From Ukrainian rap, Afro-pop and dembow to dub techno, LA psychedelia and darkened metal, there’s something for everyone in this list of up-and-comers

This boisterous six-piece, formed at the University of Cambridge, have garnered serious hype despite indie music being a bit of a cultural backwater of late. Yes, they are outspoken in the press and willing to poke fun at their peers, but the buzz is mostly thanks to their songs, with flamboyant and charismatic frontman Alex Rice stacking up the singalong choruses. Read our interview with them here. BBT

A former kindergarten teacher, Ukranian rapper Alyona Alyona keeps her material clean in case kids are listening. But her music – trap tinged with traditional vocal melodies – is far from toothless. Her breakout hit, Ribki, was about fish, but also young women who feel out of place – just as she did when people kept telling her that a plus-size female rapper would never make it in Ukraine. She raps about her regular life, touching on feminism, body positivity and tolerance, and switched from rapping in Russian back to Ukranian – a “beautiful, soft, tender, more poetic language” – after the country’s 2014 revolution. LS

Disbanded girl group Fifth Harmony is looking like a pretty successful training ground for a series of solo stars – Lauren Jauregui is currently looking to replicate the success of Camila Cabello, but in with an even better chance is Normani. Her duet with Sam Smith, Dancing With a Stranger, brought maturity and pain to the dancefloor, her solo single Motivation was totally irrepressible, and she is the first artist to get 1bn streams on Spotify without releasing an album. Stardom will surely be sealed when that debut LP arrives this spring. BBT

While there’s probably no greater indictment of country music’s conservatism than the fact that Kalie Shorr remains unsigned, her self-released debut album was likely better off for evading the genre’s nervy gatekeepers. Open Book covers the worst year of the 25-year-old Maine native’s life: her sister’s fatal heroin overdose, Shorr’s anorexia and physical abuse from ex-boyfriends. Astonishingly, she addresses her past with mordant wit and vast reserves of empathy – plus gigantic hooks worthy of Nashville-era Taylor Swift, pop-punk icons Paramore and Jagged Little Pill-era Alanis. LS

Smeared in lipstick and eyeshadow beneath an impressive collection of ripped masks, the drag persona of Bristol’s Elliot Brett is like Christeene crossed with the Mighty Boosh. His tinny electroclash tracks include the absurd sandwich metaphors of BLLT (“I’m a toastie / The boys they never ghost me / Not all the time but mostly”) and the Str8 Acting’s confusion at going to non-queer nightclubs (“It’s a bit like a pub but with slightly less chairs”), adding up to the kind of English eccentric we need now more than ever. BBT

Thousands of bedroom producers mimic the sounds of mainstream pop, but few actually pull off its heart-stopping sense of scale. Twst, AKA 21-year-old Wales-born Chloé Davis, is one of them. Her three songs to date suggest St Vincent reborn as an internet-spawned pop star: Girl on Your TV inflates lullaby-worthy melodies like a swelling Thanksgiving parade balloon, and she slips razor-sharp observations about sexualisation and the lie of technology into her lyrics. Always, a wracked conversation with Siri, plays like a Gen Z makeover of Kate Bush’s Deeper Understanding. LS

Facebook Twitter Pinterest El Alfa. Photograph: Steven Ferdman/REX/Shutterstock

The idea that El Alfa is in any way a 2020 hopeful will seem ludicrous to the Dominican Republic-born dembow artist’s fans, who have watched his charismatic, booty-heavy videos upwards of 20m, 30m, 40m times. Collaborations with major players such Cardi B, Bad Bunny, J Balvin and Diplo speak to someone who is well on their way to the top, thanks very much. But in the UK, where awareness and exposure of Latinx pop remains limited, his bratty vocal trills and fire-starting energy could easily see him swoop in and conquer the charts in 2020. LS

Solomon released his first EP in 2014, and has since become a true cult figure – a storytelling south London MC who doesn’t fit into any of the neat British rap boxes (grime, backpacker, drill, Afro trap), but walks his own path. The excellent 2019 mixtape Bleak sat somewhere between Frank Ocean, King Krule and A Tribe Called Quest, a downbeat trudge through a rainswept night – but new single Tit for Tat is quite the opposite, a crisply headnodding roller with a Giggs guest spot. BBT

