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. 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 Ghanaian-American artist is bending the boundaries of Afro-fusion music to suit her global ambitions.Īmaarae has a raspy, radio-ready falsetto that evokes the opulent luxury of silk sheets, and big confident pop songs packing fluorescent hooks.
Heard collectively, these future luminaries point to where music might be headed. Most viscerally, we favored music that has recently moved us, and people we believe will play meaningful roles in their communities going forward. 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. (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. We pulled from our Rising series and revisited emerging artists with Best New Music releases from the past few years. We polled Pitchfork’s staff and select contributors to see who excited them right now. Over the past few months, we’ve compiled a list of artists who are pushing us to think this way.
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