We listen to a lot of music here at Stereogum -- it's sort of our job! -- and every year, we attempt to codify all of that listening through lists that take stock of what's kept us engaged throughout. There are still a few weeks until the hectic year-end list season descends, but we've made it something of a tradition to highlight new sounds that have us excited about the future of music through our annual Best New Bands list.
Now, obviously, "new" is a subjective term, and "band" doesn't necessarily apply to all the entries on this list, but one thing that unites all of these artists is that they're pushing the boundaries of music forward, or at least revisiting old sounds in unique and refreshing ways. These are musicians that have created albums and songs that we can't stop listening to. Most of them have released debuts within the past twelve months (with some exceptions) -- the rest are on the verge of putting out a first full-length project, and all of them have us pumped to hear where they go next.
Those are some wide parameters, but we think this list make sense. And if you've been reading Stereogum throughout the year, from our Band To Watch series to our frequent daily music posts, most of these names should be familiar, and maybe you've grown to love them over the last year, too.
If you're interested, revisit our lists from 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010, and get familiar with Stereogum's 40 Best New Bands Of 2016, presented in alphabetical order, below. You can also listen to a playlist of our picks on Spotify. --James
Abi Reimold
LOCATION: Philadelphia, PA
The first thing you notice when you listen to Abi Reimold’s debut full-length, Wriggling, is her voice. It starts in lilting falsetto and sinks to a low and grating rasp the moment Reimold’s songs start to sound too pretty. Wriggling is a rock n’ roll tempest, a series of songs about growing up and fucking up and seeking something undefined. It’s a humbly-produced album that proves Reimold has the potential to grow into something much, much bigger. --Gabriela
ABRA
LOCATION: Atlanta, GA
Two years ago, when Awful Records was the toast of the rap internet's trend-conscious bleeding edge, few would have predicted the Atlanta collective's most exciting export would be an R&B singer. But ABRA, who recently signed with Matador offshoot True Panther, is making music unlike anyone else right now. Her recent EP converges countless strands of '80s and '90s nostalgia, from house to industrial to post-punk to new wave, and weaves them into something spare, chilly, and thoroughly modern. It's called PRINCESS, and if ABRA keeps maturing at this rate she'll be a queen in no time. --Chris
Astronoid
LOCATION: Boston, MA
Metal is unusually resistant to the "Best New Bands" treatment. (I'd get into why, but since I'm on a tight word count here, I'm afraid I have to leave this thesis unsupported for the moment. My apologies.) In any case, there are a number of metal bands that released strong debut LPS in 2016 -- Blood Incantation, Sumerlands, Numenorean... -- but for various and sundry reasons, Astronoid are the only metal band on this list. "But are they even metal?" Well, they self-define as "dream-thrash," a clever end run around being tagged as "blackgaze," although equally meaningless. Their first full-length, Air, is built on base elements from various metal subgenres, but it's equally indebted to shoegaze, prog, dream-pop, and post-rock. It's catchy as hell, beautifully produced, tonally complex, and wildly thrilling. If they never release anything else, Astronoid will have left us with a single remarkable statement. If this is just the beginning, though, they could be something really, truly special. --Michael
Billie Marten
LOCATION: Ripon, England
It's startling to hear several generations of English folk-rock manifesting in the music of one 17-year-old girl. Nick Drake's gentle whispers, Radiohead's trembling balladry, the Staves' breathless sonic panoramas -- those are just a few of the musical memories wrapped up in Marten's prodigious debut album Writing Of Blues And Yellows. Before voting age, she's already consumed a lifetime's worth of staggeringly beautiful music and synthesized it into a sound all her own. "Where does her start go from here?" she sings on breakthrough single "Bird." We can't wait to find out. --Chris
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Charly Bliss
LOCATION: New York, NY
