This preview of Vampire Weekend's forthcoming third album, Modern Vampires of the City (due May 7th), roars and clatters like a souped-up jalopy, with a cyber-sock-hop groove, surf-guitar outbursts, hand claps and Ezra Koenig's giddily hiccuping vocals, which pitch-shift from Elvis to Michael Jackson to EDM chipmunk. If you were the bookish type, you just might read it as a meta-critique of pop stardom and its dark underbelly; at one point, Koenig creepily suggests, "You got the luck of a Kennedy/So grab the wheel." ("Diane Young" = dyin' young, get it?)  At the same time, the song simply rocks up a storm, in a distinctly VW kind of way. Sounds like a band that still has plenty left to prove.

“History Lesson — Part II”

The Minutemen were a tightly knit trio, but the relationship between guitarist D. Boon and bassist Mike Watt goes back to their childhood growing up in the blue-collar California town of San Pedro. This nostalgic song's narrative (sung by Boon but written by Watt) details the duo's friendship and coming of age as music lovers and musicians. "I wrote that song to humanize us," Watt later recalled. "People thought we were spacemen, but we were just Pedro corndogs – our band could be your life! You could be us, this could be you."