Smoke or Fire is back after a tour of the world, a lineup change and months spent working on their sophomore full-length, This Sinking Ship. The band has always kept their fans alert over the years, but things are more concrete than ever for Smoke or Fire and their sound remains true. Clearly influenced by predecessors like Hot Water Music and Avail, these young upstarts also blend in some additional elements of Americana with their hints of The Replacements and Springsteen.

This Atlanta quartet nods to its arty post-punk inspirations - Joy Division, Echo & The Bunnymen, Remain In Light-era Talking Heads - and then fashions those influences into something fresh and novel. Likewise, video director David Plauger's inspired clip for Snowden's "Like Bullets" shares some of the evocative minimalism and stark electro-primitive beauty of the "Once In A Lifetime" video. In execution, though, it's completely modern. For starters, the "Like Bullets" video contains projections, but Plauger doesn't make use of a green-screen. Instead, he's dressed up a quartet of actors in black body-stockings, and these humans become the screens on which the footage of the band rolls.

But since the actors in the leotards don't move in the same way that the people in the footage do, there's a fascinating disconnect between viewer expectation and the images in the clip. Heads seem to turn at crazy angles, group members swap bodies, limbs and torsos ripple and warp. A soloing guitar appears on the chest of one actor; the face of another becomes the flat surface of a kick-drum struck by a foot-pedal. Finally, in a striking image straight from a sci-fi film, the heads of the four human-shaped screens explode - and the images of the musicians fall back, heads and shoulders slumping down the torsos of the actors' bodies.It's all unsettling and hypnotic, and further proof that the many of the best videos are built from simple ideas that are inexpensive to execute. That resourcefulness is characteristic of both Geoffrey Plauger's Refrigerator Art production company (Plauger also did the clip for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's "Over And Over Again") and Snowden themselves. You can check Snowden's tour schedule at http://www.snowden.info/

They've proved it onstage: Sohodolls has a well-deserved reputation for furious, chaotic, in-your-face live performances. Maya and her bandmates have taken their act all over Europe, shared bills for Daft Punk, The Charlatans, and The Magic Numbers, and even made a successful swing through California earlier this year. They'll close the summer and begin the autumn with a whirlwind U.K. tour; the Sohodolls will be playing somewhere in the British Isles almost every day. Ribbed Music For A Numb Generation, their soon-to-be-released debut album, captures the electronic anarchy - and the rough humour - of a Sohodolls show. Producers Robert Harder (Babyshambles, Sunshine Underground) and Steve Lyon (Depeche Mode, The Cure) have thickened and deepened the band's sound: they've kept the raw electroclash energy of the early singles, but added to it full rock-band dynamics. The result is already setting the London underground on fire; U.S. domination seems but a heartbeat away.

Video director Joe Marcantonio is another rapidly-emerging artist; barely 26 years old, he's already shot clips for some of the London's hottest new acts, including Jamie T, Larrikin Love, and Bobby Cook. His vibrant clip for "Right And Right Again" exposes the dangerous, hazy glamour of Sohodolls and their milieu. Marcantonio's camera twists in and out of focus; the corners of the frames blur, sharpen, and distort. He first shoots Maya in rich black and white - she sits, garters on, in a dressing room, and purrs at the camera through the gauzy filter. But by the time the song hits its hooky chorus, the Sohodolls are captured live in performance, and neon-bright beams of primary color stream over the shoulders of the band. Maya doesn't miss a beat, though - she keeps right on teasing the lens, beckoning seductively as the images slide into a red-hot blur.

These days, it seems like everybody is scoring big hits with songs about strippers: T-Pain, Kanye West, 50 Cent. But must you be raging with testosterone in order to pen an ode to voyeurism? Hardly. Leave it to the deliriously naughty Maya von Doll - lead singer and agent provocateur of the Sohodolls - to bring the girls in on the action. In "Stripper", the stunning London vocalist crashes the club and shows the boys how it's done, claiming the sexiest dancers as her own. "Hey, stripper, I want to be your mister", she coos, slipping some bills into that overstuffed g-string. "I have the right to pull the girls", she insists; it's a pout, a challenge, an anthem, a sexy statement of purpose.