Though they've been around for a few years and have opened for some big names, Charly Bliss' debut album is still on the horizon, and that's an exciting prospect. With one-off single "Ruby" earlier this year, they offered up a love letter to a therapist punctuated by sticky sweet hooks and vividly violent details like being "passed out on the subway with blood in my hair." They've got more effusive and sharply menacing pop-rock in the wings, and a full-length will be their time to shine. --James
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Cross Record
LOCATION: Dripping Springs, TX
Austin is a Southern metropolis, but you don't have to drive far outside the city limits to find miles of eerie Texas desert. That's where Cross Record's ranch is situated, where their stunning Wabi-Sabi was conceptualized and brought to life. The album reflects its environment, its sun-charred drones and thunderous storms of noise animated by Emily Cross' restless whisper. Chicago post-rock is in the mix too, nodding to the band's pre-Austin history, but those sounds have been transported to a foreign realm and converted into something utterly haunting and unique. --Chris
DJ Paypal
LOCATION: Berlin, Germany
Chicago footwork, with its heart-murmur rhythmic schemes and its dizzying speeds, is a tricky form of music, and almost nobody from outside Chicago ever seems to get it right. But DJ Paypal, from Berlin by way of North Carolina, has the sort of grasp on the genre that allows him to push it in weird new directions. The producer likes to stay mysterious and unpredictable, performing in a mask and, at one point, dumping 30 Drake remixes on the internet at once. But his giddy, spazzy take on the genre isn’t a joke or a gimmick; it’s an even more head-spinning version of a form of music that was already head-spinning. --Tom
D.R.A.M.
LOCATION: Hampton, Virginia
How can you feel anything but love for this guy? Just when we thought he was going to be a footnote in the grandiose multimedia saga that is "Hotline Bling," he bounced back with "Broccoli," a summer jam so joyous its piano notes practically bounce out of the speakers and dance with you. Now he's dropped an entire album that good, one that fearlessly bridges rap, R&B, gospel, house, reggae, and rock with the poise of a pro and the demeanor of a drunken master. It's lit -- as in, it shines like the sun and will definitely brighten your day. --Chris
Dyke Drama
LOCATION: Olympia, WA
For those who were bummed-out by G.L.O.S.S.' passing (RIP), there's still a lot of music to look forward to. Who knows what its members will go on to produce, but rest assured Sadie Switchblade will be around for awhile, making country-leaning rock music that sounds-off to seminal American bands passed; Switchblade channels indie greats and even covers Lucinda Williams with grace and reverence. Dyke Drama’s Up Against The Bricks is a semi-sweet meditation on identity, love, and longing. It’s rarely incendiary, but never afraid to prove a point. --Gabriela
Flasher
LOCATION: Washington, DC
Next year, the great DC punk band Priests will finally release their debut album, something that some of us have been eagerly anticipating since they dropped a game-changing EP in 2014. But Priests bassist Taylor Mulitz has already played on another great record. Mulitz is one third of the DC band Flasher, and their self-titled debut EP takes the far-off sounds of krautrock and dream-pop and grounds them in the push-pull of a classic DC post-hardcore rhythm section. This is punk rock that walks the line, letting its ideas run free while keeping the earthy urgency that the genre needs. --Tom
gobbinjr
LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY
As gobbinjr, Emma Witmer translates anxiety and alienation into songs that feel like a pillow you can rest your head on at night, or at least beat up senselessly in an effort to release your frustrations. Her whimsical pop music sounds wholly unique and oddly confident in the way it revels in its own uncertainty, and her new EP, vom night, is a darkly comedic coming-of-age about dealing with the incongruities of your personality and life never living up to weighty expectations. --James
Gordi
LOCATION: Sydney, Australia
