Bands on Exploding In Sound often know how to shred — Ovlov, Jobber, Washer, to name a few. Two Inch Astronaut were full of headbanging-worthy rippers before breaking up in 2018. Lucky for us, they shared two new songs to celebrate 10 years of their album Foulbrood, one of which is the explosive “Humorist.” Catchy riffs ricochet through the cheeky tune before it inevitably morphs into something much messier and bigger, serving as a volcanic finale to a memorable band. —Danielle

How much of your morality is based on conviction, and how much is it determined by whatever is socially acceptable at the moment? In “Crispy Skin,” the opening track from Squid’s newly announced Cowards LP, Ollie Judge imagines a world where cannibalism has become the norm. “Am I the bad one? Yeah, yes I am,” he sings in the refrain. “Thought it could change me/ Well, here I am.” It’s a song about big ideas and difficult quandaries, with a soundtrack that goes hard, but in twisty and unconventional ways. Squid begin “Crispy Skin” with a relentless guitar-based groove, tear everything down to some plaintive piano, then build it back up into a spindly, propulsive post-rock monster jam. It’s some of the most accessible artsy-fartsy indie rock I’ve encountered lately, striking a perfect balance between knotty weirdness and big-tent exhilaration. —Chris

The title sounds like something you’d hear from a Peloton instructor. The music sounds at least a little bit like something a Peloton instructor might play at you, too: Steady tempo, nervous keyboards, breathless rapping, occasional bursts of melody. You could play “Keep Pushing” while working out, and it would have the intended effect. But this is not some Peloton shit. As with all things clipping., the meanings pile up on top of each other. Daveed Diggs discusses the international flow of drugs and money as a ceaseless, soul-crushing hamster-wheel. Queasy acid synths fight it out with plangent pianos and impressionistic strings has humanity struggles against the systems that it’s built for itself. The ideas clash, but the energy never lags. We don’t know much about clipping.’s upcoming cyberpunk album yet, but we know it’ll be something special. —Tom

Will Kennedy wrote Lily Of The Valley, his new album as 22º Halo, about his wife’s brain cancer diagnosis. Through gentle, rich indie rock, the Philadelphia musician chronicles those endless doctor’s appointments, constantly waiting for test results, and all the moments of uncertainty in-between. “Her cancer feels endlessly serious to me, and yet when I’m around other people, I can’t stop making jokes,” Kennedy has explained.

“You’ll never stop being clever, I swear,” Kennedy sings on album highlight “Cobwebs.” It’s a hospital dispatch backdropped by winding guitar lines and hushed, upbeat drums, each instrument melding together until they almost mirror the beeps and erroneous clatter you might hear from the recovery room. But there’s a hopeful quality to the way he recalls these memories, even as his eyes catch his wife’s copy of When Breath Becomes Air — Paul Kalanithi’s posthumously-published memoir about battling cancer himself. “I’m trying to believe that we’re good,” he repeats, and he sounds at peace. —Abby

Superheaven themselves were long gone — a fuzzed-out suburban-Philly post-hardcore band who mostly played to small crowds during their first life and who broke up a full decade ago. But time does strange things, and so does the internet. Over the last year or two, the band’s 2013 song “Longest Daughter” became a random-ass TikTok hit and Yeat sample source. Superheaven started playing regular reunion shows in 2022, and now here they are once again, with a prime storm-surge grunge-wallow about the feeling that everything is wrong, that it’s all out of your hands. They would know. When they didn’t even exist as a band, Superheaven won some mysterious lottery, and now their first song back is an anguished howl about how nobody’s in charge. We are all fate’s playthings, and Superheaven can’t change that. What they can do is crank out some sick-ass ’90s riffs, and sick-ass ’90s riffs can make the impassive, uncaring, brutally random void feel that much more bearable. —Tom