Robert Cooke

What’s eating Kurt Vile? His last album, ‘Smoke Ring For My Halo’, was adored for how Vile nailed his signature sound – the coolly apathetic angst of grunge with the timeless authenticity of classic Americana. Yet on the ambitious, immersive ‘Wakin On A Pretty Daze’, you get the sense that there’s still something nagging at Vile, and it’ll take more than a casual spin of this 70-minute sprawl for you to figure it out.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw make Eastern European folk music for people who don’t like Eastern European folk music. To fans, that might seem contentious, because you could say the same sort of thing about Mumford & Sons. But whereas Mumford & Sons make inauthentic, bastardised folk for people who’ve never heard real folk music in their lives, A Hawk And A Hacksaw are divorced from the rest of their genre in a different, more respectable way. The reason for that is the same as the reason they’re the only Eastern European folk act that gets routinely covered on sites like this one.

New York man-poodle Darwin Smith is back with another album of tightly cropped guitar-pop earworms. ‘Songs For Imaginative People’, the second Darwin Deez record, is a natural progression from the first, as the band’s distinctively jangly, incessantly upbeat guitars are remodelled in increasingly eccentric ways.

Fuzzy, funky, freaky, fragile – there aren’t enough F-words for UMO. Compared to 2011’s self-titled debut, ‘II’ is a softer set of songs that investigates more sophisticated styles.

Are you a beardy 30-something with long hair who wears leather wristbands and rune necklaces? Well, Arbouretum’s ‘Coming Out Of The Fog’ is the album for you.

It might seem like a waste to have Aidan Moffat – a great modern lyricist – making instrumental music as L. Pierre. But it’s clear from ‘The Island Come True’ that Moffat’s just as capable of capturing a feeling or a moment with fragmented classical samples and field recordings as he is with words.

You can’t fail to be impressed by a band that sound like Battles recording a soundtrack for a Street Fighter video game. Gallops like synths that buzz, guitars that groove and drumbeats that befuddle.

As ever more bedroom producers glide into public consciousness on a wave of blog buzz, at least Willy Mason still tours the globe, acoustic guitar in hand, sharing stories of life’s struggles.

From California’s underground punk scene to staging a Broadway musical – Green Day are the class clowns who’ve started taking themselves a little too seriously. Now they unleash ‘¡Uno!’, the first in a trilogy of albums, to be completed by ‘¡Dos!’ and ‘¡Tré!’. Pretentious? Not one bit.

Out there, somewhere, there’s a parallel universe where Hey Sholay are selling out arenas, breaking America and dating women twice their age. Through that wormhole, One Direction are signing a deal with Fierce Panda instead of Syco, working their way around the country’s cosier indie venues and fighting for a place on the 6Music playlist. It’s a wonderful world, where ((O)) is outselling 21 ten-to-one and the bookies are slashing the odds on it winning the Mercury Music Prize.