If you haven't heard The War on Drugs' second album, 2011's Slave Ambient, then you're in for a real treat. It's a slow burner, full of understated yet infectiously melancholic grooves; the prevailing mood being of wistfulness, yet it's greatest strength is that it never strays into the whimsical.

New single 'Brothers' is one of the album's best tracks, so if you haven't yet had the pleasure of sampling TWOD yet, this is the perfect place to start. They are also playing at Camden's Electric Ballroom tonight, the 28th, if it takes your fancy.

Buy Slave Ambient by The War On Drugs on iTunes

Lambchop's new album 'Mr M' is, according to the band's creative centre Kurt Wagner, based conceptually around a series of paintings he did that are reproduced on the album's front cover and in its liner notes. But Lamchop have always felt painterly, in a delicate yet definite, a sad yet beautiful way, with sounds traced like light brush strokes, like Ed Hopper maybe, even if Wagner's paintings don't actually look anything like you'd expect to from listening to the music. They're all black and white, and intricate pen-like drawings.

New single 'Gone Tomorrow' is instead more interested in the whole, rather than the detail. It's seven minute run-time is wholly dedicated to creating something evocative, from it's opening to plucked country guitar to closing drum beat. It works around two opposing halves; the first three minutes setting up the refrain, and the last four minutes abstracting it in a long breakdown.

Buy Mr. M by Lambchop on iTunes

The music of Beirut is synonymous with the exoticism and romanticism of a forgotten, pre-globalisation world; it's pictures and motifs are no more interested in the verisimilitude of what's dealt with than early ethnographic images of maps emblazoned with 'here be monsters'. What Beirut's music does is instead conjure moods and ambiences inspired by places, times, epochs; from 2006's 'Gulag Orkestar' a Balkan / Slavic inspired record, or 2007's 'Flying Club Cup' which was an homage to a picture-postcard France. His most recent effort though, 'The Rip Tide' though, was more about the exploration of home, as seen on tracks like 'East Harlem' and 'Sante Fe' - both of which explored two places of importance to the singer. The second single to be taken from 'The Rip Tide', 'Vagabonds' is a three minute, melancholic, piece of horn and piano music and is utterly beautiful.

Beirut play this year's Field Day festival in June