To truly celebrate Pitchfork’s first 25 years, we can’t just look back. We need to look forward, too. The site was born out of the spirit of discovery, and over the years, we’ve always made it our mission to champion new artists, often pushing the underground into the mainstream in the process. The musicians who excite us the most are often the ones that feel like they’re just on the brink of their masterpiece, who are constantly innovating and building a legacy for themselves or their community. These are the artists that help us consider the future of music: how it’ll be made, where it’ll come from, what role it’ll play in shaping scenes, and how genre lines may be increasingly dismantled.
Over the past few months, we’ve compiled a list of artists who are pushing us to think this way. We polled Pitchfork’s staff and select contributors to see who excited them right now. We pulled from our Rising series and revisited emerging artists with Best New Music releases from the past few years. (For context, the xx, Lana Del Rey, and FKA twigs were once Pitchfork Rising artists, back in the day.) Though the pandemic has been a punishing time for musicians, making it even harder for newer artists to break beyond their scene, the richness and variety of new music has persisted.
The following list includes artists who are still developing their sound as well as those who have already made impressive records over the last half-decade. Most viscerally, we favored music that has recently moved us, and people we believe will play meaningful roles in their communities going forward. Heard collectively, these future luminaries point to where music might be headed. We can’t wait to see what they do next.
Listen to artists from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
For more of Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary coverage, head here. And read our Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel's note about our 25th anniversary project here.
100 gecs
With their breakthrough 2019 album 1000 gecs, Laura Les and Dylan Brady became the unlikely standard-bearers and de facto mascots of the hyperpop movement. And they did it by having more fun than anybody else. 100 gecs approach their impish, pitched-up pop with buckwild confidence—just watch these skinny longhairs gas themselves up in the “Money Machine” video, bragging about the size of their trucks and threatening to kick your ass.
If you listen carefully to gecs’ songs, you can trace a recent history of heavily memed pop music through the neon slurry of their influences. Percussive EDM blasts co-signed by Skrillex echo through their unorthodox ska revival banger “stupid horse.” They added their signature chirp to Linkin Park’s “One Step Closer” on an officially sanctioned Linkin Park rework. “Hand Crushed By a Mallet” is such a slam-dunk pop-punk song that Fall Out Boy managed to Animorph seamlessly into gecs on their remix. Now their sound is an influence itself: As more artists try their hands at hyperpop, Brady has become a producer for stars like Charli XCX and Rico Nasty.
With their new album 10000 gecs coming soon, and an adoring cult following their every move, gecs seem to have limitless potential. The duo recently revealed that some of their new material will forgo Auto-Tune, suggesting that as major-label pop stars race to catch up, these weirdos may already be tweaking their formula. The album also includes a song called “Doritos and Fritos” and the sound of frogs ribbiting, so they’re still clearly having a blast. –Evan Minsker
Amaarae
Amaarae has a raspy, radio-ready falsetto that evokes the opulent luxury of silk sheets, and big confident pop songs packing fluorescent hooks. But her debut album, 2020’s The Angel You Don’t Know, sounds different from almost everything in the Top 40 right now: She uses sonic elements of Nigerian alté, Southern hip-hop, dancehall, R&B, and a flash of punk to create lustful dance-floor jams that swelter and yearn. This innovative sound could perhaps only be made by this singer-songwriter-producer, who grew up in Accra, the Bronx, New Jersey, and Atlanta, listening to everyone from Guns N’ Roses to Britney Spears to Daddy Yankee to Billie Holiday.
Half of the songs on The Angel You Don’t Know double as posse cuts highlighting rising African talent, but Amaarae, with her liquid-smooth demeanor and Young Thug-like inflections, remains in the driver’s seat. She saunters from fantasy to fantasy, flaunting “rich sex” and going by “zaddy,” but her desire to escape into pleasure and luxury masks a well of complex emotion. In slinky songs that snap and pop, like the rise-and-grind anthem “SAD GIRLZ LUV MONEY,” she sings with the assurance of someone who knows darkness but won’t be deterred. Amaarae is manifesting her dreams in real time and inviting us to witness. –Vrinda Jagota
Angel Bat Dawid
On stage and on record, Angel Bat Dawid is a presence—at first a mysterious voice emerging with a clarinet and a vision; later, the commanding leader of a righteous ensemble, pleading for life and recognition. A fixture of Chicago’s experimental jazz scene, Dawid broke through as a solo artist with 2019’s The Oracle, an enveloping glimpse into her heart and psyche that she recorded entirely on her cell phone in London, Cape Town, and Chicago.
