Zach Gill is keeping busy this summer touring internationally with two new albums from two bands. While Gill and his band ALO are not yet household names, Jack Johnson is one of the most recognizable singer-songwriters of the decade.

Bridging the gap between rock and jam band, Gill and his band mates in ALO began playing together Saratoga High School. Gill first met Johnson when the two were attending college at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dead Confederate hails from the musically rich locale of Athens, Ga. Their music has been known for its moody southern melodies, simplistic and often-dark lyrics, not to mention grunge-like feel. Drawing inspiration from such renowned early ’90s acts as Dinosaur Jr., The Meat Puppets and Nirvana makes it easy to neatly package the band and write them off as simply following in the footsteps of their contemporaries.

This, however, would be a mistake. Dead Confederate has been working since the early 2000s, and has spent time building up their musical repertoire and touring with bands like R.E.M. and Alberta Cross, Deer Tick and Surfer Blood.

When the Pitchfork 2010 lineup was unleashed, one name surged above the storms of hype surrounding Pavement’s reunion and LCD Soundsystem’s potentially career-ending victory lap. That name was Sir Lucious Left Foot, known in your living rooms as Big Boi.

Out of all the faces that emerged and survived from the quicksand of the blogosphere this past year, Best Coast — the gloomy yet endearing creative project of L.A. songstress Bethany Cosentino — might be the brightest.

Few bands can mirror Liars’ uncanny penchant for converging catchy melodies with experimental arrangements. Born in the wake of the early ought’s indie explosion and fronted by Filipino-born virtuoso Angus Andrew, Liars shocked shoe-gazing hipsters back to life with jerky stop-and-start art punk on their superfluous and aptly-titled debut album “They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top.”

But four subsequent releases and a Thom Yorke stamp of approval later, it’s clear the album barely even scratched the surface of Liars’ noisy, far-reaching sonic array. The L.A. -based musical vagrants are arguably the most inventive group in the ever-expanding bubble of indie rock and in their latest work “Sisterworld, “ the trio’s sound is more polished and murky than ever before.