The new album from the British post-punk group is full of vehement love songs, workshopped over a residency of live performances a year ago in New York.

The Miami-born, French-trained jazz singer earns her second Grammy nomination for her gorgeous new album of classics and original compositions.

Jordy Asher, the producer behind Beyoncé, brings a message of societal change on a début album bridging pop, electronic music, and industrial rock.

After a four-year hiatus, Alan Palomo returns with an album combining Italo-disco, reggae beats, and the æsthetics of late-night sex-hotline commercials.

A new group show at New York’s Christian Berst brings together a collection of outsider artists inspired by—and trying to understand—the natural world.

Draped in a kimono-like red robe drawn up to her collarbones layered over a matching scarlet turtleneck and sporting red claw-shaped nails, Seinabo Sey made her much-anticipated live US début last October during CMJ in New York. Instantly captivating the attention of everyone present, Sey enunciated every syllable, pointing her finger as she hit each note. Front and center, she didn’t need to hide behind heavy production; her voice was more than enough. “Those two times were really surreal,” says Sey, reflecting on the back-to-back nights over the phone from the road somewhere near San Francisco. Five months later, Sey is back in the United States to make her American television début on Conan and to play a sold-out mini-tour—all of which she managed to sandwich between her studio recording sessions. Still almost in awe of her growing success, Sey admits to being caught off guard by her growing audiences. “There are actual fans of music and people who come out just to hear the music!” she says with surprise. “They’re so much fun!”

Leonardo Davicii, Smiley Cyrus, and Putintin are all hilarious figments of Kalle Mattsson’s imagination, mashups that connect portraits of two distinct and distinctive personalities. They can be found, collaged, on Mattsson’s Tumblr page, Buffalo Bill Gates. “I wish I could blame someone else,” Mattsson laughs, “but I just thought of ‘George Michael Jackson’ one day, and then immediately had to see how he looked.”

The derelict is not something one generally associates with beauty. That, however, can’t be said for Esko Männikkö. In “Time Flies,” now on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, the self-taught Finnish photographer exhibits twenty-five photographs pulled from his traveling museum retrospective. Meticulously arranged and cropped, the photographs are a part of Männikkö’s constant search for beauty—what he claims as “the point of everything.”

Propagator of the “Superflat” movement, Takashi Murakami treads past his infamous reputation for creating superficial work in his new show at Gagosian in New York.

At the Philadelphia-based blog YVYNYL’s showcase at Union Pool last week, Lydia Ainsworth took the stage for the first of her eight CMJ shows. Typically staging her live performances like pieces of orchestrated theater, with dancers, an orchestra section, and, on one occasion, a live snake, Ainsworth’s set was noticeably toned down as she stood by her computer and played the keys with the support of only a cellist, violinist, and drummer. Settling into her groove, Ainsworth opened with the ghostly “Malachite,” her voice bellowing through the small venue, fittingly decorated with Halloween décor.