Months after releasing The Oracle, Dawid and her band, Tha Brothahood, headed to Germany to perform at JazzFest Berlin and captured their set for 2020’s LIVE. Twice as long as the studio LP, the live album transforms Dawid’s intimate compositions into enthralling epics, melding together free jazz, spiritual music, and social commentary. LIVE is uniquely tactile, every note and chant bringing the listener into the room. Dawid’s expressive voice carries her and the music to unexpected places, where raw emotion is as valuable as virtuosity. The performance reaches a climax early on “Black Family,” as Dawid begs the crowd to repeat the song’s refrain: “The Black family is the strongest institution in the world.” What was once a private meditation is transformed into a collective need. Her words, she insists, must matter. –Matthew Strauss
Bartees Strange
As a kid, Bartees Cox Jr. could be found performing opera in churches across Oklahoma with his mother and siblings. Thanks to AOL Instant Messenger and his friends’ car stereos, by his teens he was gobbling up everything from MF Doom to midwestern emo to TV on the Radio. After performing in other people’s bands for years and working as a press secretary in the Obama Administration, Cox finally released his own music as Bartees Strange in 2020. Well, kind of: The songs on his first EP, Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, were eclectic reinterpretations of songs by the National, inspired by a concert experience where Bartees was dismayed to find that he was one of the few Black people in the room. With his proper debut, 2020’s Live Forever, he defiantly claimed space in the still-quite-white world of indie rock.
Boasting cartwheeling guitar hooks that are catnip to anyone who gets their kicks in a mosh pit, the album blows right through emo, pop-punk, and post-punk as primary influences by also featuring Auto-Tuned R&B-trap, a chilled techno vibe, and a delicate Bon Iver moment. As a vocalist, Bartees is a powerhouse who handles every sonic curveball with ease, a hardcore screamer with a gospel soul, and on songs like “Boomer,” a quick-spitting rapper running through his inner monologue. While these songs recount the many ways Bartees has been grounded—as a musician, as a lover, as a Black man—Live Forever soars in every single way. “Genres keep us in our boxes,” he growls on the glitched-out “Mossblerd.” “They tried to kill my spirit.” Clearly, they failed. –Quinn Moreland
black midi
When this four-piece rock band from London first hit the UK club circuit in 2018, none of them looked old enough to rent a car. Their youth is only notable because they sound like a band who could easily play any ’70s King Crimson or E.L.P. song in a cover band on a prog-rock cruise, so aged are their influences, so technically honed is their craft. So who better to lead us into the blind corners of tomorrow than black midi? I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future; I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next part of this black midi song.
The volume, melody, and tempo of a black midi composition sound like they are on electronic triggers, but it is just the speed and alacrity with which four players can change the song in front of your eyes. It’s practically Vaudevillian. On their second album, Cavalcade, there’s the unhinged Looney Tunes romp of “John L,” a quick costume change, and then presto! a torch song for the German actress Marlene Dietrich. The band is obfuscatory and difficult, two welcome traits in a musical landscape increasingly defined by ease and accessibility. They are an oppositional force in a futile attempt to change the current of music. It will be a joy to watch them march into battle every time. –Jeremy D. Larson
Blood Incantation
The best metal bands can make you feel like a member of an exclusive club. They offer not just their music—a superhero soundtrack calibrated to empower the listener and piss off anyone else within an earshot—but also an aesthetic, a set of values, and a whole world of references and allusions. Sometimes they even have a mascot. Blood Incantation are finely attuned to this legacy. Right out of the stargate with their instant classic 2016 debut Starspawn, they had all the signifiers of old-school death metal—grinding riffs, pounding blast-beats, and deep, hellish vocals—plus a spacey, astrologically focused mythology that was entirely their own. In early live shows, right around when most normal bands might tell the crowd they had T-shirts for sale in the back, singer Paul Riedl would run his voice through an effects box and lay out a conspiracy theory involving pyramids and ancient aliens.
