Some weeks the good shit is hiding in the corners of the internet before anybody else catches on. This week we found seven. Hit play and pick your poison.
Erin LeCount
She wrote her first song at eight and called it “Strife,” which tells you she came out of the womb dramatic and never apologized for it. The Essex artist has no formal training and does not need it, the way she pulls from Kate Bush and Lorde like she’s been studying them her whole life because she has. Her PAREIDOLIA EP is the sound of somebody who cannot filter what she’s saying, which she calls her version of journaling, and Imogen Heap is already a fan. Get in now before the rest of them figure it out.
Dottie Andersson
She got dumped with the words “you’re too sad for me,” went home, and wrote a whole damn song called “I love being sad” about how the sadness was the one thing that never left her. That is the most powerful response to a breakup I have heard in years. The Swedish artist trained as a drummer first, calls what she makes garage-pop, and records everything live with no samples, just her and producer Ben Jackson-Cook building it from nothing. She says she was born in Sweden “at IKEA.” Sign me the hell up.
Ms Ray
This London artist barely leaves a fingerprint online, which is its own kind of flex, and her single “Miss You” is a duet with Nourished By Time that shimmers on top and aches underneath. She put it together knowing the second the melody landed it had to be a duet, and he was the only person she wanted. It’s the first taste of her Melt EP, an EP she made for, in her words, your heart and ears. She wrote it as catharsis for loss, which you can feel in every second of it. This is the deep cut you brag about finding.
Kiki T
She does her best writing in her car, in the garage, door shut, in the dark, because it feels like being underwater and nobody can get to her in there. The dark-pop artist grew up on Oahu, walked away from a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, and woke up one night during the 2020 shutdown convinced she could rap after dreaming it. Her EP Aqua Eterna is named after a habit of never letting a drink hit empty, always adding to it, never wanting to see the bottom of the cup. It’s a record about the gap between what looks like fullness and what actually fills you up, and she will tell you to your face: fuck the patriarchy.
Sumi X
She built a federal consulting firm into a $20 million company with 200 employees, got named to a 30 Under 30 list, then walked away from all of it in a rainstorm in Bali to make music. Her single “American Dream” is electro-pop that stays cool and controlled until the chorus, when the military drums shove up through the mix and the whole thing turns into a eulogy and a call to arms at the same time. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she got tired of writing heartbreak songs while the world burned, so she wrote about the world instead. Her debut EP American Tarot is coming.
Bella Rose
She defines Hot Girl Therapy as the thing you do after a weekend of crying and doom-scrolling, when your friends make you put on something cute, post one for your ex, take a shot, and go out. The Nashville artist named her 14-song debut album after exactly that. She got pulled into the GRAMMY Museum’s Music Revolution Project at thirteen, has opened for Ringo Starr and Andy Grammer, and runs her own media agency on the side. It’s pop that knows heartbreak and confidence are usually the same night.
Zarema
She built a whole career across Turkey and Eastern Europe before landing in LA, and now she’s writing in English about the stuff that doesn’t translate any other way. “Closure” came out of losing a family member to COVID early in the pandemic, hospital visits banned, no chance to say goodbye, and you can hear every bit of that weight sitting inside it. She wrote it, in her words, to honor that feeling and help other people feel less alone in it. Sometimes a song does the grieving you couldn’t do yourself, and this is one of them.
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