Well, March turned out to be a tough month for me to blog much, but it was a great month for new music – I originally had over 30 tracks on this playlist and had to fight just to get it down to 23, including the four metal tracks at the end, which is the most I’ve ever included on one of these updates. We even got surprise (to me, at least) tracks from Broods, Royal Blood, and Corinne Bailey Rae. The April list may be a big shorter because I added some songs here that came out last Friday, but I didn’t want to wait another month to put them on a list.

Bob Mould – The End of Things. The former Husker Du lead singer is back with his best solo effort since Black Sheets of Rain, showing some of the same old ferocity that characterized his best power-pop work from two decades ago.

Royal Blood – Where Are You Now. Royal Blood had my #1 song of 2014, “Out of the Black,” and their sound hasn’t changed at all on this single from the critically-panned HBO series Vinyl.

The Kills – Doing It To Death. My list of the top 100 songs of the first decade of the 2000s missed the Kills’ 2008 song “Sour Cherry,” which I didn’t hear for the first time until about a year ago. Anyway, this is the sultry lead single from their album Ash & Ice, due out June 3rd.

The Struts – Kiss This. So my friend Pete, whom I’ve known since the sixth grade, and I have long had a huge overlap in our musical tastes, and we’ve both stayed into music into our dotage, so when we talk we nearly always end up chatting about what we’ve heard lately. I had dinner with Pete and another friend from high school on Friday night, and I mentioned some of the bands on this month’s playlist. When I mentioned the Struts without a ton of enthusiasm, because I like this song but recognize it’s kind of cliched and familiar, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “yeah.” That’s about right.

Bleached – Sour Candy. Bleached, now a trio, seems like they might be on the verge of a breakout with the first two singles from their sophomore album Welcome the Worms, which just came out on Friday. Their sense of melody is more in the front of things on this record, so it’s less hard-edged although still punk-influenced.

The Last Shadow Puppets – Aviation. I’m a little concerned this LSP album isn’t going to live up to expectations, as Alex Turner’s incredible ability to craft sharp hooks hasn’t been evident enough on the first three singles. “Miracle Aligner,” the third, is probably the worst LSP song I’ve heard. This song is somewhere in the middle; the sound is right, but where’s the big catchy melody?

Jake Bugg – Gimme The Love. This seems more like the Jake Bugg of Shangri-La, with clever, fast-sung lyrics and a solid riff, although it doesn’t quite rock like “What Doesn’t Kill You” or hypnotize like “Lighning Bolt.” His third album drops on June 17th.

Broods – Free. This brother/sister duo had one of my favorite albums of 2014, and they’re incorporating more electronic sounds into their sophomore album, expected later this year. This lead single has the electronic drum beat behind Georgia Nott’s voice, but she’s showcased as well as ever here – and that’s key, since her voice is by far their strongest asset.

Corinne Bailey Rae – Stop Where You Are. Bailey Rae is releasing her first album of new music in six years, The Heart Speaks in Whispers, on May 13th, only her third album overall and second since the overdose of her first husband, Jason Rae, in 2008. (She has since remarried.) The Grammy-winning singer’s voice remains in top form on this lead single, so while I’ve never loved the smooth-jazz style of her music, I could listen to her sing all day.

Ten Fé – Elodie. This British duo has released several singles of meditative, dreamy indie-pop that reminds me a bit of The War on Drugs if you dialed down the Dylan a bit.

The Boxer Rebellion – Big Ideas. I like the Boxer Rebellion’s sound, but their music often seems to lack big hooks, outside of their outstanding 2013 single “Diamonds.” This song isn’t quite as catchy but does offer some early U2 nods in the chorus.

HÆLOS – Separate Lives. This London trio’s sound reminds me of the mid/early 1990s trip-hop scene if you crossed it with some of the vocal styles of more classic R&B; the contrast between the sparseness of the verses and the lush textures of the chorus is the song’s greatest appeal even without a single huge hook.

The War On Drugs – Touch of Grey. Speaking of TWOD, the amazing thing about this cover of the Grateful Dead’s only pop hit is that vocalist/guitarist Adam Granduciel manages to make it sound like it was always a War on Drugs song and not something written by a band with its own distinctive sound.

D.A.R.K. – Curvy. This is a bad band name. Comprising Cranberries lead singer Dolores O’Riordan and Smiths bassist Andy Rourke, the group will release its debut album, Science Agrees, in late May, and this lead single sounds less like either of their original acts than it does like a New Order track.

Black Honey – All My Pride. Psychedelic power-pop. I actually know nothing about the group other than this song.

Autolux – Brainwasher. I mean, I knew Autolux was weird, but this song sounds like someone falling down a flight of stairs, and the new album is called Pussy’s Dead, so it’s as if they’re trying to prove they’re even weirder than we thought.

Mourn – Storyteller. Hinds get all the indie love right now, but they’re not the only important band coming out of Barcelona, as Mourn – three girls and one guy, as opposed to Hinds’ all-female roster – have a similar dissonant, jangly, post-punk sound, but with better musicianship. I do like Hinds, but there’s almost a sense that they’re still learning to play and write music, whereas Mourn are much further along as musicians.

White Lung – Kiss Me When I Bleed. This Canadian punk quartet also looks primed for a breakout this year, between the strength of this single and the January release “Hungry.” It’s heavy, fast, and very catchy.

Thrice – Blood On The Sand. That is indeed Riley Breckenridge of the Productive Outs podcast on drums; the post-punk icons’ ninth album is due out later this year.

Anup Sastry – Enigma. A progressive-metal drummer who’s part of Monuments and has also been a member Skyharbor and Intervals, Sastry has released a five-track EP of instrumental “groove metal” or djent or whatever you want to call it. I happen to like this style when it’s not ruined by aggro vocals.

