PJ Harvey. Let England Shake
For her eighth album, the Brit songstress toned down the raw, sexual longing in order to document the horrors of war.
In doing so, she birthed an opus of imperial decline, rife with a peculiar Englishness that catapulted her into the league of the Kinks, The Jam and Kate Bush.
By turns disturbing and ethereal, Let England Shake's magic lay in its otherworldliness, as in the grotesque imagery of "The Colour of Earth", or the muted bugle calls and off-kilter vocal snippets that peppered "The Glorious Land" and "The Words that Maketh Murder".
Whether pinballing between frat-boy frolics or Buddhist beliefs, the Beastie Boys have been gleefully rhymin' and stealin' for over 30 years.
Yet their scattershot pop culture references and hyperactive tag team raps ground to a halt in July 2009 when Adam "MCA" Yauch was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer.
His remission - and the trio's subsequent career rebuild - was a relief; that their ninth album recalled their unassailable masterpiece "Paul's Boutique" in terms of its sheer eclecticism was nothing short of a miracle.
. . . or, how a prog behemoth learned to stop worrying about life without their lead singer, and create an album of avant-garde rock to flail wildly to.
With 2007's Mirrored, this New York supergroup emerged as a mechanised tour-de-force; since being reduced to a trio, these men-machines have been propelled in a more organic, pop-oriented direction (witness the ringtone-readiness of "Ice Cream"), recruiting electro-pop overlord Gary Numan, and Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino to provide vocals, thus subtracting the "math rock" in favour of a tender accessibility.
Mayer Hawthorne
Looking like Milhouse Van Houten and sounding like Al Green, this 32-year-old Californian's brand of blue-eyed soul was unleashed via his major label debut How Do You Do.
Having spent 2011 on tour with Bruno Mars, the stage is set for the Motown acolyte to take off into the pop stratosphere.
Also in his favour is the video for A Long Time - perhaps the most emotive video ever committed to celluloid.
