who to look out for in 2009

Why her: This will sound familiar: A young British soul singer with a penchant for retro sounds is tipped by the British press as the next big thing. But Brown is a long way removed from the smokey nightclub vibe of Amy Winehouse or the torch songs of Duffy. Just check her debut single “Crying Blood,” an amped-up doo-wop dance floor anthem, where surf-rock guitars slide around video game bloops and where Brown stomps all over the cut’s big beats with a wallop of spunk. A former session singer and songwriter -- the Pussycat Dolls are among her credits -- Brown is ready to seize the spotlight with a swarm of high-energy pop songs. Need more evidence? Sample “Everybody,” with its hand-clap groove, teasing piano and no-nonsense vocals. When all is said and done, Brown delivers something her retro U.K. peers have thus far lacked: Just pure, whimsical fun.

Adele Adkins, known to many simply as Adele, is not yet 20 but already the British singer-songwriter is getting comparisons to Amy Winehouse, just minus the paparazzi, drug busts and continual controversies.

"It's a bit confusing and quite overwhelming," Atkins says from a London cab. "But to be honest all of the people around me -- like my friends, my mum, my band -- I've known forever. If I even tried to be a diva or get carried away with myself I'd be put back in place."

In mere months, the musician, playing a sold-out show next Wednesday at the Rivoli, has gone from virtual unknown to ending up on several lists of artists to watch for in 2008. Her debut album 19, which could do for her what 1999's On How Life Is did for Macy Gray, went to No. 1 on the British charts and cracked the top 20 in Canada in its first week.

Adele, who had only three songs when she signed her record deal in October of 2006, had a span of eight or nine months where she wrote nothing for 19. ]

The background: The Cool Kids and Kid Sister didn't quite enjoy the crossover success in 2008 that some pundits predicted and some hip-hop fans might have liked, but a consensus is growing around Cleveland-born, Brooklyn-based Kid Cudi that suggests it could be third time lucky for rappers called 'Kid'. He's one of the BBC's tips for 2009 alongside the expected La Roux, Florence and the Machine and Little Boots, and according to Radio 1Extra his single Day'N'Nite is engaging fans of hip-hop, urban, alt rock and electronica in a way that no rapper has done since Kanye West.

In fact, the 23-year-old Kid Cudi – sometimes spelled K.I.D C.U.D.I. or KiD CuDi, and not as he has made clear Kudi, Kutti, Cutty or Cuttie, and pronounced "Cuh-Dee" – is currently the hottest new hip-hop artist in the US, having signed to Kanye's label, featured on his latest album 808s & Heartbreak (singing on the track Welcome to Heartbreak) and supported his mentor on tour.

His choice of samples indicates a breadth of influence and potential audience range not heard since the heyday of De La Soul. 50 Ways to Make a Record is based around the chorus to Paul Simon's MOR staple 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover while Cudi Get quotes from, of all unlikely sources, Slade's 1970s glam-bootboy stomp Cum On Feel the Noize. In a way, with his sing-song delivery and ability to shift between rapping, growling and mellifluous R&B crooning modes, the former model and film student (he studied screenwriting at college, hence the often highly visual nature of his rap narratives) is less Kanye than Pharrell, although he's not quite the all-singing, all-producing whiz-kid that is King Neptune - producers Plain Pat & Emile (the former is Kanye's A&R man), Dot Da Genius and the Crookers provide the hooks and the beats.

Actually, with his gentle flow and reflective lyrics, there is a danger that Kid Cudi is too mild to make the giant splash people are expecting of him. Cudi Spazzin' features drum'n'bass breaks and Day'N'Nite is pleasingly sparse and electroid, but you don't get the sense that he could deliver a monstrous groove to equal Clipse's Grindin', to name but one Pharrell auteur classic, and Kanye pretty much has the super-self-absorbed solipsist dreamer milieu covered now, to the extent that lines such as, "If I was simple in the mind/ Everything would be fine/ Maybe if I was a jerk to girls/ Instead of being nice and speaking kind words" (from Man On the Moon [The Anthem]) just sound a little, well, wet. "I'm a real feel-good type person, and I feel like I have a real good spirit in me," he says, damning himself with faint praise. "I'm not the most insightful rapper, I'm not ya Talib Kweli, ya Mos Def, ya Kanye, uhhh, ya Common, or anyone like that ... I don't consider myself a genius, but I ain't a dummy, either." Even allowing for the possibility that the nice-guy thing might be a pose, there's a sense that Cudi's too soft – musically and lyrically – to succeed in a medium accustomed to sensory overload.

