Songs You Need to Download Now!
Go to SPIN.com for samples and links to these tunes, vid clips, and more

1 Mickey Factz “MACHINE GUN” Bronx MC spits three of the city’s eight million stories—passionately detailing gunplay’s fallout from various points of view—over a remorseless rat-a-tat Portishead sample.

2 Amazing Baby “PUMP YR BREAKS” These Brooklyn scenesters (and MGMT confreres) pile layers of noisy, cascading guitar onto an “aohw aohw” chorus like wayward glam refugees munching ’shrooms. 3E _w3ndless Boogie “STEAK ROCK” Grizzled, appropriately named meta-riff theorists chug and churn and ah-wah like a narcotized Molly Hatchet, with frontman Paul Major emitting inexplicable gurgles. Choice.

4 Tobias Fröberg “BLISSFUL” With tumbling flurries of percussion, yeah-yeah-yeah declarations, and surging chime of guitar/organ, this remedy for a shitty-ass day is Swedish pop at its nimblest.

5 Be Your Own Pet “BECK Y” Left off Get Awkward because it was “too violent,” this awesomely raw, Girl Group strut has Jemina Pearl squawking teen-homicide knife threats at her former BFF.

6 Little Pieces “CANDY STAIRS” The former leader of late-’90s alt-rock also-rans Sunset Valley, Herman Jolly concocts a sugary, lo-fi nugget—acid lollies, anyone?—and stumbles into a garage-pop near-classic.

7 Maino “HI HATER” With a bloopity beat and Brooklyn weed-spot blather (“Pussy so good, wish I could wear it for cologne”), it’s the talk-to-the-hand summer anthem for ladies with dubious weaves.

8 Glam Chops “TELL US, ARE YOU READY, EDDIE?” A cabaret-style Art Brut side project, with 9Eddie Argos winningly debating his innumerable masculinity issues over chintzy horns and handclaps. A _n9dron “WALKING HOME” Spun around by Beck and Os Mutantes as a teen, this 21-year-old singer/guitarist is ow a hypnotic, folky chanteuse who trills “I’ll do anything” and simply melts the room.

10 Radiohead “THE RIP” Unencumbered by their own melodic phobia, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood grab acoustic guitars backstage and treat this Portishead track like a great, lost Nick Drake meditation.

11 Tabi Bonney “COOL AND FLY” Like Wale’s boho stepbrother, this West Africa–born D.C. resident perfects the art of rapping as little as possible about nothing in particular, with languid panache galore.

12 Lefties Soul Connection “ORGAN DONOR” A straight Breakestra-style cover of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing track would’ve been cool, but this Amsterdam collective flip a bracingly funky translation. 13₁^T _w3he Presets “M Y PEOPLE” Aussietronica! A giddy, gay-caveman terrace anthem for husky straight dudes ho aren’t ashamed to dance (with a little Depeche Mode shimmy) for at least a few roof-raising minutes.

14 Vivian Girls “GOING INSANE” One day, this kicky Brooklyn trio may actually sound like the Vaselines gone shoegaze. For now, they’re like a faint pirate-radio echo—which is pretty sweet, too.

₁₅ Ted Leo and the Pharmacists “THE WORLD IS IN THE TURLE T” A stunning, cheekily end-of-days punk rant, written on the spot in collaboration with WFMU’s The Best Show.

T _Ch_lae_uG_se_et Out “ Paper” Unable to afford a proper video, these rockers played their single in front of 80 closed-circuit security cameras on buses and escalators, in crosswalks and parks around Manchester, then requested the footage—as is their right under the U.K.’s Data Protection Act. With some editing, the band then crafted a disquieting statement on the demise of privacy.

Chikita Violenta “Laydown” Filming your whole family grooving to your song is pretty cute. Editing footage of your family from the ’70s to look as if they’re now lip-synching your song enhances the novelty. But mixing the two into a generation-spanning holiday party takes the cuteness and novelty and blows it up like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, only instead of being evil, he just wants to dance.

Gnarls Barkley “Going On” A determined young man and his friends dance through a concrete-and-dust Jamaican town on their way to a secret multidimensional portal. As Cee-Lo narrates their leader’s single-minded willingness to “go it alone,” the dancers tire in the sun and fall behind. One loyal lady presses on with her man to the “sacred destination,” but will she follow him through the vortex? Or rather, should she?

Man Man “Mister Jung Stuffed” Man Man’s Halloween-y la-las and cartoon-doom bass line soundtrack this animated story of woe, in which a guy ferries his girl a drink past a talking hamburger, crying beauty queen, and Sally Jesse Raphael, only to discover a betrayal of the seediest sort. The force of his rage melts skin from bone, and he falls into a psychedelic underworld where he braves far worse to find her again.