Goldfrapp, Head First (Mute) Whereas Goldfrapp’s early material was introspective and cool, the band’s fifth album just might melt the dancefloor and everyone trampling it. Head First is a giddy, 80s-inspired dance offering that, if not exactly reinventing the disco ball, is a blissful shout-out to ABBA’s heavily stylized, grandiose glam. Lead singer Alison Goldfrapp exercises her Olympian voice with throaty gymnastics, only occasionally overshadowed by partner Will Gregory’s pounding bass line. Songs such as “Believer” and “Alive” provide Saturday Night Fever-worthy moments, but the jubilant and kitschy “Rocket” is the album’s gold standard.—Ashley Simpson

Previously: Le Tigre! Sia! Goldfrapp! Ladytron! And now Christina Aguilera, like a ventriloquist, has managed to stay tight-lipped while intimating how she's also collaborated with Santigold and M.I.A.. But specific details about the Best Album Ever otherwise remain cloudy. We don't even have a release date, although a viral should be forthcoming -- it usually is.

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.