“We can change our minds / decide to tell them everything,” sings Film School front man Greg Bertens on “Heart Full of Pentagons,” the band’s first single from Fission, their fourth full-length release. Film School has certainly reserved the right to change their minds. Instead of self-releasing Fission as they’d planned, the band made a last minute decision to sign to Hi-Speed Soul Records, who will release the record on August 31, 2010.

“Heart Full of Pentagons” also marks a bit of a departure for the band. Bassist Lorelei Plotczyk’s vocals begin the song, which adds an uncharacteristically feminine touch for Film School and puts it squarely in Postal Service territory from the first note. But it’s the dreamy keyboard melody that sets “Heart Full of Pentagons” apart from the band’s earlier, more distorted offerings.

The band doesn’t remain in the light and fluffy upper registers for long, however; a wall of reverb-laden guitar soon descends, bringing the song back to more recognizable shoegaze roots. If you cut it, “Heart Full of Pentagons” bleeds pure ’80s, but it’s the interplay between the light electro-pop and the heavier guitar that makes the song a legitimate offspring, rather than a hackneyed imitator.

Brooklyn foursome Restless People may be a relatively new act on listeners’ radars–their eponymous debut LP won’t be released until September 14th by IAMSOUND–but their sound will be familiar to those who have kept up with recent releases by Caribou, Deastro, and Delorean. Restless People‘s eight songs borrow a hard edge from 1990s house music as well as a heaping helping of the pan-global, post-everything mélange of the aforementioned groups, an auditory approach that nods in many directions while performing the sleight of hand of not sounding too much like any of its inspirations.

The forthcoming record kicks off with “Days of Our Lives,” a thunderous, drum machine driven single whose percussive elements are as piercing as the synthesized air horn which occasionally makes its presence known. Repetition is the central theme at play throughout the song: all of its lyrics are refrains, vocal samples stutter out with insistence, keyboards thump out patterened melodies, and an angry faux snare hammers out in a frantic Morse code. Restless People’s music is an unapologetic bash–as in both the noun and the verb–and this will assuredly make it unpalatable for some listeners. However, for those willing to engage in the noisy delirium there is an intense energy to be enjoyed throughout “Days of Our Lives,” a song which may prove to be a template for a lot of the music we’ll be hearing over the next few years.

Stockholm, Sweden duo Pallers describe their music as “dance music for the lazy,” and we’re hard pressed to come up a more apt encapsulation of their sound. Filtering Brotherhood-era New Order jams through a post-shoegazer lens, Pallers creates dreamy, electronic music with a pulse. Without resorting to piling on sonic layers, the pair crafts hazy soundscapes which are suddenly pierced by a drum machine or guitar riff, like ships suddenly appearing on a foggy horizon. Their latest effort is a two-track single, The Kiss, which was released on May 25th by their current home, the erstwhile Labrador Records imprint.

“The Kiss” spends most of its five and a half minute run time patiently cultivating a reverie of synth washes and digitally delayed notes, the backbone of which is a gentle but persistent arp line. Overlayed on this slow tide are ponderous vocals (“If it wasn’t a kiss / then I don’t know what it was”) and the glacial build up of drum machine tracks. The latter hit critical mass alongside more propulsive vocal and instrumental melodies about three minutes in, suddenly elevating the implied tempo closer to something countrymen The Sound of Arrows would rock. This duality helps lend a grace and flowing symmetry to “The Kiss,” a song which wins the listener over not with a rush and a push but rather by beguiling degrees.

Along with The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and Radio 4, !!! were one of New York City’s best gifts to dance floors during the 2000′s. After the revivalism of Joy Division’s moodier branch of the post-punk family tree at the turn of the century, the stage was set for its funkier, sexier cousin–the bough which forked out from the likes of Talking Heads and P.I.L. Some folks proclaimed !!!’s 2001 self-titled debut and its follow-up, 2004′s Louden Up Now, “dance-punk.” Others thought “post-punk” sufficed. Most didn’t really know quite how to slap an appellation on the band’s groove-heavy freak-outs but in the end, it didn’t matter: to hear !!! was to immediately understand what they were all about (and probably to love it, too).

Nic Offer and his crew were always more interested in edginess than their contemporaries, a trait that may have unfairly kept them in the shadows more than their peers, but they were likewise also more preoccupied with the primal energy of dance music in its myriad shades. “AM/FM,” the lead track from their fourth LP, Strange Weather, Isn’t It? (to be released August 24th courtesy of Warp), lays this idea out for everyone to hear. Within one song we hear a delayed synth riff and percussion layers plucked from the height of The Happy Mondays’ reign over the Madchester scene, an elastic bass line borrowed–in spirit–from the death disco of predecessors such as Delta 5 and Gang of Four, and cooed female vocal harmonies which evoke Giorgio Moroder and the Italo kids.

Where the bouillabaisse of inspiration is concerned, these influences make for a hearty stock. While “AM/FM” never gets as crazy as previous tracks such as “Hello? Is This Thing On?” or “Intensify,” it does deliver the same party-ready sensibilities and, just maybe, a slightly more mature approach to the songwriting craft than their first three albums.