South Carolina band Shovels and Rope just released their sophomore album O’ Be Joyful. It’s a calculating and impassioned offering of folk-country rock with a New Orleans twist.

The duo, made up of Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst, bring metaphors and storytelling imagery to life with hand claps, angry banjo plucking and gritty vocals draped in sincerity. It’s like they traveled down the Mississippi by riverboat, integrating bits and pieces of the waterway’s different musical influences into a Southern rock sound. At times you feel the influence of Big Easy jazz.

So maybe iTunes threw you a bone and upped your sampling time to 90 seconds a song. Even then, there is no way you can truly sink into an album before you buy it. And with iTunes in the pocket of mainstream music, forget about discovering something unique or paying a fair price for a digital album.

Enter Bandcamp.com—the website that lets upstart bands post entire albums so that you can stream them, share them and, in many cases, pay what you want for them. Web developers and friends Ethan Diamond, Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt and Neal Tucker launched Bandcamp in 2008 as a way to help bands release albums affordably and efficiently. Today, it serves as a window into true indie music.

Take a stroll through a metal foundry while listening for patterns in the sounds made by the machinery and you might hear a bit of the industrial tenor that makes up the noise-rock backdrop for Brooklyn band, A Place To Bury Strangers’ third album Worship.

It may seem unlikely that a sound so seemingly unrefined could be pleasant, but lead singer Oliver Ackermann’s vocals that echo with the dark-pop coloring of The Cure’s Robert Smith lend a fluid element to the music, rendering songs like “You Are The One,” “And I’m Up” and “Slide” impeccably smooth and endearing.