American television producers have taken notice. Alexandra Patsavas, the music impresario for such notable shows as The OC and Grey's Anatomy, recently paired "Stripper" with an episode of Gossip Girl to electrifying effect. Although the band has become a mainstay on the British alternative charts, this was, for most stateside music fans, a first exposure to Sohodolls's music. The upcoming U.S. release of Ribbed Music For A Numb Generation is likely to familiarize American audiences with Maya von Doll and her bandmates. Rarely does an electropop band make music so immediate, so infectious, and so effortlessly provocative.

That is, in part, because it's the rare electropop band that rocks this hard. Like most Sohodolls songs, "Stripper" is built around a huge and irresistible guitar riff. The British quartet decorates its mix with machine-drums and spacy synthesizer textures, but the center of this track is its swaggering six-string. Maya von Doll's performance is simultaneously authoritative and alluring (or perhaps it's so alluring because of her command); her portrayal of a sexual adventurer in the decadent dens of London is wholly convincing, and surreptitiously exciting.

It helps that Maya von Doll is as gorgeous as she is. Many pop stars are beautiful, but the Sohodolls frontwoman is absolutely made for the camera - she's got a model's face, and a body suitable for a high-end... well, for a high-end stripper. Should she ever take to the pole in public, it's safe to say she'd come away with a thong-ful of cash. Tim Mattia (Alamos, Biffy Clyro) makes the Sohodolls frontwoman the focus of his titillating clip for "Stripper", although her androgynous bandmates make the most of their screen-time, too. They take the stage of an urban cabaret (to frame the clip, a neon sign flashes "pleasures of Soho") and perform their song to a rapt crowd of well-dressed rowdies with carnal appetites. Mattia flashes close-ups of Maya's made-up lips and shining teeth as she sneers into the microphone; it's aggressive, but also undeniably sexual. By the end of the performance, her dress comes off, her flawless shoulders flash under the stagelights, and only a thick strip of gaffer's tape protects her breasts from exposure. It's a testament to her dancing skill - and to her remarkable anatomy - that everything stays perfectly in place.

For those of you who are still too cold to dare to think about the advent of spring, here's a clip that ought to help: a May day condensed into three-minute form by Grammy-nominated director Israel Anthem and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. Never mind that SSLYBY hardly ever plays conventionally "happy" songs: their melodies are radiant enough to brighten up any cloudy afternoon. That tension between wistful, breezy pop melodies and often-melancholy subject matter is one that will be familiar to bands such as The Shins and Rogue Wave. It made Broom, their debut, one of 2006's most welcome surprises - and it's made Pershing, the long-awaited followup, among the underground's most anticipated albums.

Pershing will be out next month, and fans of lovelorn indiepop are already counting the days. While we're waiting, we can all dance to "Think I Wanna Die" - a perfect example of the band's ability to pair the wicked with the sweet. The lead single is a razor-sharp dagger in a jewel-encrusted sheath: the guitars jangle, the drums rattle and bounce, and the members of Somebody Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin chant, coo, and harmonize about the unbearable pain of breakups, miscommunication, and unrequited love. Simultaneously aching and inspiring, "Think I Wanna Die" is about as gorgeous as romantic disillusionment is ever going to get. All heartbreak should sound - and feel - so good. And maybe that's why we love bands like SSLYBY so much: they make the universal experience of relationship trouble seem a little warmer and a little friendlier, and therefore a little easier to bear.

Then again, few of us have ever been dumped as decisively - or as violently - as are the boys of SSLYBY in the clip for "Think I Wanna Die". On the other hand, few of us are lucky enough to date the three frontwomen of Eisley (even on film!), so perhaps on balance, they're even. Israel Anthem, who was nominated for a Grammy award for his video work with Mute Math, teases out the playful subtext of SSLYBY's fatalistic narrative. He pairs an Eisley girl with each member of Somebody Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, and sets the couples loose on a bright spring morning. It's breakfast, and each musician eats from a cereal bowl: one at a kitchen table, one on a swing in the park, and one (incredibly) while riding a bicycle down a country road. The girls - all flirty at first - make romantic overtures toward their boyfriends. But they're eating, or pedaling, or swinging, and, in any event, otherwise engaged. Predictably, the girlfriends become irate, and each takes extreme action. Meanwhile, back in the studio, the members of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin are feeling uncharacteristically aggressive, too, but they're taking it out on their instruments. As the girls slap the musicians' faces and put arrows through their hearts, the guys trash their guitars, swing cymbal stands, and hit the floor with abandon. The girls, Anthem suggests, "torture" the guys, and the guys pour it all into their music.