It was an auspicious beginning, but something even more special has happened as the band has evolved. Now essentially an interlinked community of equally compelling projects—check out Riedl’s analog synth music as Hoverkraft, or the many metal bands with which they share members, like the doomy Spectral Voice or the Western-themed Wayfarer—Blood Incantation have come to represent their genre at its most ambitious and least encumbered. Like their music, which can bounce from wormhole mayhem to melodic psych rock, the band operates completely on its own logic. Their liner notes are known to list out-there reading recommendations; they stan for Enya; they claim their next album will be entirely ambient and they’re looking to perform it on a tour of planetariums. They’re headed to the stars and their spaceship is big enough for everybody. —Sam Sodomsky
Duval Timothy
Duval Timothy’s approach to the piano is distinct yet unassuming. His debut album, 2012’s DUKOBANTI, was based on chords he taught himself when he was 13, and the short piano tracks that make up the project wring emotion out of every note. Both DUKOBANTI and Timothy’s follow-up, 2016’s Brown Loop, explore the elliptical space where hip-hop and jazz meet, creating a niche where simple, melodic progressions take on the grandeur of an expressive solo.
His next release, 2017’s Sen Am, a product of Timothy’s travels between the UK and West Africa, made it clear that his path demanded witnesses. Using recorded conversations with friends and family in Freetown, Sierra Leone, he created a wrenching tapestry of displacement. On Sen Am, his playing seems like a repository of all the ambiguous tension one feels when living two different lives and juggling two homes. The WhatsApp voicemails that soundtrack the project move you because of the quotidian nature of what his relatives ask for (money and the ability to meet romantic partners in England) and how it all plays against a backdrop of piercing compositions. Then, last year, Timothy crystallized his approach with Help, a jazz-focused album that traverses R&B and ambient as it sketches out a picture of what art that truly represents the diaspora looks like. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Ethel Cain
Decked out in cutoffs, sunglasses, and a fringed leather jacket, she furiously headbangs inside a church, one combat boot perched on a pew: Thus was our introduction earlier this year to Ethel Cain, aka 23-year-old Hayden Anhedönia, in the visualizer for her breakthrough single “Michelle Pfeiffer.” Anhedönia had been quietly releasing a steady stream of dreamy, lo-fi music over the course of the past few years, but this spring, she went widescreen with the release of the Inbred EP. A collection of stunning goth-pop hymns from the dark side, it arrived accompanied by a fully formed universe of gritty, sexy, often uncomfortably funny videos and social media dispatches. (“i watched my god fuck your god to death,” reads one recent tweet.)
Anhedönia, who is a transgender woman, has said her laser focus on acheiving superstardom began in her early teen years, as a way to cope with the oppressive Southern Baptist small town where she was raised. Her use of Christian iconography in profoundly profane contexts is an act of reclamation, she says. Anhedönia has described the Ethel Cain persona as a “cult leader.” With her pop hooks and her visceral world-building, it’s not hard to imagine Cain’s real-world musical cult only getting bigger and more ambitious. –Amy Phillips
Indigo De Souza
To be or not to be? Indigo De Souza knows her answer. “I wanna be!” she proclaims on her stunning recent album, Any Shape You Take, each word punctuated with its own staccato snare hit and fuzzed-out guitar chord. It’s an elemental moment on a record overflowing with them. And it gets to the bleeding heart of De Souza’s art: She takes the biggest emotions we’ve got—joy, grief, sorrow—and places them at the very center of her plainspoken songs. Her unflinching music follows suit, with traces of Nirvana’s grungy wallop, Prince’s minimalist funk, and Death Cab for Cutie’s melancholy tunefulness. On “Real Pain,” a dirgy hook gives way to a hellish maelstrom of real-life fan screams that is suddenly interrupted by a tart power-pop denouement; in less than five minutes, she sums up the deepest hurt humans can withstand as well as the cathartic aftermath.
De Souza is signed to Saddle Creek, which seems cosmically right. The label originally rose to prominence around the turn of the century with bands like Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley, who traded indie rock’s signature inscrutability for a sometimes-uncomfortable emotional directness. De Souza is both continuing and updating that tradition, alongside other young singer-songwriters who are unafraid to expose their traumas and desires, including Lomelda, Snail Mail, and IAN SWEET. For De Souza, there’s no point in skirting around the feelings that make us who we are when you can just tackle them head-on. When you can just be. –Ryan Dombal
KeiyaA
Chakeiya Richmond learned the rules early, which made them a whole lot easier to break. By the time she released her debut EP, Work, in 2015, the singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist had been a musician for over a decade: first singing in the Chicago Children’s Choir, then testing into an orchestral program at a local magnet school, and eventually studying a few semesters of saxophone in Columbia College’s jazz program. But with those first songs—languid, muddy experiments in R&B that turned their back on the rigidity of the conservatory—she was Keiya, an artist. And then, as so many transcendent ones do, she retreated—not into silence, per se, but into a new life in New York amid Brooklyn's energized, and ostensibly energizing, DIY hip-hop community.