The buzz: "Splitting the difference between big-shit bravado and shoulder-shrug cool."

The truth: He's too nice to annihilate the masses.

Most likely to: Be a decent addition to the thoughtful, conscious rap canon.

Least likely to: Be a multi-platform, multimedia mogul.

What to buy: Day'N'Nite is out now on Fools Gold. His debut album, Man On the Moon, will be released in the spring.

Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay met in Paris and first made their mark with a 2003 remix of Simian Mobile Disco's "Never Be Alone" (subsequently released as "We Are Your Friends"). Sounding like the crafty, cheeky offspring of Daft Punk, Justice was not surprisingly signed by DP's former manager, Pedro Winter, to his Ed Banger Records imprint. The duo's first single was "Waters Of Nazareth," which went on to be championed by several big names, including 2 Many DJ's and Erol Alkan. Remixing work followed, with Soulwax, Mr. Oizo and Franz Ferdinand (amongst others) asking for the Justice treatment. The mainstream audience became aware of Justice when they won best video for "We Are Your Friends" at the 2006 MTV Europe Music Awards, a victory that so incensed the rapper Kanye West that he took to the stage to complain about his video losing. Subsequent online furor ensued, so that by the time Justice appeared onstage at the 2007 Coachella Music Festival, they were one of the most hotly anticipated acts. The look of their debut release, 2007's Cross, and their use of a huge cross as part of their stage show, was said to be inspired by Madonna's and George Michael's use of similar imagery during the '90s, as well as being a common heavy metal motif. It should be noted however that the huge Marshall stacks they use on stage are merely props.

Uffie (Anna-Catherine Hartley) was born in Miami, raised in Hong Kong and now lives in Paris.

After getting a limited promo release on Arcade Mode in January 2006, she was signed to Ed Banger Records and released Pop the Glock and Ready To Uff. Later that year two more tracks were available online: Hot Chick and In Charge.

In March 2007 PlayDismissed, was released on the Ed Rec Sampler Volume 2, and Uffie collaborated with label mates Justice on Tthhee Ppaarrttyy (from Justice’s album † ). Two singles have been leaked, First love, produced by Mr. Oizo and brand new car, produced by DJ Feadz.

0 October 2008

In the opening scenes to Ben Stiller's great Tropic Thunder, fake trailers for Tugg Speedman's Scorcher VI movie let us know that the action hero is back again...again. With Melodia rock is back again or rather, like Tugg Speedman - it's back again... again. If you've heard The Vines, you'll probably know that they deal in a hybrid of 60s rock and 90s indie. Since their inception in McDonald's the band has moved away from backyard Nirvana covers to recording with Foo Fighters and Beck producer Rob Schnapf and, in 2003, going double platinum in their home country of Australia with their debut album, Highly Evolved.

While Braindead sounds like it could have come this 2 million-selling album the rest of Melodia is an explosion of form following in the footsteps of more melodic follow-up, Winning Days. Recorded again with Rob Schnapf in LA - this album veers through extremes of sound from happy- go-lucky pop to laconic, melodic vocals. He's A Rocker says it all, and A.S. III has a touch of the Oasis to it. As a whole, it swings from lilting lullaby (Kara Jayne) to dirge with Craig Nicholls coaxing some soothing melodies out of A Girl I Knew; which is the best thing about this crying-on-the-kitchen-floor hymn to abandonment. Fortunately there is an occurence of some Hives-like screaming and enough thrash to bring back the dead on the acurately titled Scream.

Ending well on the rip-roaring She Is Gone, Melodia should safely ensure that the band's fanbase will grow. It's in no way original, but it does the job very effectively.

Kings of Leon are a rock band made up of three brothers and a cousin, based in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, United States who play a cross between Southern rock and garage rock. They formed in 2000 and have had a large following with fans of alternative rock.

The band consists of the brothers Nathan Followill (drums/backing vocals), Caleb Followill (vocals/rhythm guitar), Jared Followill (bass) and cousin Matthew Followill (lead guitar).

The group’s name is derived from Nathan, Caleb, and Jared’s father and grandfather, both named Leon. Jared and Caleb were born in Tennessee, while Nathan and Matthew were born in Oklahoma. The brothers spent much of their youth travelling around the south with their father, a traveling Pentecostal Church preacher and their mother, who taught them when they were not in school. According to Rolling Stone magazine, “While Leon preached at churches and tent revivals throughout the Deep South, the boys attended services and were occasionally enlisted to bang on some drums. They were home-schooled or enrolled in small parochial schools. Except for a five-year stretch when they settled in Jackson, Tennessee, the Followills spent their childhoods driving through the South in a purple 1988 Oldsmobile, decamping for a week or two wherever Leon was scheduled to preach.”

