VV BROWN
A 24-year-old from Northampton, Vanessa Brown has recovered from a brief and unhappy spell in America, under contract to a label that wanted to position her as a bootylicious R&B star; she is now set to light up 2009 with what she describes as music that is “dramatic, charismatic and, frequently, as mad as a box of frogs” - or, to put it more succinctly, “doo-wop-soul” (albeit at the more bonkers end of the spectrum). A Betty Boo for the Noughties, she has co-written hits or sung backing vocals for Madonna, Pussycat Dolls, Westlife and Sugababes. Now, with tracks as barking but brilliant as Crying Blood and LEAVE, she is nicely poised to enjoy a few hits of her own. Yes, she raids the retro-soul cupboard, but she adds to her swag bag a liberal dose of up-yours attitude (most of her songs were inspired by an unmourned ex), pop nous and berserk, full-frontal catharsis. And a voice to shatter glass.
LEAVE will be released on Island on March 2; www.myspace.com/vvbrown

FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE
The winner of the 2009 Brits Critics’ Choice award (which last year went to Adele), Florence Welch, 20, may well emulate her predecessor’s success. Melding folk and blues with excursions to wilder musical shores, as previously visited by the likes of Siouxsie Sioux and Bat for Lashes, Welch’s songs - notably her debut single, Kiss with a Fist, and her current release, Dog Days Are Over - showcase a fiery, feral singing style, and lyrics that look both unblinkingly and allusively at love, revenge, death and domestic violence. As charismatic, in her own, utterly distinctive way, as VV Brown, Welch looks and sounds like a star. The revelation that the increasingly reviled Johnny Borrell has been helping with her songwriting may dent her chances momentarily (how nails must have been chewed and heads held in hands when that slipped out), but she is good enough to get over that, as should we.
A new single will be released on Island in March; www.myspace.com/florenceandthemachinemusic

KARIMA FRANCIS
This 21-year-old from Blackpool first made waves at the In the City music conference in Manchester just over two years ago, and anyone who has witnessed her startlingly raw and intimate live shows will know why. Her debut album, The Author (released on March 9), captures her essence, mixing stripped-bare confessional acoustic songs with more strident and forceful tracks such as her forthcoming single, Again. She is already being compared with Joan Armatrading, Tracy Chapman and KT Tunstall. Francis has more than enough talent of her own - not to mention an extraordinary voice that can switch from a wail to a coo in the space of a single phrase - for us to quickly forget the comparisons and concentrate on this singer and her visceral songs. To watch her on stage and see this diminutive and shy retirer hold back her head and roar is to experience music at its most transformative.
Again will be released on Kitchenware on March 2; www.myspace.com/karimafrancis

FRANKMUSIK
If 2009 is going to be mainly about 1980s-style electro and synth-pop, Vincent Frank will be one of the artists in the vanguard. A male Robyn, the Croydon-raised musician, 22, has made a debut album with the producer Stuart Price (Madonna, the Killers) that positively bursts and billows with lethal hooks and washes of synths, and generally parties like it’s 1984. Coming over like a one-man Aha appreciation society, the former fashion student flirts dangerously with Mika-like hyperactivity and look-at-me irksomeness, but pulls back from the brink thanks to a bracing whiff of genuine, rather than artful, eccentricity and some amazing tunes. His next single, Better Off as 2, captures exactly why people are so excited about him: with a giant synth-bass exploding beneath him, Frank carries on as if he is in a completely different song, half Gary Barlow, half Shalamar. It shouldn’t work, but it does - emphatically so.
Better Off as 2 will be released on Island on March 9; www.myspace.com/frankmusik

LADY GAGA
Stefani Germanotta, a 22-year-old performance artist from New York, is about to hit Britain (her single, Just Dance, is released on January 12), and it’s likely to get messy. Her provocative techno-disco is brutally effective, with something of her Christian-namesake Gwen’s daffiness to it, and a track record of collaborations with Akon, Britney and Fergie bolster her claims that her own time has come. Her barely-there attire and single-entendre utterances won’t hurt her chances, but where her Ladyship really scores, on her debut album The Fame, is in showing an understanding both of the absolute paramountcy of hooks and of the fact that, for all that you may look like you’re playing at it, behind the costumes and make-up, you have to be deadly serious about what you’re doing. Some call her the new Madonna. In fact, in the sense of Madge’s steadily deteriorating artistic output, she’s the old Madonna: 1983-85, to be precise.
The Fame will be released on Polydor on January 19; www.myspace.com/ladygaga

