​Homeboy Sandman is a spiraling autumn of light from Queens, a rapper whose flow at once sounds like a metaphysical brain drain and a physically fit slice of verbal gymnastics. With a career built on battle competitions, hosting nights at the Nuyorican Poets Café and some guerilla F train flyering, he's finally signed to Stones Throw records. There, he dropped the six-song Subject:Matter EP, which matches the tirelessly bent label's affinity for woozy beats and uniquely blurry rapping. Opening track "The Miracle" is a three-minute chorus-less wonder, though it doesn't suffer from any lack of melody as Sandman's rubbery flow follows the musical peaks and valleys with aplomb.

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​Brooklyn's Virgin Forest is stick-to-your-ribs indie rock courtesy of 80% of Phosphorescent, fueled on Townes Van Zandt and heavy metal thunder. Their sophomore album (and first for Partisan), Easy Way Out (due January 31), mines similar Neil Youngish territory as Phospho, but is more Ragged Glory than Gold Rush, the restraint jettisoned over for some unrestrained rockers. "Don't Be Afraid" is a mix of shadow-staring doom-folk, Eagles-gone-loftpunk guitar shimmer and an irresistible splatter of fuzz bass.

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​Francis Harris is the given name of the Brooklynite who usually records as Adultnapper, the minimal techno icon who's punker upbringing leaves him never too afraid to get funky, cantankerous, mischievous or just plain noisy. His first full-length under his birthname (due February 7 via Scissors & Thread) is a remarkably personal statement wrapped in triple vinyl, a requiem for his father, who passed away in February 2010. His micropulses are fleshed out with no shortage of cellos, horns, gorgeous Arthur Russell melodies, skipping fuzzwash and dubby textures; mixing everything low to give the album a delicate feel. "Pharoah In the Morning" pairs a gracefully honked trumpet and some Björkian swoon—a perfect meld of atmosphere and melody for fans of Nicolas Jaar or Dirty Projectors.

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​Guess who's back? After wowing us and creeping us out with 2009's definitive bedbug anthem and the 2010 EP where they "pushed aside their clanky-clonky Birthday Party lurch to reveal the horrific marks where fingernails meet fresh flesh", NYC's hardest-working scumbags in the scuzzfuckery business, Pop. 1280, are back with their best work yet. Their long-awaited first full-length The Horror(due January 24 via Sacred Bones) moves our anti-heroes from gazing into the void to practically assaulting it; a new rhythm section gives chief muckmakers Ivan Lip and Chris Bug a robo-sex swagger somewhere between Devo and Pussy Galore. First taste "Bodies In The Dunes" is loaded with their howling end-of-the-world synths, complimented by some death-soaked, bummer-beyond-bummer lyrics.

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​Brooklyn's Elika is another great addition to the shoegaze revival that's been swaddling New York like a technicolor dreampopcoat for the last four years. But the retro-futurist duo spills their gooey textures on their laptops, exploring a human and delicate version of the electrogush of M83 or Ulrich Schnauss. Elika's latest album, Always The Light (due March 5 via shimmergaze depot Saint Marie Records), revels in firefly-blinking electropulse, gushy woosh and the dusky Madonna-gone-indie melodies of vocalist Evagelia Maravelias. First taste "No One Gets Lost" hums like a choir of harmoniums teaming with a glitchy drum machine, deeply exploring themes of life and loss.

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Knomia

​Doom-folk lifer Larkin Grimm is known mostly for 2008's desolate, pastoral daymare Parplar and her colorfully wry outlook (her hilarious MySpace post about attending SXSW in 2009 is required reading). The last four years have been nothing short of monumental for Grimm; she moved to Spanish Harlem, left her record label, married fire-breathing art-star Master Lee and gave birth to her first child. And if "Paradise and So Many Colors" is any indication, her new album Soul Retrieval (due in February) is naturally optimistic and lush, fueled by the sunny mutations of exotica. Starring members of Vetiver and Extra Life, as well as Jesse Sparhawk on harp and Bowie producer Tony Visconti behind the boards and on bass, "Paradise" is a manic slice of shiny textures (er, so many colors) and euphoric background coos, all backed by an Yma Sumac-inspired rhythm that pulses with electricity.

