The New Troubadours: Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling wander the globe soaking up inspiration for their fresh take on folk.

For songwriters with such a precise way with words, Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling are all over the map these days. “I feel really connected to all the places that I’ve been and the images and stories that I’ve picked up along the way,” says Flynn, originally from South Africa, who met his kindred spirit and touring mate Marling in London, after the Hampshire-raised beauty moved away from her home at the age of 16. “I forgave myself for being a kid,” she says of the songs on her Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Alas I Cannot Swim, released after her eighteenth birthday, featuring her smoky, intoxicating alto. “Everything up until then had been a massive self-indulgence, very teenage.”

Of Montreal, Skeletal Lamping (Polyvinyl). On their ninth studio album, these melodic misnomers from Athens, Georgia, continue to build upon their boffo brand of carnival pop. “Nonpareil of Favor” boils over with typical bubbly fare, anchored by frontman Kevin Barnes’s charming falsetto. On “For Our Elegant Caste,” an unexpected experiment in indie funk, Barnes lilts, “We can do it soft-core if you want, but you should know that I go both ways.” Similarly, “Gallery Piece” features lyrics like, “I want to hurt your pride, I want to slap your face, I want to paint your nails,” a perfectly bathetic trajectory for a perfectly contradictory band. —Nick Haramis

Brazilian Girls, New York City (Verve Forecast). As the title of their art-groovy third album suggests, Brazilian Girls make music for urban spaces: airports, nightclubs, deserted streets. The trio -- only one of whom is female, and Italian -- are residents of New York City but citizens of the world. There are songs here in four languages, about “St. Petersburg,” “Berlin” and a plethora of cities name-checked in “Internacional.” Riff genius, immaculate drummer and fashion diva: The Girls resemble Blondie more and more every year. And that’s a good thing. -- Evelyn McDonnell

The U.K. chanteuse takes off her disco vixen guise and slips into something decidedly more intimate.

Alison Goldfrapp is retiring glitter and stepping off the dance floor—at least for now. After 2006’s lusty breakthrough Supernature, the British chanteuse, who records as Goldfrapp with musical partner Will Gregory, was poised to sex-up the electronic music scene. Instead, she explains from a Paris hotel, she discovered acoustic guitars and even a 17th century harp, which decorates the shimmery “Road to Somewhere” on Seventh Tree, the band’s lovely, hazy fourth album. Surprising? Not exactly, for a band that has both mined burbling electronics and icy, cinematic canvases over the course of three disparate albums. This time, “we wanted to do something more intimate—with more warmth,” Goldfrapp explains about the sonic shift. It’s a stylistic departure, sure, but Seventh Tree is as stylized as anything Goldfrapp has recorded.