This week “Contra,” the excellent second album by the indie alternative-rock band Vampire Weekend, debuted at No. 1 atop the Billboard Top 200 Album charts. Somehow this heady stew of African-inflected alt-rock managed to top two of the best-selling artists of the last few months: the late-blooming juggernaut Susan Boyle and the confectionery rapper Ke$ha.

It seems impossible that songs like “Horchata” (listen and download here), “White Sky” and “California English,” brimming with clean, plucky guitar lines, syncopated beats and synthesized highlife-like horns, could ever displace Simon Cowell-sanctioned tweener pap. Perhaps it’s because the lead singer Ezra Koenig’s dulcet tone and slightly stilted phrasing recalls no one so much as Paul Simon. (“Graceland,” Simon’s African-inspired album, won a Grammy and reached No. 3 on the charts back in 1986.)

While this quartet of Columbia alums is climbing the charts with its global beats, there are plenty of other bands fusing African and other world music sounds. Groups like the Dirty Projectors, whose brainy 2009 album “Bitte Orca,” with its polyrhythms and off-kilter guitar sounds, made many a year-end list; Baltimore’s Yeasayer, whose wondrous mishmash of folk-pop-psychedelic-world-music on its debut, “All Hour Cymbals,” was a revelation; and Buraka Som Sistema, an explosive Portuguese group that combines a funky mix of electronics and African sounds.

In this increasingly shrinking global village, there are also African groups, like South Africa’s BLK JKS, coming at it from the other side. The band’s 2009 debut, “After Robots,” with rock- and reggae-inflected African music, earned it the moniker “Africa’s TV on the Radio.” Perhaps most interesting of the multinational collaborations is the one between the French-Swedish production duo Radioclit and Malawian singer Esaw Mwamwaya in London to form the Very Best. Its impressive debut, “Warm Heart of Africa,” features modern European dance beats and kitchen-sink sampling combined with vocals sung in Chichewa (and Ezra Koenig on the infectious title track).

Even Seattle-based Sub Pop Records, once the standard bearer of all things white-guy grunge, is going global. Last week the label announced it was launching a world music imprint called “Next Ambiance.” The subsidiary’s first record is by a Malian artist named Bassekou Kouyate, whose African beats might just topple the next American Idol.