Starting the decade as a rapper whose wittily trashy aesthetic made Nicki Minaj look like Audrey Hepburn, Toronto-based Chippy Nonstop ended it as one of the most purely enjoyable DJs out there. A typical set can take in dancehall, Miami bass, R&B, trap, jungle, Afrobeats and more – all of it seemingly designed to goad anyone, however inappropriately, into feverish twerking on all fours. BBT

Nala Sinephro

Keen watchers of recent performances by south-east London jazz collective Steam Down may have spotted Nala Sinephro performing alongside the likes of Rosie Turton and Nadeem Din-Gabisi. She’ll take the spotlight in 2020 to release her beguiling debut album: backed by a small ensemble, the Caribbean-Belgian musician plays pedal harp through modular and analogue synths, the effect gorgeously woozy and tidal – and not unworthy of comparison to Alice Coltrane. LS

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lady Lykez. Photograph: Musical D

By blending the firehose delivery of jungle MCs with lipsmacking lyricism, wavey bashment energy and deadpan darts of pure disparagement (“yuh pussy have gangrene”), Lady Lykez is a formidable British rap talent. Live shows are a riot of audience participation, and she found a perfect foil in producer Scratcha DVA for her 2019 EP Muhammad Ali – like him, she delivers on claims of greatness. BBT

First heard when Gilles Peterson put her song Move on the November 2018 edition of his Brownswood Bubblers compilation, London classicist Lynda Dawn harks back to Whitney Houston’s earliest work with boogie pioneer Kashif. Like Houston, Dawn was raised in the Pentecostal church and her gospel-influenced vocals dazzle like shafts of light through a stained-glass window. LS

Despacito is looking more and more like a one-off: few of the Latin artists who get literally billions of streams elsewhere in the world cross over to the UK mainstream. But if anyone can, it’s ursine Panamanian singer Sech, whose voice is deeper and earthier than peers such as Ozuna, Bad Bunny or Maluma – he croons it over keeningly romantic R&B, powered by the relentless hip-swing of reggaeton. After the success of Latin Grammy-nominated single Otro Trago, be sure that he’s beavering away on the song of the summer. BBT

Borrowing her name from the Andy Griffith Show character, Paris’s Charlène Darling makes off-kilter, shimmering chanson post-punk that connects the dots between the feminist troubadours of Agnès Varda’s L’Une Chante, L’Autre Pas, Thai molam music, the Raincoats and the way Cate Le Bon slides between bucolic melody and clanging post-punk. Her debut album, Saint-Guidon, is one of 2019’s buried treasures. LS

With their skull masks, black robes and unequivocally morbid band name, the New Death Cult look like a threatening cross between drill rappers and black metallers. But actually, a bit like their fellow Scandi bands Motorpsycho and the Night Flight Orchestra, the Norwegian quartet sit at the tunefully proggy end of classic rock. There’s a fair bit of neanderthal chugging, but songs such as True Eyes show their range, with a smoky, soulful sweetness. BBT

There’s a ruthless energy to Meggie Cousland. The London musician has said she uses ketamine to help write her prowling, Cramps-tinged punk, some of which she has recorded with Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos in Edwyn Collins’s studio. She fired one band when they weren’t cutting the mustard: her new, eight-strong rabble supply intimidating gang vocals on recent single I Said Salute Me, which finds Cousland ordering a crush who doesn’t return her ardour to drop and give her 20 in a Rocky Horror-worthy refrain. Odd tactic, but you wouldn’t say no to her. LS

This Leeds indie quartet have the same slick arena-indie heft of Foals, Two Door Cinema Club and Circa Waves. They released their first recordings back in 2014, and have lurked around the big time ever since – but could finally break through thanks to some of their strongest songs yet, such as the heavy yet deft single Your Eyes. BBT

Although she taught herself to play guitar from watching videos of Justin Bieber on YouTube, 20-year-old Californian Destiny Rogers sounds more like Ariana Grande in the way she conceals sharp truths in her effervescent, hip-hop-inflected vocal runs. “I don’t do no favours for the studio time,” she states on calling card Tomboy, its chorus an excellent tribute to Cher’s motto: “Mom, I am a rich man.” LS

Somewhere between the primly playful dub techno of Moritz Von Oswald and the bright science of Mark Fell sits Beatrice Dillon, a truly magical electronic producer whose tracks are as airy, spacious and elegantly designed as a modernist library. But you needn’t be hushed and reverent: there is even a strain of absurdist humour to the way it all hangs together, and that sense of fun suffuses her unmissable DJ sets, too. Read our interview with her here. BBT

