Listen Up! No. 88: Wire - Bad Worn Thing

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Watford's avant-garde punk pioneers Wire returned earlier this month with Red Barked Tree, their twelfth studio album and first since 2008. Amidst the familiar mixture of hand-on-heart four-chord calls to arms, nuanced, expertly manufactured textures and intrepid lyrical explorations of pop culture lies a sparkling pop jewel of a song. At once inhabiting new territory and still somehow unmistakebly Wire, 'Bad Worn Thing' decorates a throbbing anti-dance beat with a Brian Ferry art-school snarl and lines like "the future's sold, the chacellor paces". Better yet, the chiming guitar shapes which build to a gripping crescendo make sure it feels as well as thinks. An early frontrunner for the best you'll hear in 2011.

N.B. Turn that bass up where possible.

Listen Up! No. 80: The High Wire - Pump Your Little Heart

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The third single from this London quintet's criminally underrated album The Sleep Tape, which dropped in March, 'Pump Your Little Heart' sounds like the last sighs of a destructive relationship, wrapped up in dizzy dream-pop, where guitars fade in and out of consciousness and dashed hopes rise like log-fire smoke with each breathy vocal line. It's tailor made for a day snowed in with a saucepan of mulled wine, but you can't get the 7 inch until February. Console yourself with a look at the video, shot with a macro lens - which magnifies tiny objects into full screen images - by director Michael Humphrey, below: