Out this week is Slow To Love, the album by Brooklyn-based torch-song singer Doe Paoro. She comes with some steam and production vision behind her already, which you can see in the crisp videos for “Born Whole” and “Can’t Leave You,” and via the strings that color the latter, or the session-player fretless-bass style that slices up Paoro’s R&B-by-way-of-Badu on “Born.” The record’s overall vibe is spacious verging on skeletal, though, suggesting a demo-like atmosphere which is actually somewhat becoming: Doe possess both a clean, capable voice, and the propensity to dip into Imogen Heap-y vocoder; she’s better when she’s more honest herself, and her instrument. Paoro has a pop song called “Body Games” ready for makeup commercials, a track called “I’ll Go Blind” that will sit well with those psyched about D’Angelo’s return, and a cover of a track by the great Baltimore synth-pop outfit Future Islands, and you can get at all of those — and the whole record — below:

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Mirel Wagner, a singer-songwriter born in Ethiopia and raised in Finland, is 23 years old. When she wrote “To The Bone,” the opening track from her shivery self-titled album, she was 16. But her songs sound old as dirt. With an appropriate amount of crackle and hiss, you could easily pass them off as ancient, undiscovered acoustic-blues 78s. That’s partly because of Wagner’s voice, a still and spectral quaver that emphasizes every word just so and carries a hint of Billie Holiday’s soft intensity. And it’s partly because of the way she recorded the LP: Alone on an acoustic guitar, nine songs in two days. You can hear her fingers squeaking on the guitar strings, and I’m not pointing that out because it makes her somehow more authentic; it’s just part of the hushed, near-frightening intimacy of the album.

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From the vibrant enclave of Burlington, VT comes an artist one of you called the North Country’s “best kept secret.” Verily, after spending the last week with Ryan Power’s latest release I Don’t Want To Die, and seeing the reaction it gets from heard-it-all friends, it really is pretty weird that more people aren’t aware of what he’s doing. So let’s help change that, because this is music with a fairly prodigious talent at play. The style’s impossible to peg with a catch-all genre tag, so let’s start with “exploratory-pop,” and get you started with a pair of tracks:

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The indie-pop duo Blonds is not to be confused with the Brooklyn-via-Oberlin electronic duo Blondes, though, truth be told, the nominal similarity is what led me to open the email they sent. West Palm, Florida’s Blonds are about to self-release their debut EP Dark Roots, and it will eventually make its way onto many a sync-agent/label A&R person’s desk: its strongest tracks are practically custom-tailored to fit the mold of the throwback hooky, boy/girl rom-com pop spread by Tennis, and the bittersweet glockenspieled escapism of Cults. (Like those bands’ principals, and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Blonds are dating.) “Kites” lopes with a slow gait and samples of strings and makes its honeyed swing a cautious celebration of being “without a string”; “Treasure Coast” is more rousing and expansive in sound, wistful and sanguine in lyric (“so long, farewell, goodbye” and “anywhere, everything,” ascending repeatedly). This is decidedly the music of young people in love, exploring adulthood, and thus to be sidestepped by anyone who isn’t interested in such things and downloaded by anyone who is/interested in new songs to place in the movies.

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This outfit, 2:54, is a pair of British blood sisters with shoegazer and eyeliner smeared all over their music and a terrific EP to their family name. (Thurlow, for the record.) Think about the sonic signifiers of Lush and PJ Harvey bottled inside a band that named itself after a specific moment in a Melvins song (“A History Of Bad Men”) that’s tight with the xx and Warpaint and you’ve rendered a fairly accurate composite sketch. Their EP is called Scarlet, it courses with the pained hormonal lust and vocals of the vaguely post-adolescent kind and savvy fuzz guitars that feel learned from ’90s alt-rock Guitar World tablature (or like they were produced by Alan Moulder, which they were). Get familiar with the video for 2:54′s EP title track; it’s smokey, stylish, and sylvan, pale-skinned and emotionally smoldered — basically it is Twilight in a music video, to the extent something like that could be a compliment.

