Need to Know: Creep

Echoes, the ghostly debut album from Brooklyn's CREEP, feels tailor-made for those dark, nippy final weeks of the year. It also features more cameos than a Kanye record, with queer DJ-producers Lauren Flax and Lauren Dillard teaming up with different artists for each of its songs. Here, just a few of the VIPs they're indebted to.

Romy Madley Croft
The xx's front woman sings on the album's clubbiest track, the U.K. funk-inspired "Days." She recorded her vocals from her bunk on a tour bus.

Tricky
The '90s trip-hop virtuoso, who guests on "Call Her," reached out to the duo after he read an interview in which they cited him as a dream collaborator. "Teenage me was freaking out," Flax recalls. "We wrote that song with Tricky in mind, actually."

Sia
The in-demand singer-songwriter (see: Rihanna, David Guetta) shines on the ballad "Dim the Lights." "I wrote her a really long email about what this song meant to me," says Flax. "I was like, 'There is no one else in the world that can sing this.' "

Keira Knightley
OK, so she doesn't appear on the album, but the actress, a friend of a friend, did drive the Laurens to their first live show in Europe. "She'd just starred in, like, thousands of performances of some play," says Dillard, "and we were like, Why are we so nervous about having to play five songs on stage?"