Purity Ring have to date released several tracks from their forthcoming debut album ‘Shrines’, not least the airy ‘Lofticries’ (out via Transparent last year) and the tightly-bound and malign ‘Belispeak’, both of which were much praised upon issue.

Like Claire Boucher of Grimes, Purity Ring are so called ‘pop futurists’, from Montreal and signed to 4AD. Also like Grimes, they harness star-shot synths, delicate girl-vox and mechanised beats – each one a minor ear-drum implosion – to eerie but unmistakeably pop-directed effect. Relative to Canada’s zeitgeisty electronic scene (as also includes Trust, Doldrums and/or The Weeknd), Purity Ring are the straight man to Boucher’s wayward space oddity; less flamboyant stylistically but with the same pin-point accuracy to their tiered and sound-smeared arrangements.

‘Shrines’, which is released on 23 Jul, includes all prior singles (as well as ‘Crawlersout’ and ‘Saltkin’, who I’m fairly sure are characters from ‘The Moomins’) in addition to new preview ‘Obedear’, which is free to download at www.purityringsongs.com

Alternatively, sample it here:

This group’s name refers to what some might consider a significant moment in pop music, since the close of said year marked the end of that thrilling five year period of shiny new pop that was eventually trampled to death by Live Aid, opening the doors for all the over-produced, coke-addled bilge that was subsequently released until Acid House saved us all (or so music history goes).

Though, despite name-checking a golden era of pop music in their name, this Dublin duo actually manage the rare feat of being impossible to pigeonhole into a specific era or year. Their music is built on melancholy waves of dreamy electronics, with emotive vocals and mellifluous melodies straddling the insistent (and occasionally Afro-beat) rhythms. The end result is a kaleidoscope of tropical colour which, strangely, feels icily European in places at the same time.

Like Junior Boys gone chillwave, or Rainbow Arabia remixed by Visions Of Trees, their forthcoming debut album ‘Wake Up To The Waves’ is packed with similarly epic and euphoric electronic music. It’s out on Osaka Records on 7 May, whilst the video for ‘River’s Edge’ is up on Vimeo now:

So, ‘One Second Of Love’ is at first glance the most uncompromisingly ‘pop’ moment (and title track) of Ramona Gonzalez aka synthsmith Nite Jewel’s debut album. Under Wisconsin dub couple Peaking Lights’ direction, however, the original is spun adrift amid time signature shifts and sluggish-sounding production touches, almost as if it begins to play backwards part-way through.

To the remix’s credit, if you consider the Nite Jewel version – with its stark electronic strokes and celestial, choirgirl-ish vocals – to be a little too clean-cut for its own good, it’s pleasant to hear that sharp edge splintered and worn back to a woozy nub. At least, I think it is.

With Peaking Lights’ ‘One Second’ remix free to download via Gorilla Vs Bear, you can then hear the duo’s own new LP, the previously reported ‘Lucifer’, upon its release via Weird World on 18 Jun.

Keeping the Tip deep house for the second week in a row, The Need2Soul and Stop Making Sense nights join forces and rope in a big hitter, Ron Trent, who’s coming over from the States for this small well formed venue, The Bedroom Bar.

Chicagoan Trent will be playing his first London date in five years, and lunges into the foray with a five hour set – him being the only DJ at this night. Famed for his early minimal tech releases – check the sublime Altered State here  – and his more soulful releases on King Street (which you can read about via my ancient review of his Abstract Afro Journey compo from back in December 2003 ), this should be awesome in a decent bar a stone’s throw from Cargo.

Friday 20 April, Bedroom Bar. 62 Rivington Street. London, EC2A 3AY, 10pm – 3am £15, more info here.

At last! An all-new, more modest Diplo I can finally get on board with (no cruise liner pun intended), as features on Major Lazer’s new free-to-download track, ‘Get Free’.

Guest-starring Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman, Diplo and production partner Switch’s most measured cut to date (the second preview of their as-yet unnamed new album) favours nudging dub tones over the blaring brass and bravado of its predecessor, ‘Original Don’. Thus liberated from the latter’s roundhouse clout, Coffman applies her spiral trill to the lyrics of a blue-sky liberation doctrine, clinching such half-rhymes as “Never got love from a government man/Heading downstream till the levee gives in”.

Major Lazer’s European tour is now in session, continuing tonight at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire.

