Paper Garden Records hosts a sort of P.S. 1-type event at 3rd Ward featuring not only Brooklyn intellirap duo Das Racist, but Boy Crisis, art by Art Battles and, if that doesn’t make you at least interested enough to go, free Colt 45, which is the new free Red Stripe. See how now you are interested in art and music? Predictable.

THE BAND REAL ESTATE isn’t named after anything particular, certainly not after the type of job that guitarist/singer/primary songwriter Martin Courtney has. Or maybe it is. “I work in a real estate office actually,” says Courtney. “I have a real estate license.”

ON A BURNISHED fall day, Ryan Heyner and Josh Kolenik of Small Black sit side-by-side at Williamsburgs Manna restaurant. Both Long Island natives wear punchy sneakers and a heartfelt manner that matches their music.

Alan Cumming won a Tony Award for his iconic performance as the MC in Cabaret. He’s earned a place in the hearts of cult movie lovers for his turn as the geek-turned-billionaire in Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, before casting everyone’s favorite indie actors in The Anniversary Party, the film he wrote and directed with Jennifer Jason Leigh. He’s even written a book, Tommy’s Tale. So it should come as no surprise that he’s completing his pop culture to-do list by releasing solo CD, I Bought a Blue Car Today.

A week before Girls, the much-talked-about band from San Francisco, kicked off its tour with a show at Maxwell’s, the band was still putting together its live act. “We haven’t had a full rehearsal, we’re still teaching [new band members] songs—we have a week to teach 15 to 20 songs,” explained JR White who writes music and plays bass for the band. “The last tour we were playing new songs and not playing some songs from the album. We haven’t been playing ‘Lauren Marie’ because it hasn’t been working live.”

You can buy an overpriced vintage perfume bottle on Craigslist or search for apartments in Bushwick disguised as East Williamsburg. Or, if you are Somer Bingham, you can find band members. That’s how the solo singer and guitarist met Dan LeMunyan, now the drummer in the Bingham-led band Clinical Trials. LeMunyan and Bingham met through Bingham’s online listing in the spring of 2009, and the inperson meeting that followed went better than either party could have anticipated. “We decided to get drunk, make music and be happy together,” LeMunyan says.

On his worst days, Chris Otepka says it sounds like he’s standing under water. Most days though, his ears are just hypersensitive to sounds. Otepka, who turns 30 next week, is the former guitarist and lead singer of the now-defunct indie rock band Troubled Hubble, a group founded outside of Chicago in 1999. Otepka and the band played together for six years, performing more than a hundred shows a year at their peak. Troubled Hubble was never a quiet band, but Otepka says that as the years went on, the group got progressively louder in its live show, with the mentality being “crank [the volume] until the sound guy says it’s too loud.”

WHO SAYS YOU need an entire group of musicians to write infectious garage rock? Kristin Gundred writes and records under the name Dum Dum Girls and uses the stage name Dee Dee, which makes the entire project that much more confusing, as the band consists of mainly just Gundred.

IN A PRACTICE room the size and temperature of a sweat lodge, Mr. Dream rehearses after work. Beads of perspiration bleed through the musicians’ sheer shirts in Williamsburg’s Sound City, and Adam Moerder, the lead singer and guitarist, flops his boyish curls.

We love dancing, we love clubs and we certainly love drinks, but the real reason we spend so many nights out is because we really, really love bands. Living in New York, it’s easy to take for granted that every single night, dozens—if not hundreds—of groups are playing all over town, and most of them are hometown acts. We’re certainly lucky to live in a city that the world’s best bands come through on a regular basis, but we’re even luckier to have local talent of the caliber that we do. We decided to check in with some, but by no means all, of our favorite local groups to get their thoughts on the current state of the New York rock scene, its best bands, greatest venues, most underrated acts and more.