New Music You Should Hear: Clams Casino, Cold Cave, Tune-Yards, Staccato Du Mal

You may know Clams Casino as the guy who sampled Imogen Heap and made one of the best rap beats ever, Lil B's "I'm God" (aka Soulja Boy's "2 Milli"). Clams has a penchant for chopping up songs by wacky female pop stars (Björk, the aforementioned Heap) and working with gremlin-voiced male MCs. This combination makes for a truly awesome male-female tension that will change the way you think about rap music. In case you think I'm laying it on a little thick: Clams will be one of this decade's best and most influential producers and will live in a jillion-dollar house that makes Versailles look like a stack of shipping pallets. - ALEX DUNBAR

Nothing screams "Slap me, please" louder than a privileged white kid dabbling in world music (see photo above). But luckily for Merrill Garbus, whokill is superfun. Here she rips highlife riffs from her friends Dirty Projectors and then trolley-dashes up the aisles of melody and random weirdness, before whipping it all into shape while you're still wondering whether it's worth mentioning Vampire Weekend. – HELGA POPPIN

Maybe it's the difference between recording an album on your laptop all on your lonesome and piecing together a record with folk like Daryl Palumbo from Glassjaw and noise barbarian Dominick "Prurient" Fernow at your beck and call, but Cherish the Light Years is a big step up from Cold Cave's debut in terms of both confidence and skull-cracking intensity. Surging synths and S&M dungeon beats rub sex organs with big choruses, and even without being able to see any of the participants you are quite clear that absolutely no one is smiling, or has smiled for a very long time. – WALTER DA SOFTY

A rather dark, more abrasive example of electronic postpunk from New York minimal-synth stalwarts Wierd, this time courtesy of Miami resident Ramiro Jeancarlo, who is seemingly out to prove that the warm states do it even colder. Pieced together from primitive synths and bits of sheet metal and shrapnel salvaged from the bottom of Cabaret Voltaire's toolbox, it's lonely and abject even by the oppressively downbeat standards of this stuff, but pulse-racing in its brutish, roughshod simplicity. – CHARLES HANSON