Thousands of college students sit around in their rooms writing music every day, and most of it is as garbage as Natural Light cans on the lawn. But imagine your roommate is Sophie Payten, and she spends her free time conjuring these windswept electro-acoustic epics, sounding wise and sophisticated beyond her 22 years. Soundtracked by "Can We Work It Out" and "Wanting" and "Nothing's As It Seems," all-night homework marathons would suddenly seem profound and heartrendingly beautiful. Pro-tip for undergrads: Next time some hack is strumming away during your cram session, slide the Clever Disguise EP into your headphones instead. --Chris
Hazel English
LOCATION: Oakland, CA
Hazel English songs are far too easy to get lost in. That's not necessarily a bad thing because the dreaminess of her shimmering aesthetic is supposed to have that effect, but you can easily gloss over some exquisite vulnerability because it's expressed so plainspoken and unassuming, enveloped by that transcendent glimmer. But she cuts through ever so gently and it registers much more forcefully upon a few listens. It's a good thing her Never Going Home EP is easy to keep on repeat. --Collin
IAN SWEET
LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY/Boston, MA
With the addition of drummer Tim Cheney and bassist Damien Scalise, Jilian Medford's solo project IAN has evolved into the full band IAN SWEET. But it's still Medford's bruised, beating heart that lies at the center of Shapeshifter's twitchy tangles of guitar-rock, and it's her voice we hear cracking into a strained yelp time again and again. Shapeshifter is a brutal album, an album about anxiety and self-destruction and giving yourself up for someone who only makes you feel more alone. But it's also a hopeful album about going through the wringer and coming out on the other side with a smile. --Peter
Jamila Woods
LOCATION: Chicago, IL
On songs like Donnie Trumpet And The Social Experiment’s "Sunday Candy," Jamila Woods' voice was always a ray of aural sunshine, a liquid shimmer that marries jazz elocution to gospel warmth. And she's still a ray of sunshine on her own album, HEAVN, but the album is something else too. It's an album-length love letter to Woods' Chicago hometown, with all that city's beauty and heartbreak accounted for -- a statement of devotion that still acknowledges all the flaws of the place she's singing about. Woods is such a vivid, dextrous singer that she can cover the Cure's biggest hit and make it feel new, and she’s using that gift for bigger things. Bless her. --Tom
Japanese Breakfast
LOCATION: Philadelphia, PA
Michelle Zauner's music as Japanese Breakfast plunges headfirst into some of the darkest experiences in human life and finds glimmers of bright light around the fringe. As a music critic, my instinct is to describe its genre, but trying to pin down Zauner's style can be as fruitless as attempting to make sense of the sadness and loss that inspired her new album Psychopomp. As with those sensations, it might be more productive to just let this music wash over you than to understand its inner workings. It's as fluid, expansive, and gorgeous as its subject matter demands. --Chris
Kamaiyah
LOCATION: Oakland, CA
A West Coast queen has been anointed. No other woman has unified the sounds of an entire state, from the Bay all they way down to LA, like Kamaiyah has. But it would be criminal to give Ill Yaya the "good for a girl" pat on the back because she's at the top of the class in the new school regardless of region or gender. Not only can she rhyme, she has a sense for pop craft that has her stealing the show from heavy hitters like Drake and YG with just a hook. Getting in the studio with her is a brave move for many a rapper. Not only can she out-rap you, but those raps will be packaged to sell while still sounding authentic as hell. --Collin
Katie Gately
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
Katie Gately's interest in electronic music grew out of her academic background as a sound editor for films and an obsession with field recordings, and she's said that she wanted to take all of her found sounds and "make them the movie stars of the soundscapes." On Color, her debut full-length, she does just that, making these odd squelches and rattles the focal point of tracks that mix the studied with the instinctual, inverting the structure of pop music and celebrating its immediacy with a cinematic gaze. The result is beguiling and sounds absolutely massive, a soundtrack for our darkest moments that still retains a sense of playfulness and wonder. --James
Kississippi
LOCATION: Philadelphia, PA