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Tami "Making Friendz" Hart.

​For New York City, 2011 was the year local musicians proved that RSS feeds didn't kill old-school ideals like "scene" or "community." Every great band seemed to come tied to three or four like-minded bands you could love for the same reasons, often on the same bill. Maybe we read (and wrote) enough trend pieces to believe it ourselves. Maybe bands are just using Facebook connections to write the narrative before writers could. Maybe retromania has led us to think everything is back in a big way?

Don't get too excited. Bloggos still continued to rally deep and hard around the cleverest, firstiest mash-ups of hypester runoff micro-genres (good luck in 2012, A$AP Rocky, Light Asylum, CREEP and Caveman). But while so many jockeyed for positions and pixels, larger stories emerged that felt refreshingly like the street-level phonecall-and-flyer scenes of yore. As, I wrote in SPIN the new hip-hop fraternity of Das Racist, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Despot and a newly keyed up El-P represent the most energizing force in New York indie-rap since Def Jux's heyday. And as I wrote in the Voice, a beercan-ducking, sweat-gushing, feedback-obsessed swarm of new pigfuck bands have been laying waste to 285 Kent, including The Men, White Suns, Pygmy Shrews and Pop. 1280. Often pushing the boundaries of what modern metalheads can play and wear, there was a downright onslaught of forward-thinking, critically acclaimed extreme metal releases (Liturgy, Tombs, Krallice, Hull, Batillus), which helped turn New York into the most important metal scene in the country for maybe the first time ever. Hell, if record labels still had the money to fly people out here, they'd be swarming!

Below, the 2011 edition of our annual Yes In My Backyard mixtape—this year's encompasses 18 tracks, over nearly 80 minutes—which collects this year's greatest music from New York City.

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​New York sound artist Nickolas Mohanna is the real Sound of the City. The noises of our rainy days, planes flying overhead or whatever's happening on Mott Street are dutifully documented on his digital recorder, then stretched out and distended (via synth and guitar) into majestic drone worlds. The enveloping Oneohtrix Point Nostrand Avenue gush of his second album, Reflectors (out now via Preservation, limited to 300 copies), takes the atmospheres we experience every day and transmutes them into a glorious, enhanced, superatmosphere appropriate for the type of New York that Snake Plissken would escape from. The album's final track, "Particles," ultimately turns a plane taking off from La Guardia into a gorgeous, darkly hued, skipping, fractal zone-out.

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​Another band that resides on the early-'90s fascination street we traveled down last week is slippery Gowanus duo Lightouts, who resurrect the melancholy chug and darkly sexy swagger of bands like The Cure, Girls Against Boys, JAMC and Afghan Whigs and impolitely jam it into the drum machine crunch of contemporary locals like Sleigh Bells, Year Of The Tiger and the Death Set. Their latest digital EP, The Eloise Suite, is their third one released this year; all of them sport gorgeous cover art and at least one telling cover (the Stone Roses, the La's, David Bowie). "The Eloise Suite" is a three-minute 120 Minutes jammer owing to some Berlin-era Bowie chime-rock—and it now comes with a music video that can be best described as "Kubrick's 'Addicted To Love.'"

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​Hunny is the turn-of-the-millenium "return of the rock" played out in real time; it formed when the members of YIMBY-approved Staten Island dance-pop crew Paragraph got bored with glossy beats and threw their drum machines in the trash. The bruising grunge-metal gnashers' debut I'm History was recorded (and partially written) in 10 hours, a melodic version of the pre-major sludge-pop released by Melvins and Bleach-era Nirvana. Vocalist Michael "Super 60" has a voice that peaks out into a throaty gargle—hear it on the title track, which combines drunken, gently tuneless Mudhoney party-crash with Super 60's Cobain-like ability to scream two notes at once.

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