Digging for jewels in a mountain of crap is no tiny task. When you start making your way through some of music history’s most notoriously awful albums hoping to uncover a hidden treasure, you’ve got to wade through a lot of unsavory stuff. More often than not, albums with rotten reps got them for a good reason, especially where major artists are concerned. It’s no big event when an artist of little renown discharges a stinker, but once you start diving into the nitty gritty of infamous career-killers like The Clash’s Cut the Crap or Blondie’s The Hunter, there’s nary a redemptive moment to be found.But just because great songs on awful albums are a rarity, that doesn’t mean they’re non-existent. And when you do come across them, their anomalous quality only makes them seem all the more special. Sometimes, you’re dealing with low-hanging fruit; it’s no mystery why “Under Pressure” is the only track 99.9 percent of the planet knows from Queen’s otherwise unsalvageable Hot Space, for instance.It take a lot more fortitude to find the real under-the-radar moments on wretched records. For the most part, the forbidding confines of albums like Bob Dylan’s double-length clunker Self Portrait or The Velvet Underground’s sad swan song, Squeeze (featuring zero original members) are enough to make the hardiest soul long for sudden deafness. But then you come across Bob’s own unhinged version of “Quinn the Eskimo,” best known by Manfred Mann’s cover version, or the Lou-less VU’s “Louise,” which could sit comfortably on a late-’60s Kinks album. And suddenly, the world seems a little sweeter for your valiant sonic spelunking.But just so you don’t have to go trawling through the refuse yourself, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you here, exposing estimable moments from albums that otherwise ought to be swiftly forgotten. Just don’t try this at home.

Sometimes music is a solitary endeavor. After recording technology advanced to the point of making it possible for one person to construct an entire album all by themselves, hermetic whiz kids started turning out solo albums in the truest sense of the word, in which they played and sang all or nearly all of the parts. Some of them may have been control freaks eschewing additional musicians out of monomania, but others were studio geniuses who crafted entire worlds all on their own, and thats what were looking into here.A few are former band members who ran with the chance to operate unencumbered, such as Paul McCartney and John Fogerty, who had some of their most memorable songs sans helpmates, like "Maybe Im Amazed," from the ex-Beatles 1970 solo debut, McCartney, and "Centerfield," from the CCR frontmans 1985 comeback album of the same name. Some became famous as youthful mavens of multitracking, as Prince did with his first hit, "I Wanna Be Your Lover," as well as Mike Oldfield with his first album, Tubular Bells, known forevermore as the spooky soundtrack music of The Exorcist.More and more artists are going it alone as digital technology has drastically increased the ease and options in creating one-person projects. Sometimes theyve obscured their solitary stances by adopting aliases that could be taken for band names, such as Glasser (Cameron Mesirow), Grimes (Claire Boucher), and Japanese Breakfast (Michelle Zauner). Whether they tip their hands or not, the next Todd Rundgren or Stevie Wonder could be out there right now, just waiting for the right time to pop up with a new, strictly solo masterpiece.

Let’s make one thing glaringly plain right at the start: This is not a Halloween playlist. So if you’re expecting “Monster Mash” or “Ghostbusters” or any of that sort of business, you’re trick-or-treating at the wrong door. The songs assembled here are meant instead for ushering in Samhain, a holiday that occurs at the same time as—and is a predecessor to—Halloween, but has different, decidedly older origins. But make no mistake, things surrounding Samhain can still get plenty creepy.

It’s essentially an end-of-harvest commemoration that is Gaelic in origin and goes back at least to the 10th century if not farther. It’s generally reckoned to be connected to paganism, and some of the spooky rites and rituals connected to it (which have also been an inspiration on Halloween) bear that out. But there’s also an organic and naturalistic, almost folksy side to it. Check out the classic ’70s movie thriller The Wicker Man (represented here) some time and you’ll get an idea of that intersection, albeit slanted distinctly toward the dark side.

