Lars Gotrich

"Angels, your mother is about to feed you new music for five months straight,"
Charli XCX tweeted in May. "You deserve it and you're welcome." Depending on your appetite for futuristic pop, that's either a treat or a threat.

Maybe the title of the 2017 album Infinite Worlds was prophetic: by the time Lætitia Tamko took these songs on tour with the likes of Julien Baker and Courtney Barnett, the shapes spun out of their ragged indie-rock clothes and became amorphous, with deeper synthetic textures.

Michelle Zauner's songs are tender, but perverse — there's a break in the sweetness barrier that expels unspoken desire with a forceful glimmer. That's what made Japanese Breakfast's 2017 album Soft Sounds from Another Planet, in particular, so riveting.

Sleater-Kinney returned just before everything changed. In 2015, nine years after a hiatus, the trio made No Cities to Love in secret.

Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Bandcamp playlist at the bottom of the page.

How many times has Washington, D.C. endured a Fugazi cover from a touring band? Specifically, how many times has Washington, D.C. endured a cover of "Waiting Room"? Too many times. It's okay, we get it: "Waiting Room" is a jam.

This week's episode of All Songs Considered is a show of contrasts — cotton-candy pop one moment (from mxmtoon), raging punk sung in Farsi the next (from Khiis) — and then calming, instrumental, prog rock courtesy The Quiet Temple. For All Songs Considered's nearly 20 years, we've tried to live up to our namesake and on this show, we consider more drastic ends of the song spectrum than we have in recent memory.