Failing that, here’s the ‘Get Free’ lyric video:

My Tiger My Timing’s return to the pages of CMU is long overdue, and when they arrive on the doorstep with a song as good as ‘Wasteland’ it didn’t exactly take long to find them some space in the Approved column. Taken from their forthcoming debut album ‘Celeste’, it’s three and a half minutes of slightly melancholy but bouncy pop rounded off with a late rush of euphoria to finish.

Following on from last year’s ‘Written In Red’ and ‘Endless Summer’, which made more of the band’s highlife and reggae influences, it bodes well for ‘Celeste’, which is due out via Snakes & Ladders on 2 Jul. Ahead of that you can catch the band live at The Lexington in London on 28 May and grab another track when they release their next single, ‘The Gold Rush’, on 25 Jun.

Okay, so I’m a fortnight late in cottoning on to Manchester four-piece PINS, but please do bear with me; notes on PINS are as scarce as is their minimal web presence, with new single ‘Eleventh Hour’ virtually the sole evidence that they even exist.

A band to match Dum Dum Girls in their fledgling phase, it’s a tribute to PINS’ audacity that they have chosen to tread the very same lo-fi garage trope that so many artists, not least Frankie Rose, are now straying from. In ‘Eleventh Hour’, the band recast fairly un-revelatory chords as a shadowy hypno-pop passage. Fraught with girl-gang vocal pangs, it piques at a point between nonchalance and cold, cold malice.

Whether PINS’ style trounces their substance is hard to tell – there just isn’t yet a great enough discography to quantify against the abundance of black-and-white style captured in this ‘Eleventh Hour’ video. Dedicate your eyes and ears to it now:

Monster Rally (aka Ted Feighan) and RUMTUM (aka John Hastings) are two producers from Cleveland, Ohio over there in the US of A. That’s America. Bonded not just because they both have very silly stage names, they also share similar tastes in music. Having made some headway with their solo work already, their latest project sees them combining their talents for the ‘MR&RT’ EP, which is available now through Bandcamp, and on CD next week through Lefse/Waaga.

In the space of seven tracks, the duo meld everything from instrumental hip hop to psychedelic pop, establishing a distinct sound and style for themselves in the process. The EP is, Waaga’s website assures us, just a taste of more to come, which is a tantalising prospect. This record is great, but it definitely feels like the start of something, rather than a one-off. There’s plenty more to explore in the world they’ve created.

Listen to the ‘MT&RT’ EP in full here:

DJ Zaki Lais’s club night Muak has been showcasing decent names from across the deep house scene for nearly a decade. The night moves down to the Vibe Bar on East London’s Brick Lane this weekend, with Zaki playing proper house alongside resident Manish in the main room.

The big draw for this event, though, are East Coast US house heads Sean Spencer and Chris Clayton, aka DJ Spen and Karizma, who will be playing top quality tunes back to back for four hours, leaning more towards the soulful side of the genre. As well as them, up in the Loft, you’ll find Toronto’s Waze & Odyssey, Zephrine Jaxson and London-based producer Santero.

The Vibe Bar has a decent atmosphere and err, well, a good vibe about it. I’m sure it will be packed to the rafters, as Muak is still drawing in some top class names. Should be a cracker.

Saturday 14 Apr, Vibe Bar, Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London, E1, 9pm-5am, £10-£15, more info from www.muakparty.com

Will Dutta is a multi-talented concert pianist whose forthcoming debut album, ‘Parergon’, features collaborations with Warp-veterans Plaid, sonic artist John Matthias and composer Max de Wardener.

‘Distance’ – one of the Plaid co-writes – sounds exactly like you’d imagine a collaboration between the electronic duo and a classical musician would, though it takes a good four and a half minutes before the more techno-fied elements appear. A beautiful and hypnotic piano-led piece with a treasure chest of swirling, chiming percussion, ‘Distance’ exudes a beguiling sensibility that is equal parts classical and electronica.

‘Parergon’ is released on 14 May on Just Music, a logical home for Dutta given the label’s aesthetic and previous releases from sonically ideological bedfellows like Digitonal.

‘Distance’ is streaming now on Soundcloud:

Choir Of Young Believers are a Danish indie group who garnered much praise in their homeland and beyond for their bold debut album ‘This Is For The White In Your Eyes’.

‘Rhine Gold’, its follow up, should continue this upwards trajectory. Singer and songwriter Jannis Noya Makrigiannis has a beautifully crystalline voice, but the backdrop to his icy purr is equally beguiling, with taut melodies and an evocative atmosphere that make ‘Sedated’, the lead track from ‘Rhine Gold’, redolent of a kind of tripped out, minimalist Delays.

