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Spoon

With each album these acclaimed indie hands offer a lesson in rock economy: Britt Daniel and his mates write and play spare, direct pop songs but don't stint on snap, hooks, or soul. How do we love them? Let us count the ways: In 2007 alone, they landed Pitchfork's #7 album of the year (Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga) and were one of just a handful of acts to place two singles among the year's Top 100 tracks ("You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" and "Black Like Me"). Now these veterans of the 2006 Pitchfork Music Festival join another very select group: Artists making a return engagement.

Dinosaur Jr.

J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph were key players in the mid-to-late 80s Amerindie underground. They pushed the boundaries of song structure and melody in the context of post-punk rock, often departing into freeform noise before returning to familiar distorted progressions and J’s signature vocal mewl. Having spawned a generation of enthusiasts and imitators, the band can lay a claim to the creation of what became marketed as “alternative”; its influence on Nirvana was palpable. After more than a decade of separations and side projects, Dinosaur Jr. reunited in 2005 and released Beyond in 2007.

Spiritualized

Frontman Jason Pierce has been fooling with the psychedelic for decades. The former Spacemen 3 singer-guitarist has made a career of combining the minimal with the entrancing, spending months in the studio tweaking his tracks in search of the perfect balance of trance and space. Spiritualized emerged in 1991 with a string of EP releases before their debut full-length; the band’s acknowledged masterpiece Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space appeared in 1997. Following five years after the band’s previous release and three years since Pierce had a near-death experience in which he was revived twice, Spiritualized’s Songs in A&E is slated for release in June.

M.Ward

Ward’s sound combines folk, rock, country and blues with vivid lyrics delivered in a ghostly rasp. Long recognized and boosted by such admirers as Howe Gelb of Giant Sand and Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, he gained a greater public profile through dedicated touring and a recurring collaboration with Jim James (My Morning Jacket) and Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes). His recent Merge albums Transfiguration of Vincent, Transistor Radio, and Post-War pair dusky folk and loping pop, while his live shows put the spotlight on Ward’s fleet-fingered guitar work. This year he made another splash as the producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist partner to Zooey Deschanel in the duo She & Him.

Ghostface and Raekwon

There’s an assumed credibility when you’re a member of the Wu-Tang Clan, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to prove yourself—and these emcees have done it time and again with such solo records as Ghost’s Supreme Clientele and Fishscale and Rae’s landmark Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… (on which Ghost essentially co-starred). Ghost is a frenetic lyricist with a clownish side who favors rhyming over 70s soul samples; Rae is verbal roughneck whose rhymes read like a cinematic street nightmare. In 2007 they shared the spotlight on the Wu’s 8 Diagrams; Ghost also dropped The Big Doe Rehab, and both discs landed on Pitchfork’s Top 50 albums of the year.

Les Savy Fav

Formed in 1995 by friends who met at the Rhode Island School of Design, Les Savy Fav took its early inspiration from the Clash, Pixies, and Fugazi, but over the past decade the now-Brooklyn-based band has made its own name with a series of scorching singles, albums (most recently last fall's Let's Stay Friends), and wild shows. LSF live is both hard-hitting and hilarious, thanks mostly to frontman Tim Harrington's unpredictable antics. This summer the Pitchfork Music Festival brings the band back to the scene of its infamous 2005 Union Park appearance.

The Apples in Stereo

Founding members of the Elephant Six pop collective along with Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel, the Apples released their self-titled debut in 1994. Fun Trick Noisemaker appeared the next year and brought attention to the band’s hallmark blend of Beatles- and Beach Boys-inspired psych-pop. Frontman Robert Schneider’s bubbly charisma and gift for gilt-edged hooks have remained touchstones ever since; those traits are sharp as ever on the band’s recent disc New Magnetic Wonder.

Boris

Psych rock, stoner rock, hardcore, sludge, or ambient—listen to the Boris discography and you’re bound to hear a bit of everything. The genre-defying Japanese trio shifts styles so much they’re said to credit their albums in a kind of code: Those attributed to “BORIS” are likely to lean to the conventional, while discs tabbed “Boris” or “boris” edge to the experimental. The band’s best-known disc Pink was released in 2005 but gained broad distribution in North America in 06; it won a rave from Pitchfork, which dubbed the threesome “balls-out riff-makers.”

Dirty Projectors

Bandleader, arranger, singer, and songwriter David Longstreth is the one constant in a group that draws on a plethora of influences and features a different set of musicians on each release. The band’s latest venture, Rise Above, reimagines (not covers) Black Flag’s 1981 album Damaged; Longstreth used his high-school memories of the music to write his own interpretation. The effort garnered rave reviews, including from Pitchfork, which predicted it “will drop plenty of jaws” and voted the title track among its top 100 songs of 07.

