Now Hear This

Greenwich Peninsula Team
Date19 February 2019

It’s awards season. The Brits and other red-carpet ceremonies are swinging back around in a clatter of champagne flute clinking and televised celebrity gaffs, and it’s time to stick the thermometer in and take the temperature of the best new artists to look out for in 2019. The charts have arguably never been more diverse: UK rap has morphed into myriad new shapes and sounds following the grime explosion of the last three years; pop and R&B is taking influence from African rhythms and further afield; and even jazz (jazz!) has ushered in a new generation of young musicians, largely from the African and Caribbean diasporas, who are making noodling cool again. Here’s the homegrown talent who’ll be breaking through in the next 12 months.

Rina Sawayama

Rina Sawayama is making millennium-era pop for the millennial age. She sings about the perils of Instagratification, identifies as pansexual, has a very internetty nickname for her fans (she calls them “pixels”) and dresses, theatrically, like a character from The Fifth Element (often thanks to Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga’s original superstylist). Her music liberally copies and pastes sugary pop and R&B from the 90s and 2000s, as well as J-pop’s high-octane guitar anthems and turns it into something fantastical and new. Sawayama was born in Japan, grew up in London, and the glossy sheen of her latest videos, for the singles Cherry and Ordinary Superstar, suggest that she could be the UK’s first breakthrough Japanese star. Her debut studio album is due out in 2019.

Kokoroko

The UK jazz scene is aflame, nudged overground last year by the crucial compilation We Out Here, which spotlighted many of its young new musicians. One of the standout bands was Kokoroko, a mixed-sex ensemble led by trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey, who in celebration of their diasporic heritage, are inspired by west African jazz greats like Fela Kuti, Ebo Taylor and Tony Allen. Their track, Abusey Junction, a slinky, amber-hued sliver of afrobeat, has since reached nearly 20 million views on YouTube, and their live takeover of coveted jazz night Church of Sound in Clapton, where they will play an evening of highlife covers, sold out in a week. Gilles Peterson’s label, Brownswood, will release their debut EP in March.

Octavian

Octavian’s mother told him when he left at home at 14 years old, “You're either going to be in prison or you’re going to be big.” After years of sofa-surfing, via dropping out of the BRIT School – which counts Adele, Amy Winehouse and Loyle Carner among its alumni – the Camberwell MC has made it on his own terms. Last month he won 2019’s BBC Sound Of… prize, an award voted for by music critics, but 23-year-old Octavian didn’t need professional plaudits: his deft, danceable mingling of hip-hop, house and the Chicago rap style of drill has already attracted praise from Canadian tastemaker Drake, who filmed himself singing Octavian’s Party Here track at a Golden Globes bash, and got him signed to Rudimental-affiliated label Black Butter. Party is the crucial word when it comes to Octavian’s oeuvre, though, and for his debut album he’s been working with electronic hit-makers Diplo and Mura Masa to up the rave potential.

Fontaines DC

Fontaines DC will likely never be eligible for a Brit Award because they hail from Dublin, but that’s probably okay with them: their music has a post-punk snarly gnarliness that rejects consumerism, gentrification and, you might imagine, televised accolades. The quintet are, however, leading a new noisey indie scene in the city, with bands like the Murder Capital, Silverbacks, MELTS and Just Mustard; good news for fans of last year’s rock success stories IDLES and Shame, both of whom Fontaines DC have supported on tour. Fontaines DC, though, sound distinctly Irish and proudly so: their songs celebrate the capital’s counter-cultural heritage amid imagery of a fading country with mumbled pub poetry and swaggering riffage, as on their debut album, Dogrel, out in April.

Mahalia

If you tallied all the new music tips lists in the past year, including the latest Brits Critics’ Choice Award, then Leicester dreamer Mahalia would come somewhere near the top. She’s an R&B purist like recent chart-botherers Jorja Smith and Ella Mai. Mai has been Grammy-nominated this year, and Smith has been buoyed by her collaborations with Drake, so by the logic of three divided by the probability of hype, Mahalia’s moment should be next. Her bedroom jams have until now been all dear-diary ditties about breakups, bad parents and tipsy WhatsApping, with a relatable girl-next-door charm. But her latest material, such as the classy wonky funk duet One Night Only, with Kojey Radical, suggests that her music is growing up.

Afro B

Afro B is an east London artist with global ambition. Along with peers like B Young, Yxng Bane, Not3s and Kojo Funds, the Hackney DJ and producer leads a new style he’s calling “afrowave”, which mixes up the sounds of the city with Caribbean dancehall, US hip-hop and the sweetly melodic syncopation of afrobeats, the dominant pop genre from west Africa that’s sweeping the world. Kickstarting 2019, on a recent trip to America, Afro B found that his single Drogba (Joanna) was the second most Shazamed track in Brooklyn – and, as the saying goes, where the hipsters go, the rest follow. The third EP in his AfroWave series touches down in February, and he headlines the Islington Academy on 11 April.