called Moaning: The multitracked vocal attack of "Austere" is transformed from pub brawl to arena prizefight; "Whirring" gets expanded into a six-minute-plus epic of face-melting, Sonic Youth-ful jamming. The riffs are more memorable than the songs, you say? Does it really matter?

Band to Watch: Joy Formidable Revive Female-Fronted Nineties Rock

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“Tonight's the Night”

The lead cut and title track from this girl group's debut album, "Tonight's the Night" was written by 19-year-old bandmember Shirley Owens, who sings lead, and producer Luther Dixon. The band from Passaic, New Jersey met in high school, first calling themselves the Pequellos. The song's frank thoughts about sexual and emotional surrender was racy for the time, but that didn't stop the Chiffons from cutting a similar version immediately after the original came out. "We were the first female group to write some of our own material," band member Beverly Lee recalls. "We did have some say-so in our writing."