Music

Like to party? Meet Sweet Spirit, a punchy, powerful party band that features up to nine members onstage at any given time. The group's infectious live shows caught the eye of fellow Austinite Britt Daniel from Spoon, who invited Sweet Spirit to open at a bunch of his concerts and championed its full-length debut album, Cokomo, in 2015.

Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page.

When a band whose biggest hits came out in the mid- to late '80s shows up to play a concert in 2017, the first question you have to ask is: Are they going to sound like the band you know and love? When alt-rock icons Pixies played a show at World Cafe Live in May, the answer was: Absolutely.

Starting this Sunday, HBO will devote five hours over four nights to perhaps the unlikeliest and most influential partnership in the modern music industry: rap producer and entrepreneur Dr. Dre and rock producer and music executive Jimmy Iovine. Directed by Allen Hughes, The Defiant Ones charts the duo's influence over music from the '70s on, and begins with a $3 billion deal jeopardized by — of all things — a Facebook post.

Allison Crutchfield has called a lot of bands and collaborations home — but this year, she released her first full-length solo record, Tourist In This Town. As you'll hear in this conversation, putting out music under her own name has been really important to her.

For about a minute, "You're Like Me" sounds as if it's being played in the next room — you could be hearing it through a wall, or maybe your headphones aren't plugged all the way in. Then, it comes roaring into focus: still compact and compressed, still just a guy playing most of the instruments in his bedroom, but just as thunderous as the wiry rock 'n' roll on which Ted Leo first made his name.

The seven-year wait for a new record from Canadian collective Broken Social Scene was well worth it. The crew returned to our studio in great spirits and debuted "Stay Happy," featuring newcomer Ariel Engle, from the new album Hug Of Thunder.

SET LIST

• "Stay Happy"

Lee Bozeman's always been something of a romantic and a provocateur — taunting ("Fame is lust to be loved / And fortune: to live off the fat of the land"), teasing ("Make you gasp / Make your heart skip a beat") and often both at once, with some wisdom woven in ("But some still call it making love / And some believe that'