Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist behind The Doors, died Monday from bile duct cancer. He was 74. In a story about the band’s breakout “Light My Fire” on NPR’s All Things Considered, Manzarek says, “Western civilization ends here in California at Venice Beach, so we stood there inventing a new world on psychedelics.”

So this is great: Twin sisters Katie (Waxahatchee) and Allison (Swearin’) Crutchfield cover Grimes’ “Oblivion” for Rookie Mag.

Joined by three excellent collaborators, Mohammad Reza Shajarian gives what amounts to a brief master class in the art of singing. Watch the Iranian icon — and one of NPR’s 50 Great Voices — unleash torrents of swooping, soaring, goosebump-inducing sound that’s still perfectly controlled at age 73.

Photo: Marie McGrory/NPR

With so many distractions and different ways to hear songs, it’s getting to be pretty impossible to give full albums the attention they deserve. When was the last time you actually listened to one all the way through, without any interruptions?

Photo: Corbis

The producer’s best album since the mid-’90s, False Idols is one of 2013’s biggest surprises so far. His signature mix of menace and seduction still sounds contemporary after Tricky’s more than 20 years in (and out of) the spotlight.

Stream False Idols now.

Laura Marling’s songs dig well beyond the everyday, with each sung in a wise, dusky, brooding voice that always seems in control of its surroundings. The U.K. folksinger’s fourth album, Once I Was an Eagle, takes a remarkable journey over the course of 16 hypnotic, subtly inventive songs.

Stream Once I Was An Eagle now.

The British beat-makers shed their electronics in pursuit of a sound designed to translate live. For their second album, Mount Kimbie’s Dominic Maker and Kai Campos even trot out languid vocal performances and a real live drum kit, while still sounding like themselves in the process.

Stream Cold Spring Fault Less Youth now.

There’s a way we talk and it includes profanity. We never figured we’d be arrested for it.

— Beastie Boys’ Mike D in a 1985 interview animated for PBS’ Blank on Blank series.

The whole fantasy that we had, and whole dream that we had, was could we still do, or can we still make, today, dance music without a drum machine?

— The robots speak! Hear the elusive Daft Punk in an interview with NPR’s Audie Cornish

Carnal implications abound on “Sex Mission,” a new techno track from the Brooklyn-based musician Laurel Halo. There’s the not-exactly-subtle title, and the EP from whence it comes is called Behind the Green Door (out May 21).

Hear “Sex Mission” now.