When she reemerged with the full-length Forever, Ya Girl in 2020, KeiyaA, now with an extra vowel bracketing her stage name, had synthesized a vocal and production style that is somehow earthy and otherworldly at once: the crystal-gleam harmonies of Solange, the stubbornly irregular drums of J Dilla, the soul-weary melodies of Erykah Badu, the speckled texture of decades of hip-hop and jazz and R&B and the emotionally honest, intellectually curious promise of their future. But mostly there is KeiyaA, cartwheeling freely over some beats and sitting in humble meditation over others. KeiyaA has said that she was couch-surfing when she uploaded the album to Bandcamp, and that its reception quickly outpaced her expectations. Without a label to cop billboard space or industry prospectors eager to hype her, she offered up what she had, hoped for the best, and reminded us that it’s magic when the music is enough. –Rawiya Kameir
L’Rain
Even upon arrival, L’Rain seemed bound for an endlessly malleable future. Classically trained in piano and cello, the artist born Taja Cheek taught herself bass to play in rock bands, studied music at Yale but was drawn more to college radio, and now works as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 outpost, where she’s booked underappreciated acts like New Age trailblazer Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Her 2017 debut album—also titled L’Rain, an homage to her late mother Lorraine—grappled with grief through an unruly collage of field recordings, flickering guitars, and musty loops, part Alice Coltrane ashram chant and part J Dilla beat tape.
Arriving this year, L’Rain’s sophomore album, Fatigue, reimagines the modern avant-garde. As much a bandleader as a front person, Cheek steers nearly 20 collaborators through genres—from galactic funk to acidic post-punk, swirling ambient to soulful R&B—in much the same way she molds found sounds, traversing unpredictable song structures that turn a half-hour set into a hero’s journey. Grief still lingers, but the shape-shifter’s focus is on the theme of metamorphosis itself. Cheek has described her music as “approaching songness,” and the six-minute showcase “Find It,” which ends with a preacher singing gospel at a funeral, offers a more poignant summation: “My mother told me, Make a way out of no way.” Cheek’s is an art of becoming; her music explores concepts and emotions in search of resolution, staying intriguingly, wonderfully unknowable along the way. –Marc Hogan
Loraine James
For Loraine James, blurring lines—between club rhythms and experimental sounds, agony and ecstasy, continuity and rupture, the storm and its aftermath—comes naturally. Over the past several years, across a prolific stream of albums, EPs, edits, and outtakes, James has developed one of the most distinctive sounds in contemporary electronic music, in which IDM, grime, ambient, techno, rap, and noise collide in a thrillingly unstable fusion. The autumn of 2019 marked James’ proper arrival: Released on London’s vaunted Hyperdub label, her breakthrough album For You and I wrapped up her opposing tendencies into a deeply personal statement, by turns tender and confrontational, about life as a young, working-class queer Black woman in contemporary London.
The accolades flowed and her bookings multiplied. Then, of course, came the pandemic. James responded to the uncertainty by burrowing deeper into her volatile world of sound. After a stretch of Bandcamp-only experiments, she returned early this summer with Reflection, an album that amplifies everything that makes her music special: vulnerability, expressiveness, sheer force of will. It also marks James’ increasing interest in collaboration, with features from drill rapper Le3 bLACK, Zurich-born experimentalist Xzavier Stone, and even chillwave veteran Baths. In the album’s closing track, Manchester rapper Iceboy Violet gives voice to the twinned senses of struggle and purpose that run throughout James’ music, addressing police violence and capitalist oppression before offering a proud counterpoint: “We bop, we flex, we groove…. We’re building something new.” James’ work takes us inside that reconstruction, in all its beautiful tumult. –Philip Sherburne
Lyra Pramuk
Lyra Pramuk once said, “I want to build a world together as a queer community,” and her music offers a direct line to the utopia-building that brings her solace. The Berlin-based artist wanders between genre and technique, combining her skills as a producer and vocalist to redefine identity expression as a trans woman. On Fountain, her stunning 2020 debut LP, the only recorded sound is her classically-trained voice, which Pramuk then electronically processed to blip and manipulate into full compositions. Infinite and ritualistic, these songs sit at the precipice of electronic, experimental, and folk music. On the tense Fountain highlight “Xeno,” her voice, layered atop itself, drones and grows louder, spilling and toppling over the track like a waterfall.
