After Le Chat Bleu, this Mink DeVille record foretold the depth and dimension of Willy DeVille's talent and the lengths he would go to as a vocalist and songwriter to get the right mix of emotion, drama, and rock & roll attitude. Featuring the core band from Coup de Grace – Louis Cortelezzi on sax; Kenny Margolis on keyboards, including accordion; DeVille and Rick Borgia on guitars; and Tommy Price on drums – the seam in the album comes on the second track, "River of Tears," with its stunning soprano saxophone lines, marimbas, accordions, and howling, raw, Gato Barbieri-like tenor lines in the choruses. When DeVille sings, "Every night lonely, empty dreams/Here comes that tide washing over me/Not again/Oh no/Not again/I don't want to cry/But there's tears in my eyes/I don't want to cry/That river of tears," the horns and accordion swirl around him until the final 16 measures, when the guitars and marimbas envelop all his loss in their warmth. His voice is the grain of every rock & roll lothario's Waterloo. DeVille follows this with a scorching Cuban son called "Demisado Corazon," featuring full salsa horn and percussion sections.

No Doubt’s 2010 installment in Universal’s ongoing Icon series is a retitled reissue of the excellent 2003 compilation The Singles 1992-2003. Spanning 15 tracks, the disc is sequenced like a concert, favoring forward momentum over chronological history, and that's a point in its favor since it shines a spotlight on individual songs, not eras. More than anything, this highlights No Doubt's consistency as a singles band, since the defining breakthrough single, "Just a Girl," is as exciting as both the band's pre-fame "Trapped in a Box" and the sexy neo-electro grind of "Hella Good." It also shows that even if lead singer Gwen Stefani grew increasingly assured and sexier over the years (compare the seductive "Underneath It All" to the breathy, naïve "Don't Speak") and even if she was always rightly the focal point, the band itself is a muscular, versatile, tuneful outfit, rooted in ska revivals like "Spiderwebs" but equally convincing when turning out spiky pop like the glorious "New," the hard-rocking "Sunday Morning" and "Ex-Girlfriend," the sighing ballad "Simple Kind of Life," or the rubbery, reggae-inflected "Hey Baby".

The brilliance of this collection is that it combines the standard Brit-punk anthems by the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, and Stiff Little Fingers with other great songs that typify the variety and range of punk-era independent music from both sides of the Atlantic. The songs are so well chosen that the punk aesthetic is further revealed by the inclusion of songs that characterize pub rock, new wave, and other related genres. The usual punk suspects ("New Rose," "Anarchy in the UK") are all here, along with many other treasures: Dr. Feelgood's "Milk and Alcohol", Devo's "Mongoloid," Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner," Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer," and Television's "Marquee Moon." The less commonly anthologized punk selections are inspired, too: the Ruts' "Babylon Is Burning," Generation X's "Ready Steady Go," and X-Ray Spex's "Identity," along with the seminal "Sheena is a Punk Rocker." The conception of the genre is expanded further to include Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop, XTC, Joe Jackson, the Pretenders, the Tubes, and Blondie, and their presence overcomes the tendency for boring repetition on a very long collection.

Tear Me to Pieces is the sixth studio album by American rock band Story of the Year, released on March 10, 2023, through SharpTone Records. This is their first album without guitarist and backing vocalist Phil Sneed. What's the sound of Story of the Year? Loud guitars, massive singalong choruses, and uplifting perseverance. Few records helped build the post-hardcore scene as swiftly as the band's debut, Page Avenue, one of the first of it's kind to sell a million copies. "Until the Day I Die" endures as both an anthem and mission statement. Tours with Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Deftones, and The Used cemented Story of the Year's reputation as a stunning and engaging live act.

One of the band's masterworks, Juju sees Siouxsie and the Banshees operating in a squalid wall of sound dominated by tribal drums, swirling and piercing guitars, and Siouxsie Sioux's fractured art-attack vocals. If not for John McGeoch's marvelous high-pitched guitars, here as reminiscent of Joy Division as his own work in Magazine, the album would rank as the band's most gothic release. Siouxsie and company took things to an entirely new level of darkness on Juju, with the singer taking delight in sinister wordplay on the disturbing "Head Cut," creeping out listeners in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek "Halloween," and inspiring her bandmates to push their rhythmic witches brew to poisonous levels of toxicity.