The Three Songs You Need to Download This Week

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There’s a lot of music online–more than most people have time to keep up with. That’s why you’ve got us. Every week, we’ll point you toward three excellent new downloads or videos from chart-topping stars, cult favorites and unknown geniuses.

1. Apparently the “playing the entire new album live as a webcast” thing is catching on: last week we mentioned Iron & Wine doing it, and this week the Decemberists played the entirety of their #1 album The King Is Dead at Oregon Public Broadcasting’s studios. The whole performance can be viewed as a webcast at NPR’s site, or played as streaming audio.

2. The pop/noise duo Sleigh Bells made a fantastically odd, immediate, intense album last year, and now the Philadelphia hip-hop producer Diplo has gotten in on the act too. He’s posted his remix of “Tell ‘Em” on the Mad Decent blog, for streaming or download; it’s got the dance party/headache/inside-a-video-game vibe of the original version, augmented with a juicy beat.

3. Destroyer’s Kaputt album disassembles the soft pop of the ’80s, and makes those pillowy sounds curdled and arty. The video for the title track, directed by Dawn Garcia (and on display at Pitchfork TV), does the same for soft-focus ’80s music videos–it’s like an old Duran Duran clip reprocessed into the stuff of nightmares, featuring synchronized dancers, pyramids, a flying blue whale, and a lot of people lip-synching the song, none of whom are Destroyer singer Dan Bejar.

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