Yo La Tengo

Time keeps moving and things keep changing, but that doesn’t mean we can't fight back. Yo La Tengo's latest victory is called This Stupid World, a spellbinding set of reflective songs that resist the ever-ticking clock. This is music that's not so much timeless as time-defiant. "I want to fall out of time," Ira Kaplan sings in "Fallout."

Of course, times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. Yo La Tengo made This Stupid World all by themselves, though. Their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band's high standards, and nimble enough to make things new.