Menomena

This week's installment of Mandatory Music includes new music from Mike Patton – and that's never bad news.

El VY's debut album 'Return to the Moon' is out Oct. 20. The duo, Matt Berninger and Brent Knopf, shared the title track and will tour in support of the record.

This week's installment of Mandatory Music kicks off with a collaboration by two of alternative hip-hop's emerging stars.

“Menomena share their various forms of plumage,” reads the YouTube description of the band's video for 'Plumage,' a tune from their new 'Moms' album, which dropped last month. And if by "various forms of plumage" they mean "a million different crazy wardrobes," that totally makes sense.

Family is strange. Anyone can tell you that. And so it follows that for artists, as they mature -- like, say, by the time they're making their fifth album -- they investigate their own. This is the overriding theme of ‘Moms,' the new record from Portland's Menomena. The title can be explained by the fact that Danny Seim's mother died when he was a teenager, while bandmate Justin Harris grew up wit