Manhattan

Skaters have a long way to go before joining such Big Apple luminaries as The Ramones and Blondie, but with their debut album they've taken the first step: they've written a collection of songs all about what it's like to be young in New York City (one's even called "To Be Young in NYC"). Mixing a palette of sounds as diverse as the record's titular borough—garage rock, new wave, dub, reggae, electro—the four-piece paint a vivid picture of the long nights and bleary-eyed mornings that characterize coming of age in a city that never sleeps. Accented by samples and vocal snippets—of the subway, of a woman complaining about apartment hunting—the tunes whiz by with the fervor of a taxi at rush hour. "Band Breaker" is a lilting reggae track in the spirit of The Clash; "Deadbolt" borrows Billy Idol's libidinous snarl; "Miss Teen Massachusetts" is the kind of lackadaisical anthem The Strokes pioneered. When frontman Michael Ian Cummings assesses his hipster peers as "a generation of jerks," it epitomizes the love-hate relationship so many have with the city.