Church, sin, deals with the devil.

New favorite band alert: Hop Along is from Philly. Their sound is, jeez, indie-folk-rock-ish? (Like everything else I tend to love.) But listen, guys: this woman's voice. It is unreal. It shouldn't exist. It is definitely made-up by some magician somewhere, because there's no reverb bolstering it and no auto-tune in sight. And it also has a massively-unhealthy-sounding growl in it that seems unsustainable, vocally speaking. Which means: listen to her now. I really don't know how long her deal with the no-vocal-chord-nodes devil will last, but I'm not taking any chances.



Before you get annoyed by the spelling of "Chvrches," think of the internet search annoyance caused by searching for a band spelled "Churches." Now that that's out of the way, Chvrches is a trio from Glasgow that boasts a hugely 80s-derivative vibe and a lead singer with an effortless soprano school-girl sound, singing lyrics that are nowhere near juvenile. Hers is a hard sound to pull off live, and yet, clips from their late-night talk show rounds show that she's up to the task. And there are synths—not as part of a larger band, but exclusively, which makes this an album 80s babies will relate to on almost a cellular level, without even knowing why.

So Beyoncé basically just owned the world last week. She released a surprise album last Thursday, and even though the Billboard Top 200 tallies sales from Monday to Sunday, she topped that shiz easily by selling in excess of 600,000 copies in THREE DAYS. Disclaimer: it's way explicit. So if you're not into that, move along, but realize that in doing so you're missing an album that's epic in the for-real definition of the word. And honestly, seeing her go as far as she does is kind of awesome. Why shouldn't she be allowed to own that? What's not getting as much press: how impressive her lower vocal range is, and how vulnerable some of the lyrics are. It's massively hyped, for a reason. Just listen.

Run the Jewels is Killer Mike plus El P, two great hip hop artists in their own right. Bring them together and you unlock a next-level flow, as they themselves acknowledge on the first (and title) track: "Oh shit, what the hell have we done? /It's alive and it's hungry as fuck/Better hide all the snacks and the dough/It is out of my control, you are shit out of luck." And this pretty much sets the tone: you've got some standard-issue MC braggery, but because it's Killer Mike and El P, it's smart as hell and the rhyme schemes are intense. And thanks for El P, the beats bang and the bass booms.