KT Tunstall turned heads in 2004 with just the power of her voice and her guitar, but the intervening years have found her showing little interest in being just another worked-up folkie. On her third album, Tiger Suit, she leavens sleek pop songs with her warm-whiskey rasp, clawing against the digitized guitar in "Difficulty" and rocketing up the center of the galloping, tribal "Uummannaq Song." Though the album was recorded in the same Berlin studio where U2 created Achtung Baby, Suit's chief aim isn't experimentalism so much as empathy. "Push That Knot Away" may pivot on a pulsing dance beat and a tense, minor-key strum, but its lyrics are hellbent on encouragement: "May you always live in hope," Tunstall coos, as the storm builds behind her. That it can so nimbly navigate such contradictions is one of Tiger Suit's cleverest tricks.

“Time to Pretend”

Listening to MGMT’s breakthrough song, one might interpret it as being about the excesses of rock stardom, but it’s actually about the duo’s pet praying mantis. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden told Rolling Stone they got the idea from the insect's jerky movements. The mantis died, but the two bandmates kept the egg sack and allowed the hundreds of eggs to hatch. “We tried to name them all, but they died after a day,” said Goldwasser, with VanWyngarden chiming in, “But the praying mantis dance inspired us.”