The Dublin four-piece embody the shared DNA between first-wave emo and country, putting their tender approach and keen, hooky song craft in service of empathetic songs about male bonding (Brothers) and body image (HowDoILook), and slyly subversive punk: Gay Girls turns the names of the saints into a list of crushes. Together since 2016, the four women are aiming to release their debut album in 2020. LS

Start the strength conditioning exercises for the sternocleidomastoid muscles in your neck, because this Stockholm “darkened metal” band invite the kind of deep, profound headbanging that could put you in bed with a whiplash injury. Having been recorded somewhere called Fuck Life Studios, their self-titled debut album is stern, abrasive and kicks total, utter and comprehensive ass: all righteous downforce and terrifying declarations. BBT

Formed in Melbourne’s DIY punk scene, Cable Ties have signed to US indie Merge to release their second album in 2020. Their rough, determined ragers evoke Against Me! and the Velvet Underground, and in Jenny McKechnie they have a wailing tempest to rival Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker. “Why don’t you walk out your bedroom and steal your brother’s guitar,” she suggests on Tell Them Where to Go, an irresistible call to arms. LS

A hyperlocal phenomenon in their native Bradford, Bad Boy Chiller Crew make ridiculously enjoyable bassline house anthems topped with dextrous patter about beer, designer clothes and *checks notes* the excellence of an obscure Teesside car wash called Billy’s. They’re the sort of people that get dismissed as chavs (or, to use their reclaimed Bradford version, “charvas”), but their breezy good humour is what makes this country great – and tracks such as 450 and Pablo genuinely bang. BBT

Brazilian producer Badsista has been a crucial part of the São Paulo scene for a few years now, as much for her activism – she’s part of Bandida, a collective organising parties where only women and non-binary people perform – as her hectic, exhilarating kaleidoscope of baile funk, techno and house. She’s set to release her debut album in 2020, promising a sound that is “good on the dancefloor, but also for crying in your bed”. LS

Drill originally filtered over from Chicago to the UK, but now, with British MCs having made it their own with an unmistakable taunting metre, the influence is moving back across the pond. Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke’s debut release was produced entirely by Londoner 808MeloBeats, Tottenham MC Skepta hopped on a remix of hit single Welcome to the Party, and tracks like Flexin could have come straight out of Loughborough Junction – but Smoke’s deep, beautiful, characterful voice has a grandeur than only comes from living in New York. BBT

100 Gecs’ music starts out sounding more like noise than signal, as if Dylan Brady and Laura Les had hung an electromagnet over pop’s junkyard and lured the most vivid, violent parts into a mutant whole. But over repeat exposure, the St Louis-born duo’s assault of happy hardcore, dubstep and corrupted cartoon theme tunes takes on its own strangely soothing and endearing logic. Destined to be as influential as they are divisive. LS

Shuttling around the Brooklyn underground for a couple of years, the duo Deli Girls broke through to a wider audience with the release of their 2019 album I Don’t Know How To Be Happy. Over lo-fi industrial beats that swing with reggaeton syncopation or bustle around with a raver’s energy, Danny Orlowski rants, raves, yelps and screams – a menagerie of startled vocals that places the whole endeavour in a glorious interzone of rap, metal, punk, no wave and techno. BBT

Had Peaches come up through grime and garage rather than electroclash, you would have something like Shygirl, AKA Blane Muise, whose nom de disque is probably misleading enough to get her done by Trading Standards. Her sound is deeply malevolent – Uckers pairs a sample of the scream from Psycho with a haunted dancehall beat – and she unspools her unruffled bars like a sadistic bully whispering in your ear about exactly what they plan to do to you in the graveyard after school. LS

The London performance poet is moving into music, and his first step was perfect. His endlessly replayable track Natural Born Killers (Ride For Me) was like Dean Blunt going in on a Chicago house jam: distorted free-flowing poetry over a slowing vogueing bassline, and an enormously exciting harbinger of things to come. BBT

Liminal Garden, the debut album proper by Portland composer Sage Fisher, tingles the upper registers of human hearing: she plays the highest notes of her harp, processing and fracturing the results in search of an effect that she likens to how it feels to experience trauma. Dolphin Midwives are unabashedly new age – right down to the purposefully “gross” name, which references the apparently real practice of giving birth surrounded by dolphins. One for fans of Holly Herndon and Mary Lattimore. LS

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Asagraum. Photograph: Martin Rahn