Voivod – Post Society. Voivod hasn’t been the same band for me since the 2005 death of founding guitarist Denis “Piggy” d’Amour, given how critical his songwriting was to their peak albums Nothingface and Dimension Hatross, but this six-minute track from the February EP of the same title offers a strong facsimile of their late ’80s transitional sound as they were moving from straight thrash to the progressive metal sound of Nothingface.

Prong – Cut And Dry. Prong’s 1990 major-label debut, Beg to Differ, remains one of the best metal albums I’ve ever heard, an accessible hybrid of thrash and hardcore styles that brings out the best elements of both genres. They went into a steady decline from there, and their output since their 2003 return has been generally disappointing, but as with the Voivod track above, “Cut and Dry” at least brings back some memories of Prong’s early-1990s peak.

Amon Amarth featuring Doro Pesch – A Dream That Cannot Be. This isn’t actually my favorite track from Amon Amarth’s Viking-themed death metal album Jomsviking, but it’s the only track on the album to feature former Warlock vocalist Doro Pesch.

My latest piece for Insiders names my 2015 Prospect of the Year, along with a bunch of other “nominees” and the 2015 draftees with the best pro debuts.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I assumed Iron Maiden was finished as a band after 2010’s forgettable The Final Frontier, as the band members are mostly in their late 50s and have started to encounter health problems, most notably lead singer Bruce Dickinson’s bout with a cancerous tumor on his tongue earlier this year. The mere existence of their new album, The Book Of Souls, was thus a surprise, as was its length – a 90-minute double album in an era where the entire idea of an album is losing its relevance – but there was no greater shock than the fact that the album, while uneven, is pretty damn good overall.

Most of the eleven songs on the record are prog-rock in length, three clocking in beyond the ten-minute mark, but without most of the masturbatory prog-rock noodling that has forever sworn me off the likes of King Crimson or Marillion; only one track comes in under five minutes and it is by far the worst song on the album. Instead of overly complex solos or time-signature shifts, Maiden – primarily bassist and main songwriter Steve Harris – give us driving guitar riffs highly reminiscent of their peak era from The Number of the Beast through Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, as well as Harris’ signature galloping bass lines. Maiden’s best material combined a strong melodic sense with the heavy major-key riffing that inspired a generation of metal bands, many of whom were overwhelmed by or assimilated into the hair-metal scourge of the late 1980s. (Queensrÿche remains, for me, the strongest of the post-Maiden acts, although they too went off the rails with Empire after Operation: Mindcrime earned far more critical acclaim than commercial success.

Because Harris didn’t write all the material on Book of Souls, there are clear stylistic differences across the various tracks, and the lead single, “Speed of Light,” written by Dickinson and Adrian Smith, is tighter and shorter than Harris’ writings. It’s worthy of comparison to the band’s best singles from the 1980s (“Wasted Years,” “The Number of the Beast,” and “Run to the Hills”), although it’s one of the songs that overtaxes Dickinson’s voice to a distressing degree. Harris keeps things to about six and a half minutes on “The Great Unknown,” providing tremendous contrast with an extended, dark acoustic outro that seems inspired by Black Sabbath and that leads perfectly into the similarly tenebrous intro to the thirteen-minute epic “The Red and the Black,” which quickly gives way to a riff very similar to the main line from “Hallowed Be Thy Name.” (I was a little disappointed that the song isn’t in any way connected to the novel of that name by Stendhal.) That song has a lengthy guitar solo that never devolves into mindless shredding, repeating an outstanding if short melodic lead guitar line, leading into a second instrumental section with two lead guitars playing parallel lines, with its only misstep in the final minute with a too-abrupt shift to the outro. “When the River Runs Deep” returns to somewhat radio-friendly length, an unabashed throwback to the period of Maiden that, in hindsight, appears to have directly influenced the rise of early thrash metal.

The album’s two great weaknesses are Dickinson’s voice, which can no longer hit the higher registers that marked him as one of the great vocalists of early metal, and the lack of ideas at the back of the last quarter or so of the release. The lyrics of “Tears of a Clown,” a tribute to Robin Williams, are embarrassingly mawkish, riddled with platitudes like “Maybe it’s all just for the best/Lay his weary head to rest.” The music sounds as if Harris had been trying to write something that might appear on the singles charts, which Maiden hasn’t pulled off since the bizarre trip to #1 in the UK of Dickinson’s “Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter,” an absolute low point in the band’s history.

The 18-minute closer, “Empire of the Clouds,” marks the longest track in Maiden’s history, surpassing “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from Powerslave, which quoted pieces of Coleridge’s epic poem and has become one of their most enduring hits. The comparisons are inevitable, and inevitably unfavorable, especially as it’s nearly impossible to record a rock song of nearly twenty minutes that doesn’t fall short at multiple points, and “Empire” never seems to get going in the first place; Dickinson’s operatic aspirations don’t translate at all well to the format, and the first truly memorable piece of music in the track is the two-measure guitar riff that pops up after seven-plus minutes have elapsed, by which point I assume most listeners would have abandoned ship.

That criticism may be specious in a double album that runs an hour and a half and provides plenty of music above replacement, including numerous tracks that do work as singles, including “Speed of Light,” “Death or Glory,” “When the River Runs Deep,” and lengthy opener “If Eternity Should Fail,” penned by Smith and Dickinson but more true to the spirit of Harris’ songwriting than even some of his own tracks. When “Shadows of the Valley” opens up with a lick that has to be a nod to the monumental line that starts “Wasted Years,” it’s more than enough of a statement that Harris, Smith, and Dickinson remain capable of producing songs that are worlds ahead of the artists that have long tried to emulate them.