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Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett are Beacon, a Greenpoint-based duo steeped in ’90s and contemporary R&B, IDM, and bass music. Moodgadget is set to release Beacon’s No Body EP, the project’s second collection of songs to triangulate those worlds into a sensual, downtempo electronic mesh of lush synths and lusty falsetto. It’s How To Dress Well with slightly less BMG CD club R&B, slightly more Warp Records infusion. No Body is lights-down music, ambient-pop for the unrequited, the logical result of years absorbing Boards Of Canada and Postal Service, Matthew Dear and Karin Dreijer Andersson, The-Dream and Ginuwine. (Related: Beacon cover Ginuwine’s “So Anxious,” so their aim is true.) Over a few emails they identified contemporaries like Shed, Actress, the Weeknd, Boi-1da, and Fever Ray as influences, and oOoOO, Nike7up, White Ring, and Blissed Out as showmates. All of that should have you primed for a listen of their new EP’s title track:

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The twin sisters Cristi Jo and Jessica are Zambri, both in surname and musical guise. I first mentioned them on Stereogum when they jumped onstage and added petite, but substantial, vocal muscle to Hooray For Earth during that band’s CMJ 2010 shortlist winning set; it was the sort of highlight that deserved identification. A year on, Zambri has new EP set for Kanine Records, titled Glossolalia. It’s a promising, hooky five-track set of left-field, occasionally gothic and avant garde electronic pop.

Evidently, Zambri are production and synth-wonks. Glossolalia‘s tracks swerve and unsettle on a bed of loaded, dissonant production. But their best moments build songs from a strong, new romantic melodic base: “To Keep Back,” is sultry and slow moving (key phrase “time doesn’t exist”) with haunted keyboards that Zola Jesus would jump at; “On Call (biddibiddi)” dives into Gang Gang-redolent rhythmic clang and knotty modality. It’s not surprising that the EP’s credits include Gang Gang studio man Chris Coady on a few tracks, then, nor that there’s a mixing credit for frequent collaborator/mate Hooray For Earth’s Noel Heroux. You can dive in with this MP3 of “Heather” for a taste of their vocal embrace/squiggle and squawk production vibe at work. Think St. Vincent on warped vinyl.

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The excellently named Sacremento producer Raleigh Moncrief has been something of an indie rock “that guy,” for the past few years, staying busy on the periphery. He engineered and co-produced Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca, and he’s played in Marnie Stern’s backing band on tour. His debut solo album Watered Lawn, meanwhile, is coming out on Anticon, the label that built its name as a home for gnarled, abstract underground rap. Watered Lawn walks a line between those two poles. In Moncrief’s vocals, you can hear the Dirty Projectors connection; he’s got that knack for throwing sweet R&B falsetto-hooks through twisty time-signatures and art-pop arrangements. But the album also fits in just fine with California’s bass music scene, all off-kilter low-end rumbles and Dilla-damaged drum programming.

Below, download “I Just Saw” and “Lament For Morning,” two tracks from the album. We’ve also got the album’s tracklist and cover art. It’s out 10/25 on Anticon.

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If you look at them from a certain angle, the San Francisco trio Wet Illustrated fit right in with the analog-gear retro-garage boom that’s happening in their city right now. After all, they’re a sometimes-jangly, sometimes-riffy guitar-rock band who know their way around a chorus hook and who record on gear that sounds older than the actual dudes in the band. But Wet Illustrated also take a ton of cues from the artier, further-out edges of late-’70s British postpunk. There’s a playful edge to this band; their riffs are jaunty, and their vocals edge toward the yippy more often than not; they’ve clearly spent some time watching and learning from Robyn Hitchcock. 1x1x1, their debut album, is a jumpy, jittery, and overall fun ride — like the Fresh And Onlys, if someone put Pixie Stix in their acid

1x1x1 is out 10/25 on True Panther. Below, check out the tracklist and the collage-happy video for their song “Satellite Kids,” directed by drummer/vocalist Robbie Simon.

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Get past the eye-catching/potentially irritating stylized spacing (ala w h o k i l l), and focus instead on the heartfelt, fuzzy electronic dance tracks from 26-year-old Denver art school grad Drew Englander aka R E A L M A G I C. He claims influence from “shoegaze, R&B, and Grime,” and on “No Things Left” some of that bears out, via tricky, shifty beats adorning club-ready rhythms and a blown-out synth sound. The result is something like Clams Casino crossing into Baths’ beat based realm, with the vocal melodic stylings of Beirut (or his own similarly monikered synth-pop guise, Realpeople). Get a sense of R E A L M A G I C via an MP3 of one of his two songs available at the moment, “No Things Left”:

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