The Most Exciting Artists I Discovered This Year

Lykke Li photo by John Lindquist

Here at Paste, we pride ourselves on championing new artists. So much so, in fact, that we devoted a whole cover story to the subject just a few months back. For the purposes of this blog post, I automatically ruled out anyone who appeared in that Best Of What’s Next feature, or in our monthly Emergent section. Beyond that, the only criteria were that I first heard them in 2008, and that I liked what I heard. 

5. Hjaltalín - I visited Iceland for the first time this summer, right before the economy collapsed, which meant I was still paying about $600 for a cup of yogurt. Anyway, despite the exorbitant prices, I wanted to shop at Reykjavik’s famous record store 12 Tónar, which did not disappoint—the clerk offered me espresso and let me listen to any record in the store, and the one I ended up buying was Sleepdrunk Sessions by a band called Hjaltalín. I know almost nothing about this band, and I kind of enjoy not knowing. It allows me to simply enjoy the music, which is a kind of peppy chamber-pop that—in its strange mix of formality and exuberance—seems to me to be quintessentially Icelandic.

4. Noah and the Whale - The guy’s voice sounds like a blend of Ron Sexsmith and Kermit The Frog, which I guess isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But mostly what I love are the twee pop melodies. They’re plucky and well-crafted, and they go places you wouldn’t necessarily expect. There’s an element of pub-rock in the melodies, a sense that the songs would go over well as group sing-a-longs, if you could pack a pub with a bunch of sensitive indie types in argyle sweaters. The band also has a pretty good song called “Shape Of My Heart,” which is also the name of the Sting ballad that played in the final scene of The Professional, a hitman movie co-starring a very young Natalie Portman. Noah and the Whale’s song isn’t a cover, but I nonetheless appreciate the association.

3. B.O.B. - This dude cracks me up. His tough-talking anthem “Haterz Everywhere” was a hit on Atlanta hip-hop radio, one of those songs that gets so big you wind up knowing the words without you even knowing whose song it is. Once I looked into him a little bit, I discovered that “Haterz” isn’t even all that representative. He’s got a zany personality and a playful delivery, and his MySpace page has no less than four different free mixtapes for you to download. Maybe one day he’ll release an actual album. Although in this day and age, does it even matter?

2. Lykke Li - Her vocals remind me of Astrud Gilberto’s—soft, hesitant and endearingly accented. Her music, though, is something else. I love how it’s clubby, but also sort of shy. It’s poppy, but also sort of arty. Her album Youth Novels was terrifically consistent, and yet also varied. There’s that echo effect on “Tonight” and that distorted snarl on “Breaking It Up” and that minimalist trumpet solo on “Everybody But Me” and…I dunno…her appeal is hard to explain. Maybe you should just go see her live. She’s coming back around to North America in early 2009. Tour dates are right here.

1. Santogold - The only artist to place two albums in our Top 50 of 2008, Santi White brought the heat in a major way this year. Everybody loved her—Coldplay asked her to open their tour, Budweiser copped one of her songs for an ad that ran during the Olympics. Right this very moment, she’s blowing up with a song called “Brooklyn We Go Hard,” a collaboration with Jay-Z from the forthcoming Notorious soundtrack. She seems utterly indifferent to musical genres and pigeonholing, which makes it even more exciting to anticipate what she might do next.