Rock
Joshua Boydston
Stillwater rock outfit Taddy Porter must have been blissfully ignorant of the sophomore slump that’s taken down so many bands before it. Stay Golden not only matches the group’s 2010 self-titled debut, but exceeds it in about every possible way.

Rock
Zach Hale
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: The band is called The Hitt Boyz, whose latest release is an EP titled AlphaCat, and, yes, the artwork is kind of amazing.

Rock
Joshua Boydston
One gets the feeling that Depth & Current understands the dangers of having too much of a good thing.

Hip Hop/Rap
Joshua Boydston
Tulsa rap export Johnny Polygon made a splash with 2010’s Rebel Without Applause. Now he’s back with his most fully realized effort to date.

Rock
Joshua Boydston
It takes most bands a couple of years to put out two EPs. Oklahoma City garage rockers Cosmostanza did that in less than six months.

Rock
Zach Hale
It's pretty clear that The Grown Ups know what good music sounds like. When the band ceases its emulation of good music and lets its creativity flow naturally, the Oklahoma City collective's new album, Dark Hearts, offers flashes of genuine talent.

Folk
Zach Hale
Take away the album name — and its cover — and you’d never know Kid Face was released by a 26-year-old. The most alluring weapon in her arsenal, Samantha Crain’s voice resides somewhere between Nico’s husky croon and Joni Mitchell’s tuneful elegance.

Pop
Alyssa Grimley
Amanda Earhart’s sound is hard to categorize. Think today’s pop, but with fewer thump-thump club beats and synthesizers, traded for more undoctored vocals and guitar. Throw in a dash of country twang and a sprinkling of piano and violin, and that’s a start.

Rock
Joshua Boydston
Black Canyon is a different alt-country band than the one you heard on its 2011 debut, Battlefield Darlins. Those songs were written by band leader Jake Morisse and Jordan Herrera, who has since split off and formed Young Readers, sounding as if The Decemberists had come from Enid instead of Portland.

Rock
Joshua Boydston
Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kings of Leon are two of the biggest rock groups in the world, but you don’t see many bands trying to put the two together. It works better than you might think on Oklahoma City three-piece Ripple Green’s new EP, A Lungful, which speaks worlds of the members’ respective talents.

Hip Hop/Rap
Ryan Querbach
Harlem, New York, rapper A$AP Rocky has released his highly anticipated debut album, Long.Live.A$AP.

Pop
Joshua Boydston
Modern pop music is awful: vapid odes to partying, phoned-in love ballads and bastardized house beats bubbling under some flavor-of-the-moment with a prettier face than voice.

Rock
Joshua Boydston
The landlocked state of Oklahoma might not seem the most likely breeding ground for excellent surf-punk bands, but it’s bore more than a few in recent years, although none so fabulously named as Tulsa’s The Fabulous St. Knicholas Cage.

Rock
Louis Fowler
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a raucous good time with Citizen Fred’s self-titled disc. With guttural vocals and crunching guitars, it sounds like the background music to a scene in a buddy-cop film where the mismatched partners go into a sleazy strip club to shake down perps.

Rock
Louis Fowler
I know most purists would look middle-aged white guys playing soul music and immediately pass — I can’t count how many times I have — but damned if Dirty Red & the Soulshakers don’t rock the joint for all of its juke, lack of pigment notwithstanding.