Hometown: Rhodes, La.

Members: Kip Berman, Peggy Wang, Kurt Feldman, Alex Naidus
Album: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
For Fans Of: The Pastels, Velocity Girl, My Bloody Valentine

On a Monday morning in early spring, Kip Berman is in New York's East Village, waiting for brunch and discussing his voice. "I really don't like the sound of my voice talking," he says. "You probably noticed that. You probably don't like it that much either." So much for rock 'n' roll swagger.

Considering their regal name and tuneful sound, the power poppers in Norwegian band I Was A King seem poised as heirs apparent to Scanadanvia’s royal family of indie rock. But can their reign expand even beyond the land of ice and snow? Paste explores how they stack up against some of the greats.

Hometown: Portland, Ore.
Album: Trumpets for Paper Children EP
Band Members: Amanda Lawrence (viola, vocals), Jade Eckler (vocals), Dave Depper (bass, guitar, keyboard, vocals), Scott Magee (clarinet, percussion, vocals), Ritchie Young (vocals, guitar, percussion), Laurel Simmons (piano, mandolin, percussion, vocals), Jason Leonard (vibes, banjo)
For Fans Of: Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine, Destroyer

"I don’t usually go to festival shows unless I’m playing, because I feel jealous,” admits sheepish Loch Lomond frontman Ritchie Young. Until recently, his band worked on perfecting its live show in the dark enclaves of theaters and clubs, but it’ll unleash its captivating chamber pop on the wilds of Washington state this summer during its Sasquatch! Music Festival debut. Onstage, the seven bandmates—including a pianist, a violist and a drummer who plays standing up—slowly build elegant sonic summits that give way to valleys of tenderly picked strings and Young’s hushed, oft-macabre lyrics. “The sounds of children laughing makes my eyes bleed,” he intones on the deceptively lovely “A Field Report,” from the Trumpets for Paper Children EP, a collection of favorite tracks from the band’s two previous releases. (A late-2009 full-length will showcase a bigger, more road-tested sound.) “I love watching music,” Young says, “but I so much more enjoy playing and performing.”  

Hometown: Raleigh, N.C."I always wondered what kind of situations benefit a songwriter,” recalls 28-year-old Stuart McLamb. “Do you need to just do a bunch of drugs and hole up in some seedy hotel room in Paris? Is that how it happens?” Not exactly, as the North Carolina tunesmith recently learned. His eponymous release as The Love Language stems from moving back in with his parents a few years ago after several sordid run-ins with the booze beast.

Portland, Ore.-based singer/songwriter Laura Gibson wrote her new album, Beasts of Seasons, underneath a cemetery. Her basement apartment was built into the hill of a graveyard, which sloped up from her solitary window and disappeared into a skyline of trees and headstones. At night, Gibson would look up from her bed and see moonlight glinting off the marble markers.

Hometown: Atlanta, Ga. 

Remember that flannel-wearing loner from high-school algebra class? The one who never paid attention, and who staved off boredom by doodling elaborate comic-art illustrations in his notebooks: Spider-Man hoisting a rocket launcher, flaming skulls with snakes bursting through the eye sockets, mutated lobsters severing the torsos of half-naked women? Sure, that dude might’ve been a slacker, but his imagination was working overtime.

Hometown: Stockholm, Sweden
Album: More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide
For Fans Of: Belle and Sebastian, The Concretes, Camera Obscura

Swedish chanteuse Annika Norlin—the wordsmith and vocalist behind adorable indie-pop act Hello Saferide—named her newest album More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide, a nod to her literary bent. Like a musical incarnation of O. Henry, Norlin infuses her lyrics with winsome wit and twisted endings, populating the songs with loveable characters ensnared in curious daily concerns. She cultivated her detailed lyricism during years spent as an arts journalist frustrated with musicians’ vague explanations of their work. Here, Norlin reports on the stories behind Short Stories’ choicest songs.

Hometown: Nashville
Album: Midnight at the Movies
For Fans of: Steve Earle, Buck Owens, Ryan Adams

"There’s a whole class of kids that have grown up in Nashville that didn’t want anything to do with the music business, because we all grew up with single mothers, with fathers who fucked off all across the U.S. and the world while Mama stayed at home and worked her ass off,” explains 27-year-old Justin Townes Earle. “The last thing we wanted to do was be musicians.”