This all-female satanic black metal band from Holland have a terrific sense of theatre. Fake (we assume) blood pours from their mouths over white greasepaint and black leather; videos feature priests getting roughed up and pentagrams aplenty. But this is no mere cabaret – their recently released second album Dawn of Infinite Fire is a totally exhilarating blast of permanently crescendoing metal majesty. BBT

Bossy Love are Amandah Wilkinson and John Baillie Jr and they’re the best Scottish pop act since Chvrches. Released in October, their debut album Me + U is the stuff that fantasies are made of: Girlfriend brings to mind Carly Rae Jepsen’s passing collaborations with Danny L Harle, while Foreign Lover could be post-breakdown Britney singing classic Erasure. Plus, they have a taste for bludgeoning arpeggiated synths straight out of Robyn’s playbook. Their live shows have been inspiring cultish adoration at home in Glasgow. LS

Born in Nigeria and raised in London, Darkoo sits at the subtle, delicate end of the Afro-pop spectrum. The teenager’s androgynous alto allows her to be both braggadocious and coy, sometimes almost in the same line, and has already netted millions of streams for breakout hit Gangsta. Some of her peers can end up letting charisma do the heavy lifting, but with her melancholic yet swaggering chorus lines, she has the songs to match her considerable charm. BBT

As a teenager in Houston, Eli Winter had his mind blown by footage of guitarist Steve Gunn performing in NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series. It prompted his own excursion into American primitive guitar music and a move to Chicago, as much for college as for the lineage of cross-pollinated weirdo music that came out of local labels Drag City and Thrill Jockey. His gorgeous debut album, The Time to Come, channels late local forebear Jack Rose and finds the 22-year-old considering the death of a friend and the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Read our interview with him here. LS

As the winner of the Brit Rising Star award – previous winners include Adele, Sam Smith, and Rag’n’Bone Man – Celeste is the artist in this list most likely to cross into genuine stardom. The industry excitement is justified: her voice, which has the same scuffed melancholy as Amy Winehouse or Billie Holiday, gives such vivid life to a breakup song Strange or a moody midnight crooner such as Both Sides of the Moon. BBT

Best known for her long-term writing partnership with Ariana Grande (their skittish collab Monopoly was a 2019 highlight), Monét has been releasing solo material for five years but looks set to break out properly in 2020. Her upcoming EP moves away from her cutting-edge productions with Grande in favour of more luscious instrumentation indebted to Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Frank Ocean’s dreamy Blonde. Her ambition to be a Pharrell-type double threat looks eminently likely to pay off. Read our interview with her here. LS

South Asian music rarely crosses over into the UK charts, but Punjabi singer Sidhu Moose Wala managed it in October with blockbuster track 47, flanked by British rappers Mist and Stefflon Don. Can he keep up the momentum? Even if he struggles in the bhangra-resistent quarters of the UK, it won’t be down to his voice, which is delicately mellifluous even with its power maxed out. BBT

A stalwart of the LA psychedelic scene who has played with musicians including Ariel Pink and Tim Presley, Jack Name’s own music is eerier than that of his energetic peers. He prefers close moods and chicken-scratch guitars, and shares Bradford Cox’s knack for weird and lovely melodies that sparkle like specks of flint in the dirt. LS

Her fairly generic breakthrough song Hi, It’s Me had us fearing a Billie Eilish knockoff, but then Ashnikko – US-born, Baltics-raised, London-based – brought out Stupid. With its wild mood swings – maniacal laughter into monotone lyric recital – it was tailor made for miming on TikTok and became an unlikely divorce anthem, plus a massive streaming hit. Here and elsewhere, her central lyrical focus is the teasing and withholding of sex: one minute she’ll be comparing the taste of a certain male organ to a scented candle, the next she’ll decide her vibrator is a much better option. BBT

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ashnikko. Photograph: Lucrecia Taormina

Not a million miles from the 100 Gecs nexus, this Ohio producer’s music sometimes evinces the deranged energy of a Ryan Trecartin film, yet at others channels the soothing wonder of strolling your video game avatar through a pixellated rainforest. Their music is vivid and playful, qualities they share with the Japanese footwork scene: “To me, the music these artists make sounds like pure freedom and play, and that’s the space I like to create from,” Tipton told Mixmag. “One of unrestricted expression and emotion.” LS

As traditional roots reggae continues to flourish, someone well placed to cross over to an audience returning to its easygoing charms is Jamaican singer Mortimer. His voice is hands-down gorgeous, the sort of thing that reduces even the most pursed-lip muso to blissful sighs at 100 paces: rich and robust in its depths, flinty and feathery in his lovely top range. Recent EP Fight the Fight is a good place to start. BBT