For her recent remix album Delta, Pramuk invited a diverse set of collaborators including Australian-Icelandic producer Ben Frost, Indonesian electronic rebels Gabber Modus Operandi, and Brooklyn techno artist Tygapaw to reimagine songs from Fountain. Yet Delta feels more expansive than a run-of-the-mill remix project—some songs boast entirely new arrangements, adding to the scope and reach of Pramuk’s artistry as they suggest tantalizing ways forward. Across sounds and styles, Pramuk’s work pushes us to see beyond the confines of gender and into a new kind of musical subversion. –Gio Santiago
MIKE
MIKE works to find patches of light through fogs of grief. He was only 18 years old when he released his 2017 breakout project MAY GOD BLESS YOUR HUSTLE, but he sounded more enlightened than his years let on. He would spend the late 2010s refining a deeply personal and therapeutic style of rap, reminiscing on his late mother in his music as much as he channeled the influence of MF DOOM and Earl Sweatshirt. This soul-baring approach, combined with the sample-based beats he creates under his dj blackpower pseudonym, helped galvanize the city’s newly thriving underground scene. When Earl himself namedropped MIKE on his 2018 album Some Rap Songs, it felt like a full-circle moment.
With his latest album Disco!, MIKE’s emotional palette expands further. Songs like “Evil Eye” and “Aww (Zaza)” are among the sunniest and most confident of his career, while others, like “Frogville (Mk Ultra)” and “Sandra,” resonate deeper than before. There’s a sense that even though his journey of self-discovery might never end, it will only become richer as his platform expands. Though just 22, MIKE’s emotional honesty has done more than redefine lyricism for a new generation of rap fans—it’s given them the tools to navigate mental fog through song. –Dylan Green
Moor Mother
The banner of “protest music” has been claimed by many artists but earned by few. For Camae Ayewa, the poet, composer, rapper, and educator who records as Moor Mother, the creation of radical art is the only option. After self-releasing a number of raw, sample-heavy EPs on Bandcamp, she issued her debut album Fetish Bones in 2016 and quickly established herself as an incomparable presence in the underground scene. Moor Mother’s songs mine intergenerational trauma and recontextualize painful history. She revisits the source of suffering—race riots, police brutality, the death of Sandra Bland—and reshapes the narrative through her own lens. As narrator, she acquires agency.
On her new album Black Encyclopedia of the Air, Ayewa continues to dig through the brutal past. “Mama made me/Tall baby/Out the guts of slavery/Grits and gravy/Shackled babies,” she raps on “Race Function Limited.” But longtime fans will note the softness of her voice, the liquid keystrokes, the shimmering percussion. Ayewa has jokingly referred to Black Encyclopedia of the Air as her “sell-out” album, though “most accessible” is a more accurate description. Nodding to astral jazz and ’90s R&B, the record might contain her most effective protest music to date: the kind that quietly slips you bold concepts while you recline into the groove. –Madison Bloom
Navy Blue
A childhood classmate of Thebe Kgositsile, who would soon become Earl Sweatshirt, Sage Elsesser grew up on the periphery of the Odd Future collective, but his earliest professional endeavors were as a pro skateboarder and model for streetwear brands like Supreme. When he first started making beats and posting them to SoundCloud under the name Navy Blue in 2015, he did so anonymously, hoping to avoid the burden of expectation. By the time his beats popped up on records by NYC hero MIKE and Elsesser’s old friend Thebe, his soulful, off-kilter loops and lo-fi FX had coalesced into a recognizable aesthetic: at once somber and hopeful, gorgeous, yet pockmarked with grit. That homespun style serves as a well-suited backdrop for the sober, introspective rhymes he writes as an MC.