Sometimes you’re introduced to a song at such a pointed moment in time that it physically hurts you to hear it. Kississippi’s "Indigo" did that to me when I heard it a year ago. There’s a loneliness in Zoë Allaire Reynolds' voice that curls up next to you when you find yourself in the same emotional space so you can keep each other company. Kississippi’s exquisitely-produced EP, We Have No Future, We’re All Doomed, is a moody and open-hearted collection of songs about love overcoming physical and emotional distance, and the fallout that ensues when it doesn’t. --Gabriela
Kweku Collins
LOCATION: Evanston, IL
You'd think a guy that name checks Sade, Kendrick Lamar, Tame Impala, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Black Sabbath, Electric Wizard, and Iron Maiden as influences would make a chaotic, discordant mess of sounds. Somehow, Kweku Collins has the skill to steal (in the way that good artists steal versus borrowing) elements from all of them and combine them all into a unique gumbo. To add to the constantly shifting sonics, Collins slides on a spectrum between singing and rapping with an ease that belies his 19 years on the planet. Dude is rap game Brandon Ingram -- scary good already with a huge upside. --Collin
Let's Eat Grandma
LOCATION: Norwich, England
Imagine the creepy twins from The Shining rented a room in a gingerbread house, ate some magic mushrooms, listened to a lot of Kate Bush, and then recorded an album. You'd probably get something like I, Gemini, the beautiful, bewitching debut from British teenagers Let's Eat Grandma. Their dark fairytale music is experimental without ever taking itself too seriously, their whimsical eccentricity resting somewhere between total sincerity and winking artifice. Either way, it's magical. --Peter
Littler
LOCATION: Philadelphia, PA
Being young is hard. Your twenties are basically just a series of personal, professional, and romantic fuck-ups, a decade of fumbling towards something resembling adulthood. Sometimes it feels like the only thing to do about it is complain over some loud guitars, and that's the approach that Littler take on their debut album Of Wandering. The band recorded the LP with Swearin's Kyle Gilbride, which places them in an impressive lineage of punky, poppy DIY rock that also includes Waxahatchee, Radiator Hospital, All Dogs, and Sports. But Littler's fuck-ups are all their own, and so are their triumphs, Of Wandering being one of them. --Peter
Mal Devisa
LOCATION: Northampton, MA
"Now I go by Mal Devisa/ Avid rapper, she's a preacher/ A nonconformist nonbeliever." That's how Deja Carr describes herself on Kiid's swaggering closer "Dominatrix," but I'll keep it short and just call her a star. Her voice is a whole universe unto itself, folding everything from Nina Simone's smoky croon to Merrill Garbus' fiery yawp into its rich depths. Whether singing over the deep thrum of her bass or rapping over an explosive beat, she projects the kind of quiet confidence that demands your attention instead of asking for it. --Peter
Mannequin Pussy
LOCATION: Philadelphia, PA
Mannequin Pussy can thrash you, soothe you, blitz you, groove you. The Philadelphia pop-punks have a Pixies-like ability to shift the shape of their sound, making full use of their genre's dynamic spectrum from gently pretty singsong to harrowing sonic violence. Their new album Romantic fits more thrilling twists and turns into 17 minutes than most bands can muster over an entire career. And since that music is a vehicle for Marisa Dabice's compelling internal monologues, it adds up to something more lasting and meaningful than mere sensory overload. --Chris
Margaret Glaspy
LOCATION: New York, NY
On her debut album, Margaret Glaspy makes tried-and-true rock and roll sound vital and fresh. Her blues-inflected songs take cues from the '70s (think Mitchell) and '90s (Phair) but feel thoroughly here and now. Glaspy's a world-class songwriter, and each track on Emotions And Math explores the divide between desire and rationality with exactitude and confidence. If Glaspy feels like an outlier in today's musical landscape, that's only because she's so remarkable, and her music demonstrates that the singer-songwriter tradition is alive and thriving. --James
Maria Usbeck
LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY
Maria Usbeck’s Amparo is an album that’s traveled long distances. Written and recorded throughout Latin America, Florida, the West Coast, and Brooklyn, and composed in Usbeck’s native language, Spanish, these songs sound like they could stretch out and find a home just about anywhere. Usbeck herself describes this work as a travel diary, and it'll make you want to get out of your familiar surroundings and explore something new, whether it be a neighborhood or city, or something simpler, like a genre of music you’re not well-versed in. Amparo is just that beautiful. --Gabriela
