If you haven't heard much about the Weeknd, it's because there isn't much info out there on them-- that is, if the mysterious project affiliated with Canadian multimedia collective She's So Lovely XO is a "them" and not just a "him" or "her". Who, exactly, makes up the Weeknd is at this point an open question, with talk of label interest and the involvement of Drake producer Noah "40" Shebib also making up the attendant chatter. But what about the music? Well, at the moment, the Weeknd have three songs to their name: the Beach House-sampling "Loft Music", the syrup-slow "The Morning", and the project's finest track thus far, "What You Need".

The distant vocal sample and hollow, snapping beat that open the track initially suggest that you're in for the type of Bristol-born banger that you'd get from a UK bass-centric label like Punch Drunk; it's genuinely surprising, then, when "What You Need" unfolds into a twinkling, moonlit R&B protestation all made the more sensual by an anonymous, butter-dripping voice challenging a lover's relationship with suggestive come-ons. It's plenty sexy, but there's also a tinge of melancholy to the song, particularly when the vocalist hits the both-sides-repeated chorus: "He's what you want/ I'm what you need", a sentiment sounds as much like a self-reassurance as it does an enticement.

"I can hear everything. It's everything time." Those are the words that guide in the first glimpse of Gang Gang Dance's upcoming Eye Contact album, in the beautifully malformed shape of "Glass Jar". The "it's everything time" line would work as a near-perfect epithet for this band, who once again manage to pilfer from an array of styles and slot them together so all the ideas bounce off one another in total synchronization. But there's a distinct raising of the bar here, a sense of heightened ambition-- not many artists are fearless enough to promote a new album with an 11-minute song, but not many artists operate at the same level of aspiration as Gang Gang Dance.

Despite its length, there's no excess here. Every tiny facet feels like it's been fussed over until it's just right. It begins with a lengthy beat-less passage that leads to trickle-down synth sounds reminiscent of the balmed-out passages of Saint Dymphna. That bridge from past to present, and the slow-build nature of the track, makes it feel like you're watching the band evolve in real time. It's often dizzying; steel drum parts are set to the tug of a dubby bassline, followed by a caustic guitar workout that segues into a delirious house-influenced jam, all in the space of a minute or two. The only anchor comes in the form of Lizzi Bougatsos' peerless vocals, which add some textural heft that makes her sound like she's wandering blind, lost somewhere in the gloriously maze-like arrangement.

[from Eye Contact; out 05/09/11 in the UK and 05/10/11 in the U.S. via 4AD]

Siriusmo is Moritz Friedrich, a Berlin-based electronic producer with a decade's worth of singles on labels like Monkeytown and Grand Petrol under his belt, who recently released his debut LP, Mosaik. Like many of his contemporaries, Moritz freely riffles through electronic genres from house and electro to dubstep and disco, often with a healthy dollop of American West Coast hip-hop influence. The constants are his elastic, high-relief sound and live instrumentalist's sense of comprehensive arrangement (he's a keyboardist and big Stevie Wonder fan), which are both showcased on this ebullient electro-pop confection from Mosaik. The minor key bass drop near the beginning is like a tremor of unease on a perfect day, but it passes quickly, and the staticky chords and granulated vocal samples stay cloudlessly bright for the remainder. The basic melody, infectious in its own right, gets stuffed with earworms: Sweet little vocal ornaments mimicking tiny rave sirens, a robotic talk-bass breakdown, and keenly tuned misfires kinetically swerving up and down. Like Hot Chip's "Ready for the Floor," it's a sleek and well-built whole that whizzes and pings screwily on the inside. You can tell Moritz doesn't take himself too seriously; the melodic and technical skills with which he unleashes this rush of pure good feeling are serious enough.

MP3: Siriusmo: "Einmal in der Woche schreien"

[from Mosaik; out now on Monkeytown]

As much as their self-titled debut was founded under the organizational principle of All 90s Everything, at Yuck's core, there's a simpler philosophical motive: if it feels good, do it. This utter lack of pretense is best illustrated on "The Wall", a song that would prove comically linear if its one-take nonchalance didn't perfectly accompany its main point.  Four chords, a palpable sense of struggle too vague to actually conquer, and brief remembrance of "Web in Front", "The Wall" exists at the point where a jam session evolves into a great song. Yuck is completely locked in here, and they know better than to fuck up the momentum even with the Sisyphean bent of the lyrics.  Besides, the only line on the thing-- "Trying to make it through the wall/ You can see me if you're tall... looking over"-- doesn't need much elaboration with a seemingly tossed-off epigram encapsulating their message-- "It's just the way that I feel." Yuck may be borrowing a feeling, but it's ultimately one they make their own.

[from Yuck; out now on Fat Possum]

Brooklyn-based musician, DJ, and Resident Advisor contributor William Rauscher first gained notice for his Night Plane project with a series of Soundcloud uploads at the tail end of 2010. Much of his work is twilight-hour techno, where endlessly repeating grooves pulse and unravel over vast expanses of time, allowing Rauscher to perforate his basic template with abstract loops and vocal samples. "Parallel Lines" is woven around a slowly shifting trance-like backbone that roots the track in a near-constant state of anticipation. Synth drones and squelchy Roland TB-303-style patterns are phased in and out, while tangled-up male/female voices are methodically interlaced with the instrumentation. It's in those dual vocals that the song picks up its melancholy undertow, making it feel like a paean to a lone raver, lost in sound, willing the night to black out the encroaching daybreak. Rauscher ultimately finds a way to apply the brakes by crafting structure from repetition as the song stretches to its close, with key components subtly phased out and the listener cast adrift into silence via a blissed-out sea of acidic sound.