If you like digital dancehall, R&B and hip-hop, chances are you'll enjoy the first album proper by Kardinal Offishall, the nom de rap of Jason Harrow, Canada's self-styled "hip-hop ambassador". If you like all three, your chances will increase three-fold, because that album, Not 4 Sale, features all of those types of music. And if you're enticed by the notion of an artist whose songs often combine all three genres AT ONCE, you'll either find it utterly irresistible or be left wondering what would possess someone to attempt such an unlikely fusion of styles.

We're saying first album proper because, although he's released records before, this is the first to be given a big push by a multinational conglomerate. In fact, he started young, did Harrow, who used to go by the name of KoolAid before changing it to Kardinal Offishall after Cardinal Richelieu, Monty Python's favourite 17th-century French clergyman. The son of Jamaican immigrants, born in 1976, he started rapping aged eight and when he was 12 he performed live for the first time in front of Nelson Mandela during a visit to Toronto. Over the last few years he has recorded with Pharrell and Ne-Yo and appeared in videos by Rihanna, Sean Paul, Akon, Busta Rhymes and Estelle (a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in American Boy).

He's got some real heavyweights on Not 4 Sale, including Rihanna (who is not heavy at all but actually rather slim), Akon, Estelle, the kings of the crack narrative the Clipse and Mr Autotune himself, T-Pain. And if that sounds like not one but several bids for commercial glory, wait till you see the credits and hear the record: the single, Numba 1 (Tide is High), is a version of the 40-year-old Jamaican jingle that was turned into a worldwide hit by Blondie in 1980 featuring the NutraSweetened vocals of R&B queen Keri Hilson while Ill Eagle Alien (geddit?) quotes from Sting's Englishman In New York. Then all you've got to do is get past the album skits and the Kardinal's ragga growl and you can immerse yourself in the Timbaland-esque stutter-step beats, synth-heavy arrangements and crisp, pristine production. Because, as though to confirm his desire to connect with a broader audience this time, Harrow, now more Romeo than Rude Bwoy (that combat helmet he's wearing on the front cover of the album doesn't sit right), has gone all-out for a polished pop/R&B sound that posits him as a sort of Sean Kingston for grown-ups or a less ridiculous Shaggy.

You might have to do a double-take when you hear this music and then see the photo: Deer Tracks are a boy-girl duo, not two girls, which is what they sound like, their helium-high voices entwining exquisitely on their melodic folktronica. In fact, they have the simpatico compatibility you expect from sisters, even twins, and as such most strongly resemble the Casady siblings who comprise US electronic-folk duo CocoRosie. If there is a male-female precedent for the way Lehnberg and Lindfors's vocals meld and melt together, it's the voices of Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher of My Bloody Valentine, whose (When You Wake) You're Still In a Dream most vividly recalls the blissful state evoked by that song's title. Deer Tracks sound half-asleep, in the best possible way. Deer Tracks' own Slow Collision is well titled here in that it evokes the slow-motion drift of something precious and innocent towards disaster.

They're less languid than creepy, and as lacerating as they are lovely. Ominously, they even wrote their debut album Aurora in the shadow of a huge straw model of the locally notorious Gävle goat that looms over the city's Castle Square. To heighten this sense of eerie prettiness Deer Tracks combine folk-ishly delicate melodies with glitch techno techniques: twinkling keyboard lines that sound as though they're being played on toy instruments (as per that other micro-genre, toytronica) are frequently interrupted by static and hiss, crackles and jumps; one Deer Tracks song, 127Sexfyra, resembles a lullaby cooed by an angel bearing a razorblade. Imagine Julee Cruise singing with Four Tet for some idea of these terrorised, techno-fied warbles.

Deer Tracks – blog favourites across Europe throughout 2008 who apparently ranked higher than CSS, TV On the Radio and Franz Ferdinand on Hypemachine's summer Top 20 blog chart – describe what they do as "Northern Lights Electronica" and they have been compared to various Scandinavian bands. Some of their songs do indeed create an atmosphere of intimate intensity and immensity. Using guitars, melodica, trumpets, synths and beats, their most highly rated tune, Yes This Is My Broken Shield, builds towards the sort of epic crescendos normally the preserve of Iceland's Sigur Ros and Denmark's Mew.