Neon Indian: “Should Have Taken Acid With You”
Houston, Texas/Brooklyn, New York’s Neon Indian waxes nostalgic about a missed opportunity to experience romance whilst getting experienced. The music–Daft Punk-style dance pop rendered with bargain bin synthesizers–suggests that he eventually found another opportunity to drop out. But that doesn’t make this moody gem any less affecting.

Kid Cudi: “You Can Call Me Moon Man”
“You Can Call Me Moon Man,” Kanye protege Kid Cudi reveals that he’s not from the Midwest, as previously believed, but from the heavens. Specifically, the Moon. And what’s it like on the moon? Dark, apparently. Cudi spends most of “You Can Call Me Moon Man” dropping sobering boasts along the lines of “Shit is so damn sick/ No antibiotic could ever fucking stop it/ If you copped it, please O.D.” Other lines–”I make immortal songs for the mortals to cruise with,”– imply Cudi might be getting high on hot air.

Gang Gang Dance: “Live @ Southpaw, April 2008”
Just in case you forgot they were out there, Gang Gang Dance recently slipped a full live set into a podcast by Social Registry (the band’s US label). Because the concert was taped all the way back in ‘08 and is largely made up of tunes from the group’s last record, Saint Dymphna, so none of this is new, exactly. Then again, the way that the songs “First Communion” and “House Jam” are mashed up here with slurry jams, you might not recognize them right away, anyway.

Six Organs of Admittance: “The Ballad of Charley Harper”
In his paintings, Cincinnati-based artist Charley Harper sought to simplify nature–to create an ordered representation of a complex reality. There’s a good chance that Six Organs of Admittance’s “The Ballad of Charley Harper,” with its slowly cycling melodies, is an homage to that sensibility. Ben Chasny uses simple components–an acoustic guitar, some distortion, a single lyric–to suggest some larger and more elusive mystic truth.

Grizzly Bear: “Cheerleader”
Who are we kidding—everybody and their mother has already downloaded Grizzly Bear’s new album Veckatimest, which leaked a few weeks ago, in its entirety. So, it would seem that any official posting of the record’s first single, “Cheerleader”, is sort of a day late and a dollar short. But “Cheerleader,” with its Van Dyke Parks-inspired pop-noodling, offers a little bit of everything that Grizzly Bear’s third record has to offer–children’s choirs, orchestral grandiosity, and dandy falsetto. And if those are things that you find irritating en masse, they’re a little easier to appreciate in one compact 5-minute dose.

Health: “Die Slow”

Los Angeles noise-punks Health, whose debut LP sounded sort of like a vocoder getting tossed down a particularly ragged set of stairs, get a little more overtly tuneful on this new single. In fact, “Die Slow”, with its foreboding industrial synths, clubby rhythm, and uneasy vocals, probably could have sold a fair share of cassingles in ‘94. It’s the best argument yet for MTV to bring Alternative Nation out of retirement.

Stuart Murdoch: “God Help the Girl”
Give Stuart Murdoch some credit for knowing what he does best: wistful, thoroughly orchestrated, twee-pop about young, hip, and lonely women. This song from the Belle & Sebastian songwriter’s long-in-the-works musical, God Help the Girl, doesn’t do much to upend that winning formula. The strings, the dashed hopes, and the necessary kitchen-sink-drama lyrics are all there, only now there’s a real-life hipster-woman belting it out, instead of Murdoch.

Kid Cudi feat. Kanye West, Common, Lady Gaga: “I Poke Her Face”
Kid Cudi’s latest leak finds him rapping alongside his majordomo, Kanye West, and, annoyingly, Lady Gaga, whose bratty scatting makes up a significant portion of the backing track. But rendered into a rhythm track, Gaga isn’t half-bad, and she certainly can’t bring down Cudi and Kanye’s high-brow rhymes about “getting brain in the library.”