[from Soul Clap's Social Experiment 002; out now on No. 19]

It's rare that a one-word song title can accurately capture the feeling of the track it represents, but Star Slinger's "Mornin'" does just that. This is the sound of the morning after, where befuddled notions of time and place slowly creep back into focus as you stumble out of bed on jellied legs. That passage back into the world is eased into shape by samples of the Staple Singers' "Let's Do It Again", which begin as murkily coagulated and lightly pitch-shifted cut-ups that continuously gain more traditional form as the track progresses. The journey out of bleary-eyed nausea is held together by J Dilla-inspired beats that drive the track to its clear-headed destination, which is completed in an impressively brief timespan that runs just over the two-minute mark. "Mornin'" is a fitting mood setter for Volume 1, Star Slinger's Bandcamp-released album, but his ability to stretch out a perceptible narrative using abstract sound sources also makes it work extremely well as a singular slice of ibuprofen pop.

MP3: Star Slinger: "Mornin'"

[from Volume 1; out now]

Memphis' Drumma Boy has proven one of hip-hop's most reliable producers over the past few years, laying down sparkly synth sheen and cavernous bass for tracks like Young Jeezy's "Lose My Mind" and Waka Flocka's "No Hands" that find their way to radio and stay there. He's also got a long, fruitful history with Brick Squad kingpin Gucci Mane, having contributed beats to nearly all of his mixtapes, and here he recruits the marble-mouthed MC for "2 Timez", a collaboration with perennially baked It Guy Wiz Khalifa.

A standout from Drumma's recent 2011 All-Star Playlist tape, the track is a lush, atmospheric weed jam that casually fires on all cylinders. There's the elegant production, all twinkly g-funk keys and tight, snapping bass, and both rappers stepping up to match it. Gucci's verse is probably his best since the ice cream cone incident-- despite some recent duds, he still finds new ways to string words together that just shouldn't fit. And Wiz, for his part, is unusually crisp, executing breathless multi-syllabic rhymes that seem glued to the beat. It all comes together so well, I can't help but wish the track were longer-- this thing is smooth enough to ride out for a few more minutes at least.

MP3: Drumma Boy: "2 Timez [ft. Gucci Mane and Wiz Khalifa]"

[from the 2011 All-Star Playlist mixtape; out now]

Radiohead's "Give Up the Ghost", a highlight from The King of Limbs, is an evaporation song, one that seems to be exiting and entering your consciousness at the same moment. They have a knack for these songs -- "House of Cards" off In Rainbows, was another one. Like "House of Cards", "Ghost" is built on a patiently rocking, palm-muted guitar strum. It's a lulling sound, and it's made even more so by the white noise and bird calls that surround it. Over this luminous haze, Yorke softly repeats a primal sentiment that slowly melts into the background of the track, becoming part of its heartbeat. A shimmering, reverberant choir of Thom Yorkes pours in, adding new shades to his bare plea-- "Gather up the pitiful/ In your arms." At the edges of the mix, Jonny Greenwood's little patterned finger-picking figures burble away quietly, and the whole song begins to slip subtly, beatifically, out of your grasp, like a conversation half-heard from a far room as you nod off. The second it has shimmered out of view, you lean forward to replay it, convinced that you were a little closer to unlocking its life-affirming point that time around.

[from The King of Limbs; out now digitally on XL/TBD]

The mere name of Hooray For Earth threatens an exuberance that could conceivably be too much for some people to handle. They certainly played to type on their excellent first single, "True Loves", a reggae sunsplash of chippy major chords and nimble falsetto runs. Which raises a question: Are they capable of acknowledging gloom, let alone embracing it? At first glance, the wildly oscillating synth arpeggio recalls that of the Knife's "Silent Shout", a rare infiltration of pitch-blackness in popular indie circles, and as "Sails" lurches forward, the cavernous production hearkens back to Depeche Mode getting comfortable in arena settings. But the gothic spaciousness gets flipped on itself, fully employed in service of a positive tension that makes "Sails" such an effective anthem. The chorus moves in a manner as surely and powerfully as a cruise liner, total slow-release propulsion dwarfing the encroaching darkness and going ever onward and upward.

Back in his No Limit days, New Orleans rap veteran Fiend delivered his lyrics in a scrambled, pitched-up growl, sounding like a demon starving for souls. These days, though, he's adapted a wizened grown-man mutter, and when he ad-libs between verses, he sounds almost exactly the same as he does when he's rapping. By falling in with old No Limit buddy Curren$y's up-and-coming weed-rap clique, Fiend has done great favors for both himself and for rap listeners, since now we get to hear him using that husky drawl over top-shelf psychedelic rap production like the woozy, cut-up glitch-thump on "Absolutely". It's a weed song, one of many on Fiend's excellent new Tennis Shoes & Tuxedos mixtape. And it's a weed song with very worldly, relatable concerns, like how the hell are you supposed to get that smell out of the cord in your hoodie? But the song isn't really about anything as specific as weed. Instead it's about a feeling-- that sensation you get when you hear an excellent rapper find a groove that fits him exactly, to the point where his voice sounds like it's always been a part of this beat. And when the track drops away into a wobbly little keyboard riff on the chorus, and Fiend breaks out a great little headspun sing-song, the whole world drifts just slightly out of focus for a second.

MP3: Fiend: "Absolutely"

[from Tennis Shoes & Tuxedos; out now]