Adventures In The Underground Journey To The Stars, the latest album from South (and their first for Young American Recordings), is well titled: it really does feel like a trip across the stratosphere. Singer and bassist Joel Cadbury's voice can float elegantly atop the blissed-out mixes, but when necessary, he proves he can shout out an indie rock lead vocal as well as any Britpop frontman. The "You Are One" clip amplifies the gauzy, dizzy and slightly destabilized feel of South's production on Adventures In The Underground Journey To The Stars. It would be misleading to call it psychedelic, but it does put the band - and the viewer - through a resolutely altered state. The entire clip is shot through a distorted lens that warps the faces and bodies of the bandmembers: the closer they get to the center of the screen, the smaller they look. As the musicians address the camera, their heads shrink, disappear altogether, bend and twist, and pull apart like taffy. But this isn't the only effect employed: instead of fluid motion, the video consists of quick, herky-jerky cuts. So "You Are One" leaps from one warped image to the next - instead of flowing toward the corners like oil pressed under glass, the members of South appear to stretch mechanically, their bodies slanting unnaturally to the corners of the screen. Check out this mind bending video!

It's been five years since we last heard from Jason "Spaceman" Pierce, the electrifying, tormented, and otherworldly frontman of Spiritualized - and given the troubling subject matter of his songs, many of us had suspected the worst. Turns out that dark speculation wasn't too far from the truth: Pierce spent much of 2005 in the emergency room, trapped in a life-and-death battle with cranial infection and double pneumonia. The singer-slash-composer won the ultimate prizefight, and he's back with a new set of tales heavily informed by his protracted encounter with his own vexed mortality. Surely it's not right to find utility in the misfortune of others, but if we could pick one artist to journey to the lip of death and report on what he'd seen there, Jason Pierce would be the one.

That's because nobody sings about transcendence and altered states with more authority than Pierce does. His albums with Spiritualized are modern classics not merely because of their bold experimentation, mind-altering phasing effects, and monumental sound - they're also invariably personal, painfully honest, and deeply human. Those who've called Spiritualized a "drug" band have always missed the point (even while reveling in the group's unparalleled trippiness): Pierce's music takes the listener on a voyage beyond the limits of his own quotidian consciousness. Love, sex, religion, and pharmaceuticals are, in the hands of the writer, all metaphors - methods for attaining spiritual freedom. And freedom, as Pierce informs us in "Soul On Fire", is just another word for when you have no one left to hurt.

In interviews, Pierce promised that Songs in A&E would be the work of the Devil, and judging by the sound of "Soul On Fire", he's managed to capture the Archfiend in all of his diabolical glory. The "A&E" of the title aren't just musical keys - they also refer to the accident and emergency ward in which the singer was confined. In his cracked, conversational, and hypnotic voice, Pierce sings of a hurricane blowing through his veins: he's been to the edge, and his performance bears all the hallmarks of terrifying lived experience. Ironically, Spiritualized has never sounded any more glorious than they do here - their unprecedented and vigorous fusion of Brit-pop, space-rock, gospel, old-fashioned R&B, country, blues, and art-psych remains wholly intact here, lurid, radiant, pulsating in vibrant color.

As anybody who has ever spun Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space or Let It Come Down can testify to, Spiritualized's music often feels like a force of nature. Consequently, the bar is set high for any Spiritualized video: it must capture some of the crazed grandeur of Pierce's signature sound. We're thrilled to say that the "Soul On Fire" clip rises to the challenge - it's as breathtakingly beautiful as it is harrowing. The video finds Pierce at rest on a frozen Icelandic landscape, cheek pressed against the glacier as he sings. Wind whips a froth of snow from rocky crags behind him, and the northern lights dance in the sky overhead. Still shots of syringes and medical equipment strongly suggest that Pierce is, in fact, confined to a hospital bed, and that this dizzying vista is, in fact, his internal landscape.