Indie Chillout

So, last night was a little rough — so rough you don't even remember seeing the band everyone's been blogging about lately. A day of decompression is in order if you want to get anything done, so take a deep breath and succumb to our soothing Indie Chillout Essentials, which starts with the continental drift of the Shins at their softest; the feathery film-score work of Air; the heart-wrenching confessionals of Cat Power, Elliott Smith, and Death Cab for Cutie; and the reverb-drenched Neil Young leanings of Fleet Foxes.

There, don't you feel better now? Not quite? Click on that Next Steps tab and keep listening, then.

The thing that makes our Indie Chillout Essentials a cut above is the sheer variety of mood manipulators and mope merchants at work. What could have been a tepid tonic of acoustic tunes is, instead, bursting at the grooves with film noir-infused trip-hop (Massive Attack), the tear-in-your-beer bloodletting of post-Blur Britpop (Doves, Snow Patrol), incense-sparking free-folk (Brightblack Morning Light), a couple of Icelandic icons (Björk, Sigur Rós), and enough downtempo to keep the martinis a-comin' in your favorite local lounge (Zero 7, Koop).

While you're probably two seconds from slumber by now, don't close your eyes just yet. We've still got a stack of Deep Cuts that'll deliver sweeter dreams than Annie Lennox.

Not to get too new age-y on you or anything, but it's gonna be alright. Don't believe us? You will soon enough — once that pounding headache becomes a dull throb and we're done massaging your sensitive areas with cutting-edge indie chillout. That includes the name-affirming peaks and valleys of Explosions in the Sky, the shoe-gazing grandeur of Ulrich Schnauss, the break-of-dawn electronic flourishes of the Album Leaf, the spaced-out psych of Mercury Rev and Sparklehorse, and the soothing singer-songwriter fare of American Music Club, Joshua Radin, and a beat-dodging Laura Veirs.

It'd be nice if that phone of yours stopped ringing, wouldn't it? Hey, we've got an idea: how about yanking it out of the wall and tuning into nothing but the following nightcap cuts, all of which are guaranteed to numb your nerves and wash your worries away. Not just the big-time balladry of Coldplay or Feist, either; if anything, our Indie Chillout Essentials leans to the left with such stars and buzzed-about next-big-things as Bon Iver, Modest Mouse, Iron & Wine, Bright Eyes, Sufjan Stevens, Yo La Tengo, and Belle & Sebastian. All and all, we've covered enough subgenres and scenes to fill the racks of any taste-making record store, leaving you feeling as if you've just been worked over with warm stones and tea tree oil. Night-y night.