As we reported about this time last year, K-Holes are "a sleazy, late-night group grope... all stumbling tom-toms, orgiastic screams and porn-stache saxophone wail"—and this sleazy dry-hump only ripens with age. Moving from garage staple HoZac up to Sub Pop-affiliated poptimists Hardly Art for their second album, Dismania (out May 1), the band has stepped up their slime-grind into something much tighter and meaner, rendering all those sloppy Butthole Surfers comparisons irrelevant (though the Scientists comparisons stand stronger and smarter). First single "Rats" is a churgle of pukeworthy distortion, "I've been a jerk" self-loathing, party-band swamp-sax, caveman drums, finger-pointing and finger-poking and sticking their finger in your peanut butter.

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Brooklyn duo Secret Music is like a sleeker Japanther or Death Set, all distorto-churn and party-crashing lo-fi pulse (some actually sang through phone recievers) but with hooks that pay credence to contemporary indie rock's ragged glory. Their self-titled debut (out last month via Black Bell Records) is 10 tracks of blown-out bubblegum with a sexually charged undertone. "T.O.Y.S." has a bit of the fluttery, wubbly feel of bands like Future Islands and Dinowalrus, but used for far more sinister, chuggy means.

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Dave Shelley

New York's clang-on-an-anything all-stars Skeleton Key have finally returned with their first new music in seven years. They spent the '90s as unlikely major-label signees and released the sawblade-bashing industrial quirk-pop masterpiece Obtanium in 2004. Their new independent hustle surrounding third album Gravity is the Enemy involves a Kickstarter project that practically doubled its goal, a deal with German label Arctic Rodeo, and an ongoing live show that's just as manic and dangerous and junk-smashing as ever. First taste "Little Monster" has the dissonant grind of vintage Jawbreaker matched with their trademark sheet-metal bashery that boings and cracks and putts along like a cartoon factory.

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True to its name, Bright Moments is a big sunshiny explosion of optimism: joyous found sounds, Afro-Brazilian rhythms, Beach Boys harmonies, anime keyboards and big explosions of billowing brass. It's the demented brainchild of New Yorker Kelly Pratt, a multi-instrumentalist who's played horns for Beirut, Arcade Fire, David Byrne and LCD Soundsystem; he cobbled all the highest peaks of those bands into the danceable, po-mo mash-up Natives (Luaka Bop). "Tourists" is a little Talking-Heads-gone-gypsy-punk; a little yacht rock warmth; and a little Game Boy cheerbomb.

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Brooklyn singer-songwriter Doe Paoro is a wild mixture of contemporary sounds and ancient techniques. Her single "Born Whole," taken from her debut Slow to Love (out last month), has the spectral fervor of Zola Jesus's haunted house swirl, Adele's retromaniacal bombast and ghostly traces of James Blake's post-dubstep—but Paoro's take on modern art-pop comes from an untethered vocal style she credits to her study of lhamo, the centuries-old Tibetan opera tradition. "Born Whole" starts as nimble, muted neo-soul but finds its magical energy through post-chorus flights of vocal fancy—think Winehouse-gone-Diamanda and you're close. Its unsettling video was shot with four close friends in her Syracuse hometown. Collaborator Miranda Siegel conceived its theme, as Paoro describes it, "of a fruitless quest and getting trapped in cycles of attachment and detachment," all influenced by their shared practice of vipassana meditation, the Buddhist tradition that seeks to understand the truths of reality.

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PHOTO ROB

Harlem rapper Kyle Rapps is gifted with the type of plainspoken, motormouth, socially progressive underground hip-hop that's not exactly fashionable in the age of fashion-label Tumblr rap, but is more than welcome when done with his head-knocking brio. Rapps is clearly a student of hip-hop—so deep, his mixtape EP Re-edutainment is spiritually (and sample-ally) linked to Boogie Down Productions' third-best album. "Bully" flips a few BDP samples into rollicking "How to Roll a Blunt"-style narrative, seamlessly bringing the conscious '90s style to the "It Gets Better" 2010s.

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Radioactive industrial-punk mutants Wet Witch slither from the Burn Books label, the same sludgehurlers who got us Pregnant this time last year. Part Jersey Shore wash-up, part Brooklyn crust-over, Wet Witch's four-song, one-sided 12" (out now, limited to 500) comes complete with the band's name melted into the middle like an acid burn. The eight and a half minutes of music that surround it are all factory steam, pulsating pistons, CB radio chatter, country-rock played a broken radio and the screaming/gargling of events that will get you reported to OSHA. Opener "New Ways" features Suicide's broken textures, Big Black's steely drive and Fear's hardcore brawn all in the span of a premature ejaculation. Fans of Pop. 1280, Yvette, and Sleigh Bells take note.

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Christopher Paul Stelling is a gifted Brookyn songwriter walking an austere, somber, gloriously pastoral line between William Elliott Whitmore-style indie-blues and the ever-emerging new breed of fleet-fingered Faheyesque fingerpicking. Every song on his debut album Songs of Praise and Scorn (just out via Mecca Lecca) cooks with both down-home comfort and avant-garde brio, Stelling building earthy folk troubadour stories over a fluster of wild arpeggios. "Solar Flares" finds him following his fingers and then floating away from them in every verse. His lyrics about "tired hands on broken plows" may not sound like the products of a subway-riding Brooklynite. But he has a stance on making idyllic music in a noisy city that's particularly illuminating.

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Daniel Roland Tierney

In 2010, YIMBY praised the debut 7" of noise-punk night terror Yvette, a "hard-edged, ultraviolent, spooktacular response to years of the fluttery squish of Animal Collective." They've finally returned with a follow-up, "Erosion" b/w "Cold Sweat" (out this week on the God Mode imprint of piglet-fuck skronkpop crew Mr. Dream), and their sound has perfectly solidified itself into a fierce, industrial-leaning, drums-of-death blossom of nice sprites. The A-side is like They Were Wrong-era Liars sent back in time to bridge some gap between This Heat and Pretty Hate Machine. But the B-side wins again, combining Sightings guiterrorism, a vintage no wave 3/4 deathplod, and a sweet bubblegunk melody that somehow writhes itself free for exactly one chorus and no verses.

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Winnie Jeng

When alt-epic crew Farewell Republic recorded their beaming, hazegazy debut, Burn The Boats, none of the members had reached the age of 23, but it sounds like they lived through the 1990s multiple times: Swirly Corgan guitars with none of the arena cheese, shoegaze pedal chains forming shiny alliances with stoner-metal pedal chains, Shudder To Think's disjunctive melodies sliding into a little math-rock drift. Hell, these young bucks might be New York's best hope for alt-rock space spirituals since Secret Machines, dreaming big and mixing their records to sound even bigger. The album's best track is "Wake," a two-and-a-half-minute churn of Jesu guitars cascading into foggier indie shores.

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