If our indie zeitgeist meter is to be trusted, “horse” is the new “wolf” and this Seattle band are leading the equine parade. Since signing to Sub Pop late last year, they’ve been stroked by all the right tastemakers, and for all the right reasons: their Phil Ek–produced debut full-length, Everything All the Time, is a tasty, timeless-sounding shot of glinting early R.E.M. guitars and high-flying Shins-y vocals all dunked in My Morning Jacket’s watery reverb machine. “The Great Salt Lake” is available at Sub Pop’s Web site.

Could it be that an album of intricate Gypsy folk recorded by a 19-year-old high-school dropout from Albuquerque upon his return to the States after finding himself — and Balkan brass music — in Europe is one of the indie-rock finds of the year? If the recent stream of rhapsodic blog gush is any indication, then clap your hands and say yeah. Beirut’s debut, Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing), finds Zach Condon — who recently relocated to Brooklyn, natch — using trumpet, ukulele, piano, organ, accordion, mandolin, and his voice and adding a few violin-, cello-, and clarinet-playing buddies and former Neutral Milk Hotel drummer Jeremy Barnes on percussion to create a virtual Eastern European orchestra and one of the most distinctive albums of this year.

This teenage punk foursome from Nashville promise to burn your house down, take your money, and steal your virginity. Tough words from SAT-age Stooges fans who share an interest in skateboarding, sea horses, and asthma inhalers. But BYOP’s homonymous debut, recently released on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label, has such cutely messy intensity that the under-three-minute songs call for pogoing in place: engine-revving guitars, lightning-storm drums, Karen-O-touched frontgrrrl yelling like a high-school-cafeteria revolutionary. File under: Damone for noisy art punks.

Bosque Brown, a/k/a Texas native Mara Lee Miller, is a spooky singer with a twangy vibrato who spins yarns of Jesus and anorexia over sparse instrumentation. She was discovered by Damien Jurado, who shares her religious sensibility. Miller’s moment of grace comes in “Fine Lines,” where she sings from the point of view of a fucked-up teenage girl: “I would die for their fine lines/I’m a liar/Call me a sinner.” It’s a song of death in slow motion, the strings sobbing behind her voice — Southern Gothic in song that will send chills down your spine.

Like those other famous Camilles — Dumas’s play, Garbo’s film, the Gulf Coast hurricane — this one, a French chanteuse recently liberated from cocktail/new-wave novelties Nouvelle Vague, reeks of doomed sentimentality. On “Ta Douleur,” from her breakthrough album Le fil, she sounds like Björk’s yuckier, more obnoxious little sister, punctuating impossible notes with onomatopoetic gasps, tongue clicks, and go-fuck-yourself raspberries. Closer to Carla Bruni than to Keren Ann, she begins at pop and works her way toward the fringes, not the other way around.