The three albums he’s shared since the start of the pandemic—Àdá Irin, Song of Sage: Post Panic!, and Navy’s Reprise—depict a young man at the precipice of adulthood, wise enough to see beyond his years and realize just how much he has to learn. Despite growing up in California, he has crafted a sound that suits New York’s’s high-minded underground rap scene. His latest offering, a collaborative LP with NYC’s resident old soul Wiki called Half God, bears that out; Elsesser’s beats imbue Wiki’s street tales with gravitas and romance, evoking sights and smells with just a sound. With his precocious wisdom and world-weary loops, Elsesser is well-equipped to shepherd hip-hop’s next generation into the future. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
Rina Sawayama
The empathy in Rina Sawayama’s music comes with a razor-sharp edge. Informed by internet culture, couture, and Y2K nostalgia, her work, she says, is “kinda like drag,” and its scrim of high drama allows her to explore how ideas of self and identity are being mediated by technology and society. “What if it all went away, today?/Then what’s left inside?” she asked on “Ordinary Superstar,” a sugary pop anthem from her 2017 EP Rina, hinting at the conditional nature of contemporary online celebrity. And while it’s fair to call Sawayama a pop singer, her 2020 debut SAWAYAMA presented a heady mix of turn-of-the-millennium Top 40, golden-age R&B, and nu-metal that felt remarkably unforced. Inside that tough, gaudy exterior was a touching album about Sawayama’s family history, including the pain of her parents’ divorce and the complicated ways that genetics and experience shape us.
Sawayama’s ongoing pop project also involves inclusion and advocacy. Just a few years into her career, she’s effected lasting change by successfully petitioning the Brit Awards to recognize the contributions of UK artists born abroad. And her holistic vision for queer artistry goes beyond a single love song or photoshoot to encompass theatrical costumes and makeup, futuristic art direction and video treatments, and the shared community celebration of a song like “Chosen Family.” With her arresting aesthetic and clarity of intention, Sawayama’s work feels like a harbinger for a hyperconnected pop future where no influence is off the table. –Anna Gaca
Shygirl
When Blane Muise’s voice, icy and at ease, bubbled up from the rattling beat of 2016’s “Want More,” her first single with producer Sega Bodega, the Shygirl persona instantly crystallized: She is a sphinx slinking through the club at closing time to select her prey. But unlike most other raunchy MCs, Shygirl’s dirty talk is tuned to a whisper, her direct but blasé delivery making the matter of sex and control all the more normalized. On her 2018 debut EP Cruel Practice, she deadpanned about her conquests over blistering beats, crafting a hybrid of rap and quietly sinister dance music. For 2019’s “UCKERS,” she mused on her “soul destroying pussy” as Sega bent a slasher-flick scream into a hook, cleverly repurposing the sound of female torture into one of female pleasure.
With six million Spotify streams and chaotic usage on TikTok, “UCKERS” remains one of Shygirl’s most popular songs, a track that only she could make. But her subsequent ascent has featured a string of high-profile moments, from collaborations with Arca and the late SOPHIE to a recent appearance on Lady Gaga’s Chromatica remix album. In late 2020, with her conceptually driven and sonically diverse ALIAS EP, Shygirl planted a giant freak flag in dormant club culture with cheeky lines like, “Won’t ever meet your mum/But your daddy’s on the phone.” Following it up this year with “BDE,” a filthy little duet about getting exactly what you want, Shygirl has locked down her own darkened corner in the pop sphere before even announcing her proper debut LP. –Madison Bloom
Snail Mail
Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan emerged in 2017 as something of a Most Likely To Succeed from her indie rock class: a guitar student of Helium’s Mary Timony who’d been playing since she was 5 years old, the Maryland teenager signed to Matador Records around the time she graduated high school. Her debut LP, 2018’s Lush, sounded wiser and more wistful than her age, with its crushing hooks, classic ’90s references, blunt emotional clarity, and distinct guitar tone; at the same time, her casually vulnerable sensibility and goofy online demeanor felt distinctly of her generation. In a genre built on canon reverence and personal introspection, the word “prodigy” was tossed around a lot.
Snail Mail’s forthcoming follow-up, Valentine, seems to set the pace for what “going pop” in indie rock means today. Now 22, Jordan sounds more confident and nuanced in her vocals as she moves through the newfound eclecticism of her musical world and the crushing depths of her own longing. The rock songs are gnarlier and angrier, with some striving to the arena-ready heights of Celebrity Skin-era Hole, while the pop songs hint at yacht rock, trip-hop, chillwave, and more. The whole thing is bold and a little sexy without really trying, in part because Jordan throws herself into love just as easily as she cuts people off. “You and I, that ship has sailed,” she croons carefree on the highlight “Forever (Sailing).” As usual, Snail Mail’s moving on to better things at a startling clip. –Jillian Mapes
Spirit of the Beehive
Since forming seven years ago around the core duo of Zack Schwartz and Rivka Ravede, Spirit of the Beehive have followed their own inscrutable logic. Named after a 1973 classic of Spanish cinema, the group arrived as purveyors of misty psych-rock and clanging noise-pop interspersed with hallucinatory found-sound snippets. Art-damaged and basement-dank, they sometimes resembled a shoegaze band that got into Pavement’s stash circa Wowee Zowee. Pleasure Suck, from 2017, positioned them more in line with trippy racket-makers from Pink Floyd to Animal Collective, but their 2018 breakthrough Hypnic Jerks brought the goods: Filled with cryptic vintage recordings and oblong riffs, it was as attention-addled and disturbing as contemporary life itself.
