Although Tomcats Screaming Outside is technically his debut album, Roland Orzabal has been a solo artist in all but name for the best part of a decade. The dominant half of Tears for Fears, Orzabal turned the 1980s pop duo into a one-man band after the departure of Curt Smith in the early 1990s, releasing two albums, Elemental and Raoul and the Kings of Spain. Although "Ticket to the World," "Bullet for Brains," and "For the Love of Cain"–big chorus, guitar-led pop/rock anthems–could happily fit into either of his post-Curt Smith albums, Tomcats is very much a return to the experimental ways of Tears for Fears' heyday. The dark production and menacing rhythm tracks of "Under Either" and "Hypnoculture," the ambient sway of "Day by Day," the grunge-esque "Dandelion," and the drum & bass of "Kill Love" and "Hey Andy" are all coupled with contagious melodies and Orzabal's twisted vocals, leaving little doubt that the imagination that separated his former band from their peers and made their songs so enduring is still incredibly fertile. Solo album or not, Tomcats Screaming Outside is the best Tears for Fears album in a decade.

On Universal Mother, Sinéad O'Connor tells us more about herself than we probably should know. It's record making as therapy, the byproduct of feelings still only half worked out, a bundle of self-revelations left suspended, twisting in the wind. It wobbles between being an awful record and a remarkable one, and maybe that's why it works: It swings so wildly that it never sinks into that deathly muddy middle ground.

Berlin-dwelling Dane Agnes Obel has been racking up the accolades throughout mainland Europe since her platinum-selling 2011 debut, Philharmonics. With the beguiling Citizen of Glass, her third studio long-player, she looks poised to enchant the rest of the world with her dark charms. A classically trained pianist with an elegant and elastic voice, Obel's melancholic chamber pop invokes names like Goldfrapp, Bat for Lashes, and Anna Calvi, but with a succinct aura of Scandinavian refinery. Where her relatively austere prior outings relied largely on piano and strings, Citizen of Glass revels in ghostly electronics and voice modulation, even going so far as to bring in a temperamental, late-'20s monophonic synthesizer called a Trautonium. The string arrangements are more ambitious and the composition style is a bit more opaque, but the ten-track set is unequivocally Obel-esque. Taking its name from the German concept of the gläserner berger, which translates roughly to the glass citizen, Obel explores the idea of transparency in the overshare-heavy digital age.

After the wrenching but rewarding Geek the Girl, Lisa Germano widens her focus and brightens her outlook on Excerpts From a Love Circus. Of course, Love Circus is a Lisa Germano album, but it's a slightly lighter take on her vulnerable, folky dream-pop: only she could make the refrain "Bruises, bruises, bruises" equally catchy and disturbing. As the title suggests, Excerpts From a Love Circus collects vignettes about hating the one you love and loving the one you hate; once again, Germano captures awkward, abstract feelings with her dreamy arrangements, hooky songwriting and unflinching lyrics. Passive-aggressive love songs like "I Love a Snot" sport flourishes like toy pianos and tablas, and incisive comments like "A Beautiful Schizophrenic"'s "I know you like my bad side/I love you like my good side." Germano's dark, self-effacing sense of humor surfaces on "Victoria's Secret," which answers the question "What is Victoria's Secret?" for once and all: "She says 'You are ugly/I am pretty/Your man wishes/You looked like me".

Balancing mainstream adult pop, grittier rock, and the poetic influence of childhood idols Patti Smith and Kate Bush, Bermuda native Heather Nova charted in the U.K. and the U.S. with her first worldwide release, 1994's Oyster.