May seems to be a month for Indie musicians, Electronic musicians, and musician/actor hybrids to release their latest albums. The upbeat indie rock and indie pop band Vampire Weekend, the most popular electronic musical duo Daft Punk, blues singer and British actor Hugh Laurie, and Jared Leto’s rock band 30 Seconds To Mars are all releasing albums this May.
“Modern Vampires of the 
ity” will be Vampire Weekend’s third album, set to release on May 14. Their previous two albums, released in 2008 and 2010, have both been well received by critics, with “Contra” earning a score of 81 on Metacritic. Fans of the band will most certainly have high expectations for the newest album, and if the songs already released off of “Modern Vampires of the City” represent the quality of the album, fans will not be dissappointed.
Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories” is perhaps the most anticipated album of the year. It is the fourth studio album from the EDM artists, with the last one being released in 2005. Although they worked on the score for Tron: Legacy and released an album for the soundtrack of the movie, “Random Access Memories” is their first true studio album in eight years. The first single off the album “Get Lucky” which features artist Pharrell Williams was released on April 19 and performed on Saturday Night Live, and fans had mixed reactions towards it. While most agree it is not a bad song, the expectations were just too high for most and it did not live up to the success of their previous albums, but 12 more songs are still to be heard.
Most know Hugh Laurie as the actor who played Dr. House, but many were not aware of his musical side-project. “Didn’t It Rain” is set to be released on May 6, and it will be his second studio album after “Let Them Talk” was released in 2011. The album will contain mostly blues music, with Laurie playing piano, guitar, and providing vocals on the tracks.
Jared Leto, who is most well known for his role in the movie Requiem for a Dream, is the lead singer, songwriter, and guitar player for the popular rock band 30 Seconds to Mars, who will release their fourth studio album, “Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams” on May 17. Their previous album “This Is War” sold over four million albums, and the tour that followed the album broke the Guiness World Record for “Longest Concert Tour by a Rock Band.” Expectations are high, like always, for this new album. They even sent a copy of the first single off of the new album to NASA, who then sent the aptly named song “Up In The Air” into space, making it the first commercial copy of music into space.