In fact, it’s hard to pinpoint exact reference points, given the scope of the music on offer; with its spindly guitars, subtle dub-inflections and traces of folk and avant-garde experimentalism, it’s also like listening to a melancholy Scandinavian version of The Shadows produced by Andy Weatherall, or something.

‘Rhine Gold’ is out now on Ghostly International and you can listen to ‘Sedated’ here:

A reckonable production force since 2007 (when his J-Dilla/Beach Boys mash-up, ‘In The Key Of Dee’, came out) one-man music mechanism Bullion is back with a six track EP ‘Love Me Oh Please Love Me’, which is available to pre-order now prior to its release via DEEK on 7 May.

EP precursor ‘It’s All In Sound’ sees Bullion sing, splice and sax-sample with the same panache as on his double-edged last single, ‘Say Arr Ee’/ ‘What Does She Know’. Expanding upon the cut and pasted style that characterises much of his past output, the new track is a continuation of West London-based Nathan Jenkins’ climb from shapeshifting decks-dweller to an identifiable artist and songwriter in the ‘traditional’ sense (though with none of the dulling-down that might imply).

Sample ‘It’s All In Sound’ here:

Moscow Youth Cult are a mysterious electronica duo who deal in glitchy, slightly sinister slices of machine made pop. Following on from their delightful ‘Iris’ EP, ‘Phase IV’ is the Midlands duo’s first single from their forthcoming debut album, ‘Happiness Machines’. It’s also a homage to the 1974 film of the same name – Hitchcock title designer Saul Bass’ only directorial effort, about hyper intelligent (killer) ants – which is worth investigating in its own right (although it will absolutely terrify you).

Anyway, ‘Phase IV’ is shot through with the sort of chaotic electronic brilliance that was peppered throughout New Order and OMD’s early releases – you get the feeling that the analogue synths could break down at any moment, and are held together by gaffa tape whilst the duo record the track in a freezing cold studio with a leaky roof. But amid the relentless beats and gloomy atmosphere, there’s no shortage of melodic nous on offer too, thankfully.

Check out the video for ‘Phase IV’ here:

Frida Hyvönen released her second album, ‘Silence Is Wild’, in 2009. Which means it’s been three years without any new examples of her brilliant songwriting and unique approach to writing lyrics. Four if you go back to the record’s 2008 release date in her native Sweden. That is too long. Too too long. Happily though she’s back with a bolder, poppier sound on new single ‘Terribly Dark’, the first to be taken from her new album ‘To The Soul’.

The highlights of ‘Silence Is Wild’ were ‘London!’ and ‘Scandinavian Blonde’, the former an unrequited love letter to our capital city – “the way you want to get rid of me makes me weak at the knees” – the latter a gentle, slightly weary mockery of the stereotypical view of blonde Swedish women outside Northern Europe. Both are at the same time simple and clever – simple enough for you to curse yourself for not thinking of them, clever enough for you to know you couldn’t have.

‘Terribly Dark’ offers another juxtaposition – familiar enough to feel comfortable, but enough of a departure to make you sit up and take notice. The piano that had driven all of Hyvönen’s songwriting to date is still there, but where it was once at the forefront of her recordings, it’s now hidden amongst slick pop production (recorded at former ABBA star Benny Andersson’s new Riksmixningsverket studio in Stockholm).

While on the older songs mentioned above she looked at the world outside Sweden, ‘Terribly Dark’ is more introspective. Sweden gets terribly dark in winter – that’s your basic lyrical premise right there. The winter is dark and she’s so desperate to see sunlight again that she’d be willing to set herself on fire for the heat and light it would bring. There’s a hefty amount of metaphor running through all that, but, fuck it, it’s just a great pop song, I’m not going to sit here reading things into its meaning when I could be enjoying it instead.

Manchester-based duo Gavin Miller and Thomas Ragsdale may already be known to you as the excellent worriedaboutsatan, but currently they’re focussing on their other project, Ghosting Season.

In fact, they’re focussing particularly hard at the moment, as their debut album under this name, ‘The Very Last Of The Saints’, is due to become the first release on Sasha’s Last Night On Earth label on 14 May. And even sooner than that, they’ll be holding a launch party for the record this very Thursday.

Ghosting Season’s first release was the ‘Far End Of The Graveyard’ EP last summer, showcasing a sound more ambient than worriedaboutsatan’s. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of light and dark to it – the music sounds like it’s thought long and hard about itself and decided that everything’s actually alright, but all that introspection means it’s not quite able to express that to you fully right now. Instead it transmits a heartbreaking wave of indescribable emotion straight through your body.

