Alternative Rock music

Cranking up the alternative rock heat: Rural France's SLOTHS delivers their jangliest, most baroque album yet — organ, horns and mellotron intact — while still honoring their "Pavement playing Teenage Fanclub" mission statement. Publicity Department's S. Michael Brook And The Steam-Powered Trains brings crunchy guitars and two-part harmonies, power pop influences distorted through 90s alt-rock sensibilities. Jacob's Fall's The War We Miss? is playful then sinfully counterintuitive, theatrical yet somber — symphonic German rock at its most captivating. I Ya Toyah's Closer rounds things out with industrial-cinematic intensity, reimagining Nine Inch Nails as a haunting meditation on validation and lost identity.