LELE[SPEAKS]
This unsigned teenager from south London has a mouth like a machine gun - and, in an age of tightly controlled, gimlet-eyed young celebrity wannabes, praise be for that. Prolix she may be, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t editing what emerges from that gabby gob, however much the ramshackle, ADHD-like trolley dash through the genres of techno, rap, metal and ska that soundtracks her words may suggest otherwise. Insouciant and lippy, Leanne Jackson’s lyrics - “Eurgh, ain’t you crude/ Don’t you know that I’m a prude/ You got me losing all my food/ Just because of you, you stinking perv” - are the type that strike terror in the play-it-safe, defending-their-patch old guard (and praise be for that, too). She thinks what she does is pop music, and, if you’ve the ears to listen closely, you’ll realise that, beneath the bombast and the short-attention-span versifying, that is exactly what she is doing.
A new single will be released in March; www.myspace.com/leleisbanging

TERRY LYNN
Terry Lynn Williams’s first album, Kingstonlogic 2.0, is one of the most exciting debuts I’ve heard in ages. A passionate, furious, playful, snarling polemic from the tough Waterhouse (“a place well known as a slaughterhouse”) neighbourhood of the Jamaican capital, it throws reggae, dub, techno, electro, rap and pop into the blender, wields its pen and thunderous ricochet rhythms against injustice, corruption, hypocrisy and violence, and introduces a genuinely innovative and thrillingly multifaceted new talent to music in 2009. There is a sharp sense of menace behind these songs, as if the gun with which Williams poses on the sleeve is constantly in danger of being used to settle matters - an appropriate undertone, given the culture in which she grew up, and which she excoriates on the album. Everything MIA should be, but isn’t (there’s not a hint of catwalk chic here), Terry Lynn is a real find.
Kingstonlogic 2.0 will be released on Phree on March 2; www.myspace.com/terrylynnkingstonlogic

LISA MITCHELL
A runner-up on Australian Idol when she was just 15, the British-born, Oz-raised Mitchell, now 18, presents an intriguing prospect: her forthcoming single, Neopolitan Dreams, both bears flowers and bares its teeth, and demos for her debut album suggest her songwriting could go either way. She is currently at work in London with writers who have collaborated with Amy Winehouse and Adele, among others, as well as Ed Harcourt, whose influence can clearly be heard in the more noirishly romantic elements of her music. The single is at once fey and slightly fierce (commenting on her heartache, Mitchell sings: “It sure takes its precious time/ But it’s got rights, and so have I”), while Love Letter conjures up a carousel revolving slowly and pointlessly in an abandoned ghost-town fairground. So, she’s going to turn out kooky and cute or weird and alternative. With luck, it will be a bit of both.
Neopolitan Dreams will be released on Sony BMG in March; www.myspace.com/lisalisamitchell

PASSION PIT
In the absence of a second album from the Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) electro side project the Postal Service, here is a new Boston five-piece with a debut EP, Chunk of Change, that glories in many of the same cadences, synth-driven chord sequences, melodic hooks and propulsive drum-machine beats thatmade Give Up so indispensable. The brainchild of Michael Angelakos, Passion Pit are all unhinged falsetto vocals, shiny candy-coating and, beneath the punching-the-air euphoria, lurking misery. When, on Cuddle Fuddle, Angelakos screams over the tinny, nursery-rhyme-like piano: “Let down your hair /Let down your hair/Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!”, you realise you’re in the presence of a properly odd, and possibly slightly deranged, madcap musical genius. In other circumstances, you might run a mile, but Angelakos’s songs are so addictive and sugar-rich that you stick around. Any fan of the Postal Service, Cut Copy, Hot Chip or LCD Soundsystem will love this. Chunk of Change will be released on Columbia in February; www.myspace.com/passionpitjams

THECOCKNBULLKID
Anita Blay, a 23-year-old musician based in east London, is a real electro-pop star, described last year as the UK’s “answer to Kelis” and a hit with audiences at Camden Crawl and Latitude, among other festivals. Her slightly larger-than-life image and wardrobe make it easy to miss the pop-savvy skill with which she fastens onto the listener’s ears and memory banks, then pummels away till resistance is futile. Currently holed up in the studio, putting the finishing touches to her debut album, Blay is offering a hint of what’s to come with her new single, I’m Not Sorry, and the minimal, wonderfully weird and definitely Kelis- and Neneh Cherry-recalling Boys and Girls. “As long as there are boys,” she sings on the latter, a song with the sharpest whip-crack beats since the heyday of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, “there will always be girls/And as long as there are girls, there will always be trouble.” To which the best response is probably: “Well, you’d know.”
I’m Not Sorry will be released on Moshi Moshi on March 2; www.myspace.com/thecocknbullkid

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