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cazzu. Photograph: Jason Koerner/Getty Images

The 26-year-old Argentinian-born Julieta Cazzucheli spent a decade trying her luck with a variety of sounds from reggaeton to rock, but finally broke out with her melancholy, emo-tinged trap (Bad Bunny jumping on a remix of her 2017 single Loca helped, too). While she is hyper-prolific, releasing more than 24 singles in two years, her 2019 album, Error 93, shares its immersive, focused insularity with Rihanna’s Anti. She’s as iconoclastic as the Bajan star, too: her lyrics extol female empowerment in a male-dominated scene, and she often performs with a green handkerchief in support of the movement to legalise abortion in Argentina. LS

With the much larkier moniker Cashtastic, things were looking good for this rapper, with a healthy buzz and a Universal contract. But despite growing up in Peckham, London, and a protest led by Kano, he was deported to Jamaica in 2014 on murky immigration grounds. Now back in the UK, all his legal woes have at least left him with a distinctive Jamaican-tinged accent, put to propulsive use on gleaming trap tracks such as the brand new Incognito. BBT

London producer India Jordan is known for running New Atlantis, a monthly ambient Sunday session at London venue Rye Wax. Yet her debut EP, DNT STP MY LV, is a thumping rampage through rave, jungle and boogie (the title track samples Don’t Stop My Love by – there he is again – Kashif). She’s swiftly becoming indispensable for both the wee hours and the recovery the next day. LS

Not yet out of their teens, this band based around the duo of Isaac deBroux-Slone and Raina Bock are emerging from the absolute middle of nowhere in Wisconsin with startlingly accomplished songs. Like seemingly any young band at the moment, Pavement seem to be a touchstone, and there’s Parquet Courts’ blend of snot and soul. Keep an eye out for unreleased songs such as Loneliness and Daily Routine: genuine classics of new-school indie rock. BBT

Olivia Devine moved from Newcastle to London, the idea being to write for other artists. Which she did (Icona Pop, of I Love It fame, recorded one of her songs), but when Warner offered her a solo deal, she thought: well, why not. The 22-year-old has swiftly developed her sound: where last year’s Peer Pressure EP channelled Haim and Devine’s labelmate Dua Lipa, her excellent recent singles are more idiosyncratic: the minimal, windscreen-washer funk of Naked Alone would have been a massive hit had Mark Ronson released it, while Peachy Keen is a trance-y cyborg ballad. Charli XCX has called her “the motherfucking future” of pop. LS

Anz’s No Harm, a wriggling, squiggly slice of high-speed vintage boogie, was one of the most feted tracks in the electronic underground in 2019 – as was the rest of the Mancunian producer’s Invitation 2 Dance EP. Even better are her “dubs” mixes, where her own tracks are threaded through imaginative reworks, like a Kali Uchis vocal laid over harp-driven UKG to deliriously beautiful effect. BBT

The cresting voice on Where Is Her Head, from the National’s 2019 album I Am Easy to Find, belonged to Eve Owen (daughter of the actor Clive). In 2020, the 19-year-old will release her debut album produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner. There’s something of early Sharon Van Etten (another Dessner collaborator) about her emphatic balladry and the way she holds her own against orchestral-tinged rock tumult. It’s not hard to fathom her finding mainstream appeal alongside the likes of Lewis Capaldi. LS

It’s little wonder this Hull band supported Idles on their 2019 European tour, given they also rant anthemically over chugging indie-punk. They also have Idles’ anger at inequality in society – two of their number work with a social enterprise to help vulnerable young people make music – and raggedly brilliant tunes such as Half Pint Fatherhood will get circle pits instantly opening up. BBT

Kiko El Crazy joins El Alfa in helping dembow come to rival reggaeton in the global pop stakes – Rolling Stone reported that Spotify listening figures for the genre doubled between January 2018 and August 2019, while the New York Times proclaimed it the “secret ingredient in songs of summer”. The pink ’fro-sporting Dominican admitted that he once didn’t respect the genre because it seemed “too underground” to offer much potential for growth, but happily, since leaving the rap group El Army, he has disproven his own theory, pebbledashing his gritty bars all over the addictive rhythm. LS

• This article was amended on 27 December 2017 to correct the spelling of Lynks Afrikka.