This year’s ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH expands their unsettling vision without diluting it. While first single “THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN’T DO” adds a glitchy electronic pulse, it brings to mind the emergency room more than the dancefloor. Even in low-key moments, the proceedings feel like they’re about to collapse into chaos at any moment. In a barrage of fear and nihilistic beauty, the album’s nightmarish, post-genre collage once again evokes how overwhelming it is just to be bombarded with information at all times. As Schwartz sings on the album’s hypercolor centerpiece, “THE SERVER IS IMMERSED”: “You might wait but you’re already in the future.” –Marc Hogan
Tems
In her grade school days, Temilade Openiyi used to be embarrassed by the way she sang. That’s not a concern anymore. Now simply known as Tems, the Lagos-raised artist has a voice that could make the most frigid person swoon. It’s soft but powerful, vulnerable yet strong, a little on the deeper side, and never in a rush. Take her 2020 single “These Days”: Over lush production that brings to mind SZA’s Ctrl, Tems sings about hurt in a way that feels like it’s exhausting to get each line off her chest. Anything more may be too much for her heart to bear. It makes sense that her short but memorable debut project, 2020’s For Broken Ears, is no longer than seven tracks.
Still, it only takes short bursts for Tems’ impact to resonate. Her opening line on WizKid’s intoxicating smash “Essence”—“Say I wanna leave you in the morning/But I need you now”—doesn’t seem like much on paper, but when it’s sung around the swirling Afropop groove, it’s like time is standing still. This is the commanding presence of a pop star. Over the summer, Tems hopped on a track with Drake and turned the most dominant rapper of the last decade into just another dude. Everything comes together on her recent EP If Orange Was a Place, whether it’s the swelling falsetto on “Found” or the way she crumbles on “Replay.” It’s hard to believe there was ever a doubt about a voice this singular. –Alphonse Pierre
Tirzah
Tirzah Mastin refuses to smoothen love’s rough edges, but she cannot help singing love songs. Her offbeat ballads, brought spitting and hiccuping to life with her old friend Mica Levi, are modern masterpieces of the form. They sometimes sound stubbornly DIY, like clammy recordings of someone’s first-ever go at songwriting. Yet barely a note in Tirzah’s repertoire could belong in any other—from the casual magnetism of her water-cooler drawl to Levi’s skin-prickling woodwind and puckish percussion.
Tirzah and Levi’s two-decade partnership began during their classical music studies at Purcell School for Young Musicians outside London, and the pair began releasing scrappy club tunes in the early 2010s. Tirzah’s 2018 debut, Devotion, explored a quieter side of nocturnal life—one that is renewed, and electrified, on this year’s Colourgrade, where the new mom stretches her slow-motion devotionals to encompass maternal love (and, pleasingly, the odd trickle of distorted grunge). On both records, Levi gathers a trove of eerily pretty loops, then scatters them into barren songs like obscure antiques around a warehouse.
Singer-songwriters tend to crave piercing specificity, but Tirzah’s lyrics are attuned to the fact that some of our queasiest emotions are amorphous, too soft to pin in a pithy phrase. There is an element of trust to investing in this music—in mantras abstracted like shreds of a stranger’s diary, mixing with shrapnel from R&B, grime, UK garage, and the classical avant-garde to burrow under your skin. An air of solitude always lingers, but don’t let it fool you: Tirzah and Levi’s music is conceived in a collective spirit. It is the sound of musical DNA in motion, wiggling around to form beguiling, implausible new bonds. –Jazz Monroe
Xenia Rubinos
Xenia Rubinos lifts heavy artifacts with the lightest touch. The Cuban-Puerto Rican singer has been long loved as a weirdo storyteller, but her performance is somehow always newly arresting. After her 2013 debut Magic Trix introduced Rubinos as a mythmaker, crafting whimsical characters that navigate the humor and horror of modern life, 2016’s Black Terry Cat alloyed jazz, hip-hop, and electronic into her signature syncopated sound. While Rubinos has often been called a “political” artist thanks to tracks like “Mexican Chef,” the urgency of her anti-racist and anti-capitalist critique touches everything she does. The pieces of her work that can be approximated by “Latin music” reject any notion, industry, or genre that attributes its value to being sold.
