Next week, the CMJ music marathon that takes over the south-eastern edge of Manhattan and spread out into deepest Brooklyn. Thousands of bands play every year, some several times each day, and many spring up at surprise shows. Here are 15 acts we’ve selected from CMJ’s constantly evolving matrix of bands; many of them push rock, pop and punk into unusual spaces.  New York band Big Ups play music that’s theoretically punk, but they come at things from oblique angles. Guitar and bass phrases collide oddly. Occasionally, for a chorus, they’ll lock into each other coherently. Then the song will shift entirely, accelerating into a hardcore version of itself, as their singer (Joe Galarraga) screams and weaves around amplifiers. I’m never sure what to make of them, but they’re always captivating. The feeling they impart is woozy and uncertain, which is remarkable when the songs themselves are so skeletal.  14 October, Elvis Guesthouse (6pm); 16 October, Palisades (7.45pm)  Diet Cig are a duo from New Paltz, New York, who make power pop that feels raw and exposed. “I like getting coffee by myself / but I still know how you like yours,” sings guitarist Alex Luciano on Sleep Talk, which lyrically and vocally seems to follow the anxious rhythms of thought. Her guitar tone is produced warmly, which makes one feel comforted even if they’re being emotionally anatomized.  14 October, Cake Shop (5:15 pm); 15 October, Cake Shop (8pm), 16 October, Pianos (10pm); 17 October, Pete’s Candy Store (6.15pm); the Knitting Factory (1am)  New Orleans band Donovan Wolfington are at least three bands at once: hardcore, doom metal, and pop-punk, the sensibilities of which seem inherited from the Replacements and Superchunk. The stylistic shift is oddly seamless, and can give their sets an uncanny, free-falling feeling, and even their poppiest songs can generate an atmosphere of dread.  17 October, The Studio at Webster Hall (8.15pm)  This trio from Roanoke, Virginia, play bright, gossamer indie pop, attractive whorls of light, which recall the uncertain texture of the world when just waking up. Their instruments sound distant, yet present and warm, like the – suitably enough – the sun.  14 October, Pianos (upstairs, 5.15pm); Rock Shop at 11.35pm; 16 October, Pianos (10.45pm); 17 October, the Knitting Factory (12am)  My favorite song of 2011 was I’m So Unclean by London indie rock band Evans the Death. Its velocity acts as a rich counterpoint to the profound disconnection of its narrator. “So I stare at the cat for a while / and the minutes have changed into miles,” Katherine Whitaker sings, packing an unusual urgency and restlessness into a song about resignation. Their part of Fortuna Pop!’s impressive roster of UK bands with punk and pop sensibilities.  Kero Kero Bonito make pop music that’s simultaneously laid back and deliriously animated. Associated with the PC Music collective, the production shifts and bends relentlessly in blocks of primary color, over which singer Sarah Midori Perry flows in and out of English and Japanese.  13 October, Palisades (8 pm)  Bury Me at Makeout Creek was one of 2014’s most surprising records, a sort-of pop-punk record that generated all of its supernatural tension from silence and space. When the songs get loud it sounds as if the entire record is being crushed. When I saw Mitski she played a bass guitar that was shocking pink, and the crowd was entirely hypnotized by and sensitively responded to the emotional severity of her whisper and the relentless shatter of her scream.  15 October, Mercury Lounge (8pm)  Brooklyn duo My Body’s largely electronic songs sound like colliding shapes and textures over which producer and singer Jordan Bagnall weaves gorgeous melodies, which melt the background and foreground into a coherent focus. They’re simultaneously arm, hostile, disorganized and weightless.  16 October, Pianos (upstairs, 8.40pm)  Palehound is Ellen Kemper, a Boston musician whose guitar playing is dazzling and can resemble dense scribbles. Her songs often feel like the obey a kind of inverted gravity, drums and guitars revolving through a room commanded by a different order of physics. The effect is actually jazzy; her music is firmly suspended in the state where it could potentially unravel entirely.  14 October, Cake Shop (3.45pm); 15 October, Pianos (2.30 pm); Union Pool (9pm); 16 October, Palisades (1.45pm); 17 October, Pianos (11.30pm)  My favorite discovery of last year’s CMJ, Protomartyr play a cloudy kind of post-punk; each instrument lands in the mix like an intelligent shadow. When I saw them at Cake Shop last year, though, the economy and precision of their songs recalled, of all things, an evil version of Guided by Voices.  16 October, Santos Party House (11.15 pm); 17 October, the Knitting Factory (12.10am); 18 October, Rough Trade (7.30 pm)  Sharkmuffin are a trio from Brooklyn whose music is a kind of serpentine garage rock, a fury and fierceness compressed into tight, sinuous grooves. Their debut album Chartreuse was recorded with Patty Schemel of Hole and Upset, and the precision of her playing makes their songs even more acute and bladed.  13 October, Le Poisson Rouge (9.30 pm); 15 October, Our Wicked Lady (6.45pm)  Philadelphia band Sheer Mag feel unusual and special, producing music that courts pop and the cock-rock of Thin Lizzy. The density of what they do means that parts of songs can sound inherited from power pop, from hardcore, and even (whisper it) disco.  16 October, Music Hall of Williamsburg (10.10pm)  So few bands simulating the nervous and severe rhythms of post-punk are this fun, and this London band reminds me most of The Slits and ESG; bands that were capable of sounding both alien and danceable.  14 October, Pianos (upstairs, 6pm); Santos Party House (basement, 11pm); 15 October, Cake Shop (8pm); 16 October, Music Hall of Williamsburg (9.15pm)  The coolest band in the world. Tricot are a Japanese band that somehow indivisibly merge math rock and J-pop. Their songs are elusive, always drifting away from you in new elastic shapes, and yet they’re incredibly catchy, and work remarkably well as pop songs.  15 October, Cake Shop (10.30pm)  After The Measure (SA) broke up in 2010, Lauren Denitzio formed Worriers, a band in which her acutely intelligent songwriting and sensitive, syllabic voice have expanded considerably. They produces punk rock that is deeply animated and fluorescent.  14 October, Cake Shop (6pm); 15 October, Union Pool (10.30pm)
More than 1,000 bands will hawk their wares at the annual shindig. Here are 15 of the best: from Protomartyr to Kero Kero Bonito