Ten Exciting Artistes I Discovered in 2024

Baby Osamaa's Tank Girl album Spotify page

For the last several days of the just-finished 2024 I couldn’t write. I'd fallen into a writerly slump, burned out, depleted. And so I couldn’t do any year-end piece. No movie list. No album list. No book list. No wins list. And no 2024 wrapped. It took a long email I wrote a pen pal on the last day of the year to enervate me. I’d better now write something, even if only a list of the artistes the year gifted me.

The last year wasn’t particularly a year of music. Spotify said I did half a hundred thousand minutes of listen. That's fair, but not enough. I needed more quiet to function in the year, and so I let music calm me. I'd written about the “quieter” albums I listened to in the first quarter of the year, a dark set of three months. The irony is music saved me in a year that was no particularly a year of music. But of equal importance are the artistes I discovered in the year. As the cliché goes they were a breath of fresh air. And the quality of their music was something to wake up the next morning for. 

I could have mentioned the genres most of them sing because, perhaps expectedly, many work in and around the same genres. But I don’t want to entertain spoilers, so I’ll let you figure that out. Plus it’s difficult to pigeonhole some of them into one genre. I think it’s become a trite selling point for artistes to describe themselves as genre-blending in the race for authenticity. Which genre isn’t a blend of many? Music is especially an exciting art for cramping many forms of itself into a single form. David Shields endorses music in his manifesto of a book Reality Hunger. He was calling for a literature that, for being as messy as life, becomes unclassifiable.

But I digressed. So, here, spanning 6 countries and 4 continents and X number of genres, are ten of the most exciting artistes I listened to – not heard – for the first time last year. As usual a list of this kind can never be fair. Thus, these are ten additional artistes that are as much of a revelation as those below but can’t be cited due to space: Xaviersobased, Cindy Lee, Lisha G, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Cassandra Jenkins, Adrianne Lenker, Magdalena Bay, Sufjan Stevens, Julee Cruise, Lava La Rue. 

Baby Osamaa. The anonymous narrator of Franz Kafka's short story “Josephine, the Singer” claims Josephine's singing gives off the feeling that something is pouring from her throat that has never before been heard. This is also true of Baby Osamaa. The 21-year-old Bronx, NY rapper combines a soft voice with quick, sickly-sweet hooks and honeyed melody. The result is jelly-fresh music that feels fresher on repeated listens. Sing-rapping is Baby’s style. And rap is supposed to be her genre. But she can sing-rap on any beat be it drill or trap and about anything from AI to the pussy nigga who has to give back her drip to a boy she daily thinks about. And she can coolly bends her voice into a mumble or a whimper at will. While her confidence is concrete, she raps softly, her voice tipping into seduction. So soft her threats come off as sexy and her shades lightly but stingily. “Had to lie bout that dick, cause that shit was a blow.” Such cute rap. 

Maryyx2's Silent Noise (The Album) is the album. Chukwuka Nwobi, a visual artist, frequently does creative direction for Odunsi the Engine and Cruel Santino, taking and making edgy photos and videos. But that isn’t where the stakes end for me. I’ll put her 2024 debut album, though only 9 minutes, 19 seconds, beside Odunsi’s rare. and any of Santi’s. The ten-track project is hypnotic, avant-garde, futuristic. Car honks, game tunes, crashing ocean waves, far-fetched sirens, voice notes, in English and in French, auto-tuned, sped-up delivery, etc. You’ve never heard music like this before. But the miracle is in how the vibe is both ethereal and quotidian. Take “JUMP!!!” Which feels like AI leading a deliverance session at a white garment church. By Maryy×2’s account, she was trying to make an album that captures Lagos, fusing life and dream, chaos and cool. It’s obvious she’s done that.

Soccer Mommy, I have known for long, but only listened to this past year. People in the know think all Sophia Allison’s four albums are quality stuff. But her last Evergreen (2024) is the record I’ve properly listened to yet. This project introduces to me a private artiste whose reflective lyrics are coarsely poetic. Bedroom pop, the sound of the Switzerland-born, America-based artiste’s early days, is adrift in this gorgeous indie-rock of delightful acoustic guitar and vulnerable voice. But the music does swell in some parts, the instrumentation and her voice overtaking each other to take up space and pulling back to make room for each other. Mommy’s confessional songwriting is as honest as shocking. She’s experienced living out the messy parts of life. But she’s also surprised she’s lived out that much. And surprised she might have no idea on how to live out the more to come. She’s an amateur in selfhood. One who knows to pleasure in playfulness in the midst of melancholy. For the former see “Abigail.” And the latter “Lost.”