Rubinos has always taken care in how her Caribbean heritage might be used to hem her in, but when she does channel it musically, it’s often surprising and intimate. In 2019, she sung a brief cover of Vicentico Valdés’ late-’50s bolero “Los aretes de la luna” over an overcast canal in New York, conjuring the romance and safety of that song’s place in Cuban childhood. Her first album after five years, Una Rosa, was inspired by the color-changing music lamp her abuela had when Rubinos was a kid. These were the sounds that came to her when she thought herself incapable of making music again—and it’s a despojo, using corta venas bolero, rumba, and son washed in electronic production to yield a clean self. Una Rosa is at once her most organic and metallic record, allowing her voice to stretch out among crystalline synths, sticky strings, and filtered choruses like a computer processing a memory. Her vocals are often one-take, her grief both immediate and still unfurling. As she sings on “Sacude,” over an anchoring clave, “I’m carrying weight for the both of us/Time to let it go.” –Stefanie Fernández
Yaeji
Yaeji proves that you don’t need ego and excessive pageantry to be the life of the party. She creates spellbinding beats and then proceeds to murmur atop them, her voice buzzing lightly as her inner thoughts swirl. At the same time, Yaeji’s swagger is undeniable. “When the sweaty walls are banging/I don’t fuck with family planning,” she sings cheekily on “Raingurl,” her biggest club hit thus far. She has remixed Robyn and Dua Lipa, lent silvery vocals to a Charli XCX single, played Coachella and sold-out warehouse raves—but everywhere she goes, Yaeji simply remains herself.
Kathy Yaeji Lee was born in Flushing, Queens and moved all over, from Atlanta to Seoul, before returning to the States for college. While she initially felt that being uprooted so constantly was traumatizing, her multicultural upbringing is also what makes her stylish mix of house and hip-hop feel distinct. She switches seamlessly between English and Korean, using language not only for its meaning but also for its textural qualities: Korean has “more mountains, and hills, and rivers, and angles,” she has said. (Profiles have described crowds “screaming gibberish at the top of their lungs” when Yaeji performs, because they don’t know Korean but still want to sing along.) On her first full-length mixtape, What We Drew, Yaeji shares the spotlight with a transnational group of collaborators—from Oakland-via-Brooklyn rapper Nappy Nina to Tokyo-based DJ YonYon, her former classmate—while playing with dreamy pop, sinister electronica, touches of trap, and more. Even while putting forth this more introspective take on dance music, Yaeji has leaned into her fun side with the album’s visual world, forever striking the right balance between introvert and extrovert. –Cat Zhang
Yves Tumor
Yves Tumor’s early albums looped beats and samples into atmospheric impressions, like piecing together half-remembered dreams. Across 2016’s Serpent Music, their tremulous voice was often shrouded in an esoteric fog, even as soulful light radiated through the murk. Tumor became an exciting underground anomaly, pulling threads from ambient, noise, and club music, and scrambling them into hypnotizing collages that caught the ear of the music press and fashion houses alike. They presented their shape-shifting tracks in deafening live performances, blurring the line between harsh noise and beauty with devilish charisma.
On 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love and 2020’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind, Tumor shifted direction. Now, with songs that move beyond abstraction and revolve around face-melting solos, they’ve become a bona fide rock star who stage-dives in Slipknot tees. Tumor’s music continues to move with distinct, seductive, and unpredictable tension on this year’s The Asymptotical World EP, an artful mix of nu-metal and industrial music that balances on a serrated precipice; look no further than the mind-altering, post-punk swirl of “Jackie” for proof of Tumor’s crowd-pleasing power. Inching slowly towards the center, Tumor has twisted traditional rock gestures in newly thrilling and disorienting ways. –Eric Torres
See Amaarae, KeiyaA, L’Rain, and Shygirl at the 2021 Pitchfork Music Festival Paris, and see black midi, L’Rain, KeiyaA, Moor Mother, and Tirzah at the inaugural Pitchfork Music Festival London.
