Lord Huron – Man Who Lives Forever from Rollo & Grady Sessions on Vimeo.

L.A.’s next breakout band showcase a brand new song for our friends at Rollo & Grady’s new session series. Can’t wait for the album.

I love the way Brooklyn act North Highlands use repetition. Their songs are little more than handfuls of phrases, but in singer Brenda Malvina’s hands, they become incantations, love songs as hypnosis. The minimalist wordplay forces you to focus on the details — the dynamic shifts from chorus to bridge, Malvina’s melodic turns, the subtle overdubs that layer onto this song’s final minute. It’s refreshing, as is the silly, colorful video for “Benefits,” which gets immeasurably better if you imagine Beavis and Butthead making fun of it.

(Wild One is out now; the album was one of my best of October picks)

Keaton Henson – You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are from Keaton Henson on Vimeo.

Gloom-folk is pretty much my favorite genre, though I can’t say the same for the Lars Von Trier-y visuals that accompany Keaton Henson’s “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.” Hear a handful of equally haunting tracks at his site.

ARMS – “Three Mile Island” (live at Glasslands) from Big Ugly Yellow Couch on Vimeo.

ARMS’ spectacular Summer Skills is out this week at last. Here’s the band playing one of its many jams at last week’s album release party. Big Ugly Yellow Couch has more videos and a few live MP3s, too.

I’m not sure what Sondre Lerche’s latest video is about (The Virgin Suicides? The running sequence from Forest Gump? Witch house?), but we can blame/credit the singer’s wife, Mona, who directed the new clip. The song still sounds as sharp as it did when he played it at our SXSW party.

Are we finally hitting the too-many-live-sessions precipice? I hope not. One of the most exciting things about these videos is hearing songs in fresh contexts, whether it’s stripped-down instrumentation or from the vantage point of an exotic locale. This take on Craft Spells’ “Your Tomb” does both, offering a very Sarah Records version of the formerly electrified song as the band wanders through Copenhagen. Lovely.

My favorite sweet-talking Swede (and his finger-snapping percussionist!) plays a handful of recent jams, including hopeful LP4 heart-breaker “I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots,” for NPR’s video series. You can download the audio at NPR’s site.

Jens Lekman – “An Argument with Myself”: mp3

Previously: Live: Jens Lekman at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 9.28.11

Among the really great things in the video for Real Estate’s “It’s Real”: adorable hipster puppies, aspirational sweaters, and a clever little nod toward the played-out Super 8 aesthetic of every indie rock video of the last three years. Woof.

Real Estate’s Days, of course, remains one of the year’s very best records, as I wrote about here.