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Dungeonesse, two Baltimore musicians out to reclaim pop, reworked the first Cayucas single with 1980s beats, weeks before Bigfoot came out.

Thomas Buschbach's first EP as Dying Machines banned synthesizers. Its second track starts with a lone piano and ends in echoes. Out on Mush in September 2012.

At 17, Claire Wilkinson turned her cousins' fear of a shark in the pool into her first single for Lava, written with Kara DioGuardi and Kinetics & One Love.

Written in a hurry for Dario Argento in 1975, Goblin's first theme closed every documented set of the band's first North American tour, in October 2013.

A song about keeping quiet and doing as you're told, from the black-and-white debut a Berkeley piano-violin duo began in their Bushwick loft.

A song recorded in his parents' house in Norfolk opened a Kickstarter-funded debut, then opened Windows 8. How Kishi Bashi's 2012 went from zero to a national ad.

Before Gallant's Grammy-nominated Ology, the Canadian producer Stint pushed Lana Del Rey's slow-turning single into synth-pop, outside her labels' official remixes.

The opener of Rene Hell's side of a 2012 split LP with Oneohtrix Point Never: a piano piece in 12/8 that the computer keeps breaking into.

Monica Birkenes's song about staying too long where she shouldn't, out five weeks before Pocketknife, outlasted the cover that made her name.

A short piano song about falling below ground, remixed by Rian Lewis and turned into a six-week stop-motion short set in Golden Age Hollywood.

The first song out of a month in Mexican Summer's basement studio: two and a half minutes that opened Quilt's second album and sent them on tour.

After The X Factor let her go, RAIGN covered Chris Isaak's slow-burner with Mysto & Pizzi. Two years later, television found it.