You can catch Ghosting Season live at Electrowerkz in London this Thursday, with an excellent supporting line-up of Raffertie and The Slow Revolt, plus a DJ set from Graphics, while new single ‘A Muffled Sound of Voices’, an edit of which you can hear below, is due for release on 23 Apr.

Hurrah! And that’s a genuine hurrah, rather than a post-ironic one, because Domino is offering ‘No Title (Molly)’ – John Maus’ donation to the label’s Record Store Day flexi-disc compilation ‘Smugglers Way’ – as a free download.

Unlike much of Maus’s avant-garde playbook, it’s a track you could proudly play to your parents if you so wished. Your grandparents, even. And it’s not in the slightest bit a reference to ecstasy, despite what that other maus, Deadmau5 might think. It’s most likely to be about singer Molly Nilsson, who guests on Maus’ still spellbinding ‘Hey Moon’. And here’s ‘No Title (Molly)’:

As previously reported, the five-disc ‘Smugglers Way’ collection will also feature music from Real Estate, Villagers, Dirty Projectors and Cass McCombs. See a virtual flick-through of it, plus the zine that comes with, here:

This interesting South London space is this weekend playing host to one of the true broken beat pioneers – a funkateer if you like – Mr Mark de Clive-Lowe. Still riding high after his frankly underrated latest album, released on Tru Thoughts last year (do check it out at this Spotify link), he’ll be doing a live set tomorrow night. Joining him at the party, which goes through to 5am, will be Jazz Head Chronic and Man Vs Wife. A definite recommend.

Saturday 31 Mar, The CLF Art Café, The Bussey Building, Rye Lane, SE15, 10pm – 5am, £5-10, more at www.clfartcafe.org

La Sera is the two year-old crossover project of one Katy Goodman, bassist in Brooklyn alt-pop pack Vivian Girls. Billed as her ‘break-up album’, La Sera’s sophomore set ‘Sees The Light’ is released this week via Hardly Art, dividing its tone between the all-out wallowing of ‘I’m Alone’ and ‘Love That’s Gone’, and the barefaced optimism that shines on elsewhere.

Even a ‘suddenly single’ Goodman is no sap, though, as her new split video for LP samples ‘Real Boy’ and ‘Drive On’ goes to show. Whilst the former is steeped in chipper calypso dreamtime by virtue of its honey-dripping lyricisms, ‘Drive On’ is malign and waspish, fatalistic even (“It’s a story I wrote about a guy driving himself and his girlfriend off a cliff”, says Katy); its screenplay is a noirish vision in black, white and grindhouse grey.

Screen that very ‘video within a video’ here:

If you must lump East London quartet Fanzine into a category of any kind; file them beside Mazes, Weird Dreams, Gross Magic, and the class of guitar bands who are surpassing the capital’s live divebar scene to write songs that’ll resonate beyond (god forbid) that semi-sacred Dalston-Shoreditch-Stoke Newington radius.

One half of the band’s new single, ‘Houses Fall’ – as will form one of the first releases from The Line Of Best Fit’s new signature label, Best Fit Recordings – is such a song. Awash with covetous chords and lightly-sloping vocal steppes, it’s a sweet and ragged hymn to a girl so devastating, she can fell actual bricks-and-mortar buildings. And that’s some feat.

The very same track, which is in fact the reverse to Fanzine’s forthcoming debut ‘LA’ (out 30 Apr), can be streamed after its heartier A-side counterpart just here:

And since Fanzine would hardly be doing justice to their own name without their very own… well, fanzine; here are Fanzine’s self-made fanzines.

Their propitious fate sealed by liberal SxSW hyping (not to mention a feature in the Guardian’s ‘New Band Of The Day’ slot), sororal trio Haim (that’s LA-based sisters Danielle, Este and Alana Haim) make music to chime with the abrupt spring offensive we’ve all appreciated of late.

More than just decorative despite its forthright pop allure, their debut EP, a three-tracker entitled ‘Forever’, is available to download for free following its release earlier this month.

First track ‘Better Off’ fortifies its floral folk notes with a stiff rhythmic backboard, its pop palette darkened by sparse, barbed instrumentation and clipped harmonics. Title track ‘Forever’, meanwhile, is as knowingly pert and pristine as final third ‘Go Slow’ is downbeat.

Dip into the EP, plus Dan Lissvik’s remix of its title track, here: