Our critics and reporters have been busy making lists of the year’s best albums and songs, but we’re always listening for emerging acts destined for big things. Catch up on our latest picks here. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)
Annahstasia
Annahstasia Enuke — a Nigerian-American songwriter born in Wisconsin and based in Los Angeles — started her recording career as the 2010s ended; advisers steered her toward R&B. But she didn’t stay there. Instead, her richly tremulous contralto voice and her ear for long-breathed melodies led her toward songs with gentle guitar at their core. On the 2023 EP “Revival” and her 2025 debut album, “Tether,” she sings openhearted, acoustic-centered ballads about connection and self-definition, about what she hopes to give and what she needs. Meanwhile, she still has R&B connections; she appeared as Kendrick Lamar’s girlfriend in the video for “Luther” by Lamar and SZA.
SOUNDS LIKE Folky, deep-toned, grounded yet passionate singer-songwriters like Joan Armatrading and Tracy Chapman.
WHAT’S HAPPENING International touring, U.S. festivals and a live album in March that includes a few new songs. JON PARELES
Dove Ellis
The rise of Paul Mescal was just the beginning; sensitive Irish boys are having a moment. Consider the 22-year-old Galway-born singer-songwriter Dove Ellis, who just released his deeply felt debut album “Blizzard” — a showcase for his elegantly keening yelp and penchant for pastoral textures.
SOUNDS LIKE Lush, ornately arranged, heart-on-sleeve indie-folk with galvanic swells of intensity that border on emo; think Thom Yorke fronting Bright Eyes.
WHAT’S HAPPENING Following his string of North American dates opening for the ubiquitous New York band Geese (a coveted slot, indeed), Ellis will be playing several dates in Britain this winter. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Lexa Gates
A gifted singer and rapper from Queens of Colombian and Puerto Rican heritage, Lexa Gates has been releasing promising and charmingly profane music for years, beginning when she was a teenager.
SOUNDS LIKE Gates is such a confident presence that her music can appear almost offhand, but it’s rich with influence — the tart, infidelity-obsessed R&B of the 1990s, the lo-fi soul-influenced hip-hop of the 2010s and a touch of 1950s whimsy.
WHAT’S HAPPENING Her second major label album, “I Am,” will be released in January. The lead single, “Estranged,” captures her playful sense of mayhem well, as she sings with sensuality and swing: “These bitches thirsting over you make me wanna kill them all / I’ll throw a party on the roof and make sure all them fall.” JON CARAMANICA
KeiyaA
The songwriter, musician and producer Chakeiya Richmond, who records as KeiyaA, released her second album, “Hooke’s Law,” in 2025. That was five years after her debut garnered attention from tastemakers like Solange Knowles for its inward-looking, self-soothing songs and KeiyaA’s vertiginous electronic production. Between albums, KeiyaA contended with depression, moved to New York City and created an experimental play, “Milk Thot,” including new songs that made their way to the album. “Hooke’s Law” — named after the physics formula for the power of a stretched spring — is newly aggressive and far-reaching in both sound and lyrics, pushing every parameter.
SOUNDS LIKE Exploratory R&B, savoring extremes from smooth, plush strings — “Stupid Prizes” samples the vintage easy listening of Percy Faith — to brittle, frenetic percussion and cascading layered vocals.
WHAT’S HAPPENING Touring clubs and festivals, starting to record her next album. PARELES
Maruja
Righteous fury and stubborn idealism battle it out in the bristling, shape-shifting songs of Maruja. It’s a four-man band from Manchester, England, that released its debut album, “Pain to Power,” in 2025 after a long evolution through a series of EPs that began in 2016. Harry Wilkinson, the band’s rapper, singer and guitarist, rails against exploitation, inequality, self-destruction and apathy, but also grapples with self-doubt and seeks the healing power of love.
SOUNDS LIKE Rants punctuated by reflections, mosh-ready onslaughts alongside dramatic ballads. The band’s songs grow out of group improvisations that dig into rock, funk, jazz and hip-hop. In songs like “Bloodsport” and “Look Down on Us,” the ideas are honed into steamroller bass riffs and jabbing saxophone lines, with the insurgent political spirit of Rage Against the Machine. Elsewhere, as in “Reconcile” and “Born to Die,” the improvisations lead to earnest meditations and roiling, multipart buildups, all united by a deep sense of purpose.
WHAT’S HAPPENING Maruja is touring Europe, headlining at clubs and playing at festivals, from April through August. PARELES
Chloe Qisha
Pop can be serious, and pop can be a joke. For Chloe Qisha, a rising British pop star born in Malaysia, it’s a bit of both. The string of singles she released this year (“21st Century Cool Girl,” “Modern Romance”) are full of hilarious and finely drawn characters — objects of affection who don’t merit the time they demand, and a protagonist who nevertheless still isn’t sure how much time to give them.
SOUNDS LIKE Schooled in the Gaga mode of precise melodrama, Qisha writes funny songs that are quietly desperate and traumatic. Don’t let the high gloss fool you.
WHAT’S HAPPENING Qisha’s latest single, “So Sad So Hot,” is somehow both a pinpoint-precise pop song and also a skit about a pinpoint-precise pop song. She will embark on a brief American tour in the spring. CARAMANICA
Sharp Pins
The 21-year-old Chicago-based indie-rocker Kai Slater may be young enough to be Robert Pollard’s grandson, but with his one-man band Sharp Pins he’s already demonstrated a beyond-his-years mastery of Guided by Voices-like lo-fi power-pop across two recent, excellent LPs, “Radio DDR” and “Balloon Balloon Balloon.”
SOUNDS LIKE A slowly decaying cassette tape of a lost Flamin’ Groovies album; the self-recorded bedroom-pop musings of someone who would try to start a Village Green Preservation Society at his college; audible proof that the kids are all right.
WHAT’S HAPPENING In January, Slater will embark on a short North American tour in support of “Balloon Balloon Balloon,” which includes New York appearances at a Jan. 24 benefit show at Bowery Ballroom and a headlining date at TV Eye in Queens the next night. Sharp Pins will also be playing Wilco’s annual Solid Sound Festival this June in North Adams, Mass. ZOLADZ
Smerz
A Norwegian duo (Catharina Stolenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt, who met over a decade ago as students at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory) that makes deadpan, vividly detailed electro-pop pulsating with personality, sensuality and dry humor. Their name is a shortened form of herzschmerz, the German word for “heartache.” In May, Smerz released “Big City Life,” its irresistibly charming second album, which captures the thrills and the alienation of being young in a teeming metropolis.
SOUNDS LIKE ESG tracks slowed to half speed and heard from two rooms away; a 2020s update of early aughts blog-pop; crate-dug obscurities playing at a half-empty but imposingly cool European basement club after 4 a.m.
WHAT’S HAPPENING On its fall tour, the duo played the biggest U.S. stages of its career (the elusive alt-pop star Sky Ferreira joined for a surprise duet in Los Angeles); that jaunt is currently wrapping up in Europe. In November, Smerz also released “Big City Life Edits,” a remix album that features, among other things, an appearance from Clairo, who sounds right at home on a version of Smerz’s swoony slow-dance of a single, “You Got Time and I Got Money.” ZOLADZ
Julia Wolf
An angsty “Twilight” obsessive, Julia Wolf, 31, is like if Bella Swan fronted Taking Back Sunday, piling the detritus of the female experience and modern electronic touches atop a throwback, third-wave emo foundation — and then lighting it all on fire. Last year, her achingly millennial single “In My Room” (“I want your things in my room, I miss you all of the time / I stalk myself on the internet just to see what you’ll find”) made the TikTok rounds, setting up Wolf’s sophomore album, “Pressure.” Drake noticed; earlier this year, on “Dog House,” a one-off single with Yeat, the Canadian superstar devoted the song’s 25-second intro entirely to Wolf, who took advantage of the unlikely solo showcase by out-hooking some of the stickiest melody-makers of her generation.
SOUNDS LIKE The Warped Tour and Hot Topic, in a comforting way. Wolf has Paramore and Evanescence in her DNA, but also the proudly suburban, everygirl sass of someone who remembers loitering and riffing with rambunctious friends at the mall on Long Island, where she was raised. “Pressure” is heavier than Wolf’s earlier work, like the evocatively named “Girls in Purgatory” EP, adding some of the turn-of-the-century nu-metal textures that continue to creep into contemporary alt-pop.
WHAT’S HAPPENING After joining the deep lineage of those co-signed earlier in their careers by Drake — and as maybe the most left-field pick since iLoveMakonnen — Wolf is opening for MGK’s Lost Americana Tour through the first quarter of next year, and hopefully splitting time between rap features and deepening her diary-entry pop-rock. JOE COSCARELLI
Top image, clockwise from top left: Owen Lehman (Dove Ellis); Griffin Wells (Smerz); Will Willoughby (Annahstasia); Natasha Austrich (Julia Wolf); Lorne Thomson/Redferns, via Getty Images (KeiyaA)
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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