Then again, positioned as it is to herald the oncoming winter, Samhain is known as the harbinger of the “dark half” of the calendar year. So that darkness manifests itself in more ways than one. And the Samhain-friendly songs here fall all across the spectrum. On one end, you’ve got the gentle folky stuff, be it Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore,” Jethro Tull’s “Songs from the Wood,” or Loreena McKennitt’s “All Souls Night.” Then there’s the moodier, more intense, dancing-naked-in-the-moonlight vibe represented by the likes of Dead Can Dance, Kate Bush, and Faith and The Muse. And on the most unsettling side, you’ve got Black Sabbath, Bruce Dickinson, and Electric Wizard conjuring classic metallic, black-magic imagery.

Some of these tunes have an explicitly subject-specific spin, and some may simply fit the feel, but brought together they provide a soundtrack for the full range of Samhain moods.

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The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.

Anyone familiar with the writings of Haruki Murakami knows that he’s a massive music geek with a particular interest in jazz. From the beginning of his career, his books have been filled with musical references. He longed to be a musician way before becoming a writer but lacked the necessary chops. Instead, he ran his own jazz bar, immersing himself in music 24/7, and even after becoming a writer, he continued that immersion—music is a constant part of his environment when he’s working. His official website offers a tantalizing photo of his vinyl collection, which he estimates at more than 10,000 records, and he even published a pair of books containing his own essays on his favorite jazz artists.An enterprising soul named Masamaro Fujiki has taken it upon himself to tally up the tunes in Murakami’s collection into a massive Spotify playlist. In its current state, the playlist contains only a small portion of the music on the author’s shelves—but even that ends up in excess of 3,000 tracks. According to Fujiki, he based his playlist on a Q&A website Murakami put up a couple of years back and on his music essays. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the albums represented are jazz: Murakami’s tastes cycle between bop (Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young), cool (Stan Getz, Bud Shank), and vocalists (Beverly Kenney, copious amounts of Billie Holiday), which are interspersed with classical offerings (Prokofiev, Mozart, Tchaikovsky) and occasionally punctuated by a handful of rock records (The Beach Boys, CCR).If we take this to be an accurate sampling of Murakami’s collection, he definitely isn’t much of a modernist. He is, however, clearly capable of going deep when it comes to his chosen niches, as exemplified by the presence of obscure artists like Swedish sax man Lars Gullin and contemporary jazz vocalist Stacey Kent among all the icons. Fujiki has declared his intent to add more music to the list when he can, but in the meantime, what he’s already created is an impressive achievement—one that allows you to tune in to the celebrated author’s wavelength for a while and muse on the way his listening habits inform his singular literary style.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

When it comes to real rock rebellion, even the most badass American and British artists in history have nothing on the rockers of Iran. The rock ’n’ roll scene in Iran goes all the way back to the ’60s, when influential artists like Farhad Mehrad were beginning to make their presence felt. In the ’70s, artists such as Kourosh Yaghmaei, who became a sort of Bob Dylan-like figure, made their mark, and multiple directions opened for Iranian rock. But the sociopolitical tumult that came with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought drastic cultural changes.

Out went the Shah; in came the Ayatollah and the Ministry of Culture, a government body that required all musicians to be officially sanctioned in order to ply their trade. The reprisal against those who tried to defy these rules included oppression and even imprisonment. Still, artists like the Comment Band, Farshid A’rabi, and the B-Band managed to cut through and make their voices heard.

By the ’90s, things began to loosen up just a little bit, and more Iranian rockers rose up. But the threat of government oppression remained a very real concern. On one hand, there were artists who found ways to fight against it, such as the heavy-metal bands Mordab and Angband, which came to the fore in the 2000s. But at the same time, a number of Iranian alternative-rock bands began to expatriate. Groups like Yellow Dogs and Hypernova made their way to the U.S., and the Tehran duo Take It Easy Hospital relocated to London. But even those Iranian bands that left their homeland behind are still part of its musical legacy. And the story of Iranian rock stands to prove that in the end, the spirit of rock ’n’ roll can rise above just about anything.