Jay Som, a namesake, is another artist I’ve known for long but only started listening to this past year. Los Angeles-based Melina Duarte is that artiste that quietly puffs up the seams of the genres she works in. She tests the limit of things, and flirts with a wise, calm attitude. Shoegaze, synth-pop, grunge, etc. All these are styles Som flits across to make music that, though intimate bedroom pop, welcomes funk and hooks at the right places. These past weeks I’ve listened a lot to her 2017 “official” debut Everybody Works. I’m grateful for the exercise in patience that it is. The style, the content, the writing. Too wise for the then 22-year-old singer. “Take your time/Won't be long til our car breaks down/Your hands in mine,” she coos on “The Bus Song.” Latterly, she sings, “I can be whoever I want to be/Take time to figure it out/I'll be the one who sticks around.” Her spare, repetitive songwriting can be that effective.

Nilüfer Yanya. It’s a shame I only started listening to the British artiste last year. Her music is my kind of music. This is because she rides on electronic influences to ferry across a deeply personal interpretation of just many other genres that’ve slipped into her mind. Jazz, rock, indie, shoegaze, alt, soul, r/b, funk, etc. She pairs this eclecticism with a writing that is both humorous and honest. Self-destructively honest even. On “Stabilise,” off 2022 Painless, she sings, “I’m going downstairs, I’ve got the keys, you’re going nowhere,” and, latterly, “I’m going nowhere until it bleeds.” Or take “Shameless,” off the same album: “You can hate me if you feel like/You can hurt me if you feel like/If it feels good, then I’m alright.”

DORIS names himself after Earl Sweatshirt 2013 mercurial rap album. That’s enough to peak anyone’s interest. Didn’t know there was a thing called sampledelia until I heard DORIS. Sampledalia, sample plus psychedelia. Ultimate Love Songs Collection (2024) is a seminal piece of sampledelia. The 50 fleeting, snippet-sized demos on the compilation album are lo-fi, sample-heavy surrealist takes on everyday life. Frank Dorrey, a Brooklyn-based fine artist, sings or – better – raps, voice auto-tuned, pitch distorted, behind samples of all kinds of music. DORIS distils psyched dreaminess into concrete everydayness. You feel your head in the cloud and feet under the earth listening to him. It happens his digital art is also that: fun, surreal, mundane. 

Vampire Weekend, formed in New York, 2006, are one of those big American rock bands I’ve been sleeping on. Luckily I've started listening to them already. Vampire’s fifth album Only God Was Watching Us (2024), which begins with the word “fuck,” voiced by Ezra Koenig, has remained for a while now a regular play on my Spotify. An album that buoys with inside and outside allusions and is dotted with motifs and conceits. Adventurous in sounds as it is. And dipped in the past, reworking some of their own ideas. The ambience is deja vu. It’s obvious Only God can best be experienced when you get the inside jokes. Of course it might take listening through Vampire Weekend’s catalog to fully enjoy them. But at least I’ve begun.

Moyosworld I found on someone's IG story. I felt shame and regret, the former that I've missed out this long, the latter that the friend, a person of fine taste, hasn’t instead discovered Moyo on my own story. Anyway Moyo calls her own music Afro-rage. At this point I’m sickened by the “Afro” prefix. That poor little word just gets slapped at any word these days without really meaning anything. But no matter. Moyo does well her African take on rage, the aggressive rap subgenre of American rappers like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert. Plus Moyo doesn’t sing Afro-rage on every track. Her influences span for one Alté, Afrofusion, hip-hop, and rock. If you're a rap-loving Nigerian who has to endure a lot of Afrobeats noise, please Spotify Moyo’s 2021 Sex On Drug.

Mabe Fratti's 2024 Sentir Que No Sabes, beside Emahoy’s 1966 Spielt eigene Kompositionen, is, lately, the album I play when I want music to soothe me into sleep. Or when I want to write with music. Spanish, the language the Guatemalan musician sings in, I do not hear. But her sound, which is unclassifiable, pours out like a collage of my favorite music. There are outlines of post-rock, jazz, classical, experimental. The music is inviting, patient, gentle. Cello and her seraphic vocal are her main instruments. But there is more going on. Percussion, piano, and horn, for one. All of which build towards the airiness and homeliness of the album. Feel Like You Don’t Know is surely one of my favorite albums of 2024. 

Nala Sinephro. I am still settling into the London-based Belgian jazz luminary. But Endlessness (2024), an album of 10 “Continuums,” has endeared me better to jazz, especially experimental jazz, filling my ears and nostrils with ambience of a spiritual kind. Each track or – better – each continuum segues into the softest parts of you, wielding a charm that takes shapes only in music. The album fills your throat with floating rhythm long after you’re done listening. As if you’re constantly trying to sing a childhood nursery rhythm you have permanently forgotten. It’s also an album I can sleep off or write to. It’s ambient, it’s jazzy, and it’s cool.