(Moore) The music of St. Vincent (legal name: Annie Clark) has always felt to me chilly, precise, nearly academic: she and David Byrne made perfect sense as cerebral foils for each other on their good-not-great collaborative album Love This Giant from 2012. However, with her newly released self-titled album, St. Vincent's turned a stylistic corner, both musically and lyrically. Her once-cryptic missives now read like diary entries of a particularly obtuse crush from your sculpture class; meanwhile, her wily guitar work and frazzled electronics build instrumental backdrops that sound alternately tempestuous and Zen-like. Live, her normally unimpeachable poise gives way to dizzying solos, as Clark allows her feather-light voice to rip itself open above the fray. KYLE FLECK
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(Crocodile) Much like how the cool charisma of Tino from My So-Called Life is felt without ever actually being seen, such phantom magnetism is all a fan gets when a band goes into hibernation for a few years. But as the genre-bending, avant-garde-pop outfit Icy Demons emerge from a hiatus, one imagines that their live show will plunge right back into their frenetic former speeds. Their heated signature moves—spastic keys ducking in and out behind percussive guitars—alternate from post-punk noise rock to chilly, almost robotic kraut-rock-inspired numbers. It’s great to have Icy Demons finally back on the live circuit. With Lost in the Trees. BREE MCKENNA
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(Lo-Fi) The first track on Italian duo JoyCut’s Pieces of Us Were Left on the Ground album, “Wireless,” is unbelievably sprightly, uplifting, and beautiful. It’s more ambitious than the music of most bands on today’s minimal-/dark-wave revival circuit, its ornate textures and orchestral swells lending the song almost a classical grandeur—but it’s also kind of a red herring. Whereas many newer outfits working in this territory only capture the surface tics of the early-’80s genre or add too much melodic sugar to the sound, JoyCut keep the mood suitably overcast (except for that anomalous opening cut) and the instrumentation interesting and complexly layered throughout the album’s 15 tracks. They also explore the sort of post-punk bleakness that glum English bands Joy Division and the Sound pioneered 30-plus years ago, but JoyCut’s forte remains the downward-sloped synth jam for teary-eyed dancing. With Dionvox and the Spider Ferns. DAVE SEGAL
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(Q) Dial Up brings in two Japanese artists and one transplanted American associated with Osaka’s INNIT party to Seattle: Seiho, Magical Mistakes, and And Vice Versa—all new names to me. Seiho (Seiho Hayakawa) sounds like some of the lighter, more lustrous fare coming out of LA’s Brainfeeder and Alpha Pup imprints—a kind of ultra-vivid, neon-streaked, disjunctive update of R&B and electro. Magical Mistakes (aka Erik Luebs) traffics in a harder, more introverted realm of downtempo music. His tracks often evoke the deserted streets and dilapidated warehouses of urban anomie we used to hear on certain instrumental hiphop records over the last 15 years from the Ninja Tune and Mush labels. Magical Mistakes’ music wobbles like a sloshed poet between dreamy and sinister, sometimes melding the two qualities at the same time. The clumsily named And Vice Versa (Masayuki Kubo) creates wonky leftfield house and techno that reveals a mind not content to follow the well-trod paths of most producers in those genres. With DJ HoJo and DJAO. DAVE SEGAL
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Check out the rest of this week's Data Breaker coverage »

And here's all our recommended music events—tonight, tomorrow, this weekend, and beyond!