Ultimately, sadcore is more about a feeling than a specific sound, and, as you probably guessed from the name, that feeling is not exactly a bright, uplifting one. Some trace its origins back to the gloomy glower of British bands like The Smiths or even The Cure, but sadcore didn’t really cohere as a genre (movement would imply too much action on the part of its melancholia-afflicted practitioners) until U.S. indie bands like Galaxie 500 came along in the late ‘80s. Though virtually none of the artists to whom the tag has been applied would ever actually own up to coming under the sadcore banner, over the years the description has been applied to everything from the lacerating self-effacement of alt-rock heroes American Music Club to the muted musings of Cat Power. But whichever way you slice it, sadcore is the sound indie obsessives turn to when the sunny side of things doesn’t strike you quite right.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.Martin Newell has been making brilliant, ‘60s psych-pop-inspired DIY music at a startlingly prolific pace since the early ‘80s, either under his name or as Cleaners From Venus or the short-lived Brotherhood of Lizards. But he doesn’t just make a lot of records—he makes a lot of great records. He has a shockingly high battering average; out of the dozens of albums he’s released, there’s nary a bad one in the bunch. Provided you view the lo-fi homemade sound of his output as a plus rather than a minus (as all of his admirers must), pretty much everything the British singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist touches turns to gold.Naturally, 2016’s Cleaners From Venus album, Last Boy in the Locarno, is no exception. And it makes an excellent entry point for a deep dive into Martin Newell’s world. But in addition to absorbing highlights from his own vast catalog, try soaking up the sounds of Newell’s fellow travelers, like XTC (whose Andy Partridge once produced a Newell album), Robyn Hitchcock, and R. Stevie Moore. And while you’re at it, take a stroll through some of his ‘60s influences, like Syd Barrett, The Kinks, and The Move. Then for good measure, add some extra historical context by examining the other end of the aesthetic family tree, with sonic descendents like Guided By Voices and The Clientele.

While its understandable that some listeners would think that all the great soul music in Memphis came from the Stax/Volt stable, its simply not accurate. Not only were there other R&B imprints that challenged Stax’s standing in terms of their ability to score hits, there was no shortage of acts at other labels whose musical vision was the equal of the vaunted Stax roster. The Willie Mitchell-produced tracks Al Green cut for Memphis mainstay Hi Records in the ‘70s remain among the deepest, most transcendently sensual songs ever recorded in any genre, and they dominated both R&B and pop radio. The tunes James Carr laid down for the less celebrated Memphis label Goldwax Records were easily as intense as anything in the Otis Redding oeuvre. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the searingly soulful sounds that emerged from the musical bounty of the Bluff City.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Punk may be eternal, but one of its earliest, most explosive subgenres has been largely ignored for decades. The Oi! movement emerged in England at the tail end of the ’70s, just as the initial surge of British punk was receding, and was founded by bands who wanted punks to walk like they talked. For all its proletarian ethos, the first wave of UK punk was largely fomented by middle-class, art-school kids, but the Oi! scene was populated by working-class youth who longed for something that spoke more genuinely to their own experience as council-flat kids in a country with a crumbling infrastructure.The first phase of Oi! was led by the likes of Cockney Rejects, Sham 69, and The Angelic Upstarts, who took the basic, three-chord roar and stomp of punk and added messages of working-class pride and youth-culture unity, with choruses often delivered en masse, football-chant style. The Oi! kids copped their image from the previous generation’s ska-loving skinheads: Doc Martens (hence the appellation “bootboys”), button-down shirts, suspenders, and buzz cuts.The initial Oi! movement flourished into the early ’80s, but before long, the violence that had always been lurking on the outskirts of the scene began to overwhelm live shows, and things began to unravel. National Front forces tried to infiltrate the movement and spread their nationalist, racist agenda, an ideology that had nothing to do with what Oi! was really about. The conflict contributed to the scene’s destruction.But even though the first wave of Oi! petered out after just a few years and has seldom been celebrated in any widespread way since, its spirit refuses to die. Each subsequent generation has had its own Oi! revival bands, keeping the sound alive on an international level, from Swedish bands like Perkele and City Saints to New York Hasidic punks Moshiach Oi!