Times New Viking

From Columbus, Oh., and Matador Records comes the six-string crunch, cymbal splash and brooding lyrics of Adam Elliott, Beth Murphy, and Jared Phillips, aka Times New Viking. The band's new disc Rip It Off glows with the giddiness of just making noise—and as Pitchfork notes, "In a time when technology makes professional-sounding recordings accessible to even the smallest bands, that exuberance is refreshing."

Cut Copy

Started in 2001 as a solo venture by Aussie songwriter, producer and DJ Dan Whitford, Cut Copy eventually expanded to include guitarist Tim Hoey and drummer Mitchell Scott. Their contributions to the band’s first full-length, Bright Like Neon Love, blended with Whitford’s synths and samples to yield a bit of rock familiarity within an abstract but danceable electro cocoon. Cut Copy’s new disc In Ghost Colours recalls the airy AM pop of the 70s; Pitchfork lauded the “synth-pop shimmer” of lead single “Lights & Music.”

Bon Iver

Justin Vernon decamped to a cabin near his rural roots in northwestern Wisconsin for some rest and relaxation. What he got was For Emma, Forever Ago, a powerful, simple, reflective and heartfelt debut built from haunting guitar and layered vocals—minimalist tools that enhance, not obscure, Vernon's introspective lyrics. Pitchfork dubbed it "a ruminative collection of songs full of natural imagery and acoustic strums—the sound of a man left alone with his memories and a guitar."

Dodos

The brainchild of San Francisco multi-instrumentalist Meric Long and percussionist Logan Kroeber, the eclectic young Dodos draw on everything from folk and blues to metal, African drumming and the Javanese gamelan. Pitchfork calls the duo's debut disc Visiter "one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008," and adds that they "hit with a full-band force … in their astounding live sets."

Occidental Brothers Dance Band International

A collective of Chicago-scene veterans and acclaimed African musicians (including former members of the legendary Western Diamonds), the Occidental Brothers blend indie rock and jazz with the West African stylings of soukous, highlife, and rumba and sing in both English and the Ghanaian dialect Twi. Their monthly showcases in Chicago are known as spirited dance parties, while their festival appearances continue to win them new fans.

King Khan & His Shrines

Were it biologically possible for George Clinton and Sun Ra to procreate, King Khan could be their seed. His backing Shrines feature the percussion of soul legend Ron Streeter (who backed Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, and others) and horns from Simon Wojan (Cloudland Canyon), “Germany’s Coltrane” Ben Ra, and rockabilly sax man Big Fred Rollercoaster. The band’s latest release WHAT IS?! and the track “Welfare Bread” both scored spots on Pitchfork’s year-end lists in 2007.

El Guincho

Pablo Diaz-Reixa left his Canary Islands home at the age of 14 to pursue his dream of being a soccer and tennis star, but after six years of wandering through Europe, Pablo wound up back in Spain in pursuit of another passion: music. Over time he adopted the DJ moniker El Guincho and became known for melding island, worldbeat, Afropop, doo-wop, dance sounds and more. His ’07 offering Alegranza was released in Europe in late 2007 and topped multiple Spanish top ten lists.

HEALTH

Like No Age, HEALTH hail from the Los Angeles noise-rock scene, and the band's self-titled debut album was recorded at its home club-slash-epicenter, the Smell. On album, HEALTH merge synths, drums, haunting, repetitive lyrics, and an odd permutation of a guitar pedal and microphone called a zoothorn; live, they unleashe a torrent of raw energy and lets it rip.

High Places

This feel-good collaboration between multi-instrumentalist Rob Barber and vocalist Mary Pearson formed in Brooklyn just two years ago, but their eponymous 2007 EP has already earned acclaim and comparisons to past primitivists like Beat Happening. Pitchfork deemed that disc's four brief songs "intimate enough to sleep in, rhythmic enough to dance to; lo-fi and simple, but strange enough to get lost in."

Mahjongg

The Chicago-based groove-traffickers and recent K Records signees of Mahjongg match tribal beats to trebly guitar licks á la Talking Heads. Per Pitchfork, they've "taken up the noble mission of keeping their home city weird. No one knows exactly what to expect from any given performance of theirs, and they've kept up the struggle of cultivating that spontaneity on record," where they're "plastic pop purveyors, afro-poppers, dance-punkers, and whatever else the hell they feel like."