Stephen Thompson

Making Movies features two sets of musical brothers with a passion for protest music and a high-profile collaborator in Panamanian superstar Rubén Blades.

The Parisian guitar-pop band Marble Arch wouldn't have felt out of place on a college-radio playlist 30 years ago. But it still feels modern, sweetly rendered and utterly, hookily approachable.

Marem Ladson obsessed over American pop and folk while growing up in Spain. She sings in English and Spanish, but her sumptuous hooks and sweetly lilting vocals form a language unto themselves.

When Nadia Reid moved from New Zealand to the U.S., she felt a deep sense of alienation and isolation — feelings that naturally bled into her beautifully, reverberantly melancholy music.

For Lightning Bug, singer-songwriter Audrey Kang lets her voice swirl into a larger enchanting whole — busy, noisy, shoegaze-y concoctions in which her lyrical intentions remain opaque.

Grrrl Gang's members embrace the jangly charms of Scottish indie-pop bands like The Pastels while adding their own spry, spiky twists.

Leslie Bear's sound is perfectly suited to ambivalent nostalgia. In "Sweetheart," she sets reflections on an old love against guitar lines that sound like the musical equivalent of faded postcards.

The artist known as fuvk is named for a typo and pronounced in a radio-unfriendly manner. Her song "Skipper" is an enchanting fragment of folk-pop breeziness.

Nobody's Girl takes three hardworking veteran Austin singer-songwriters and assembles them into a countrified folk-pop supergroup with a knack for choruses that soar.

As Field Medic, Kevin Patrick Sullivan uses the sparest ingredients — an acoustic guitar, sparse drum-machine beats, an unadorned voice — to build lo-fi folk songs that crackle with vibrant intimacy.

On Black Aura My Sun, Deserta — the latest project of Saxon Shore guitarist Matthew Doty — uses whispery vocals as a garnish for a dish centered on guitars, guitars and more beautiful guitars.

Hearkening back to the classic likes of Black Sabbath and Motörhead, the group pummels hypnotically, soars majestically and straight-up brings the damn thunder.

Elizabeth Moen wraps "Headgear" in an arrangement that sparkles agreeably, but Moen herself is the song's radiant star.

The German electro-pop band Cosby spins out slithery hooks as efficiently as it confounds search engines.

Fran's Maria Jacobson knows her way around a curveball. Take "So Surreal," in which grungy guitars churn ominously before giving way to a jaunty, sprightly vocal by the song's 15-second mark

Luke De-Sciscio found his songwriting voice the old-fashioned way: by writing dozens upon dozens of folk songs, spread out across a decade, often while living on a boat with no electricity or heat.

Petrol Girls' sonic intensity is barely contained by the boundaries of a single song; the band's rage at corrupt and exploitative systems is never contained, period

It's hard to pin down Porridge Radio's sound from song to song, or even from moment to moment.

Quinn Christopherson's songs sketch out raw, vivid character studies that reflect on his family, addiction and the dramatic shift in perspective that took place when he came out as a trans man.

Looking at a ukulele, the instrument shouldn't be able to do everything it does in Taimane Gardner's hands.