Melkbelly
LOCATION: Chicago, IL
After spending a few years knocking around the Chicago underground and putting out a string of pulverizing and epically-constructed shortform releases, Melkbelly are gearing up to release their debut full-length next year. "Mount Kool Kid" and "Elk Mountain" from this summer's 7" ooze confidence and cool and have a handle on tension-building like no other, and if they're any indication of what's to come, it's going to be a wild and snarling ride. --James
Moses Sumney
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
An unearthly vocal range, the ability to write lines like "I know what it is to behold and not be held," and the savvy required to maximize them both in everything from a bedroom 4-track setup to a full studio? What else could you ask you for? Maybe that he release more than five songs every year-and-a-half or so? Even then, with less than 15 songs to his name, Moses Sumney has more potent emotional evocation in his beautiful, soulful, short catalog than some artists can boast for their entire career. --Collin
Muncie Girls
LOCATION: Exeter, England
It’s hard to make political music, but we were graced with so much good music this year that was explicitly aimed at creating social change. The Exeter-based punk band Muncie Girls take macro issues and act them out on a micro stage. “All the things you didn’t learn in school, and why it feels like no one knows the truth,” Lande Hekt sings on From Caplan To Belsize’s leading track. “The systems we rely on aren’t for you, they’re for the lucky fucking few!” And while the album is polemical, Muncie Girls still manage to sing about the everyday trials and tribulations of regular 20-somethings on the side. They’re fighting the good fight, and they’ll make you want to do the same. --Gabriela
Noname
LOCATION: Chicago, IL
Back in 2013, a complete unknown who called herself Noname Gypsy turned in a casually virtuosic guest-verse on “Lost,” a highlight from Chance The Rapper’s Acid Rap. And she’s been doing great work on other people’s songs since then. But none of it fully prepared us for the stirring, humble, conversational depths of Telefone, the album that the newly rechristened Noname gave us this year. Over dizzily lush and organic beats, Noname rhapsodizes about childhood sneakers and her imagined future child, helping to usher in a glorious new age of introspective Chicago rap in the process. --Tom
Pill
LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY
Doing political music well is a wobbly tightrope walk that many artists and bands don't have the balance for, but art-punk quartet Pill took huge, confident steps on their debut Convenience. Veronica Torres keeps the ear intrigued with a deft mix of poetry, rants, laments, affirmations, and daggers -- all with mark-leaving bite -- and the band has a matching sound that lifts them all to resounding heights. And when they drop knowledge from up there, it doesn't fall like an Acme anvil on your head. It's more like a feather you'll barely feel that will leave you with just as big a lump. --Collin
Pinegrove
LOCATION: Montclair, NJ
This Jersey band is a product of the same emo revival scene that gave us Modern Baseball and plenty of bands that sound like Modern Baseball. And Pinegrove’s yelpy sincerity fits in with that, but it also reaches back to the dusty, anthemic Americana of the alt-country universe, as well as the insular and instinctive guitargasms of Built To Spill. Together all those elements blur together to turn Cardinal, technically the band's debut, into one of the most heartfelt and cathartic guitar-rock records we’ve heard in some time -- a piece of the sort of prime road-trip music that almost nobody makes anymore. --Tom
serpentwithfeet
LOCATION: New York, NY
There’s no easy way to describe the music that Josiah Wise makes as serpentwithfeet. It’s devotional R&B folding in on itself, a gothic landscape of pops and hisses and string rondos and virtuosic melisma. Wise is trained for classical music, and there’s an element of that in there, too. But there’s also the forbidding murk of collaborator the Haxan Cloak, who produced Wise's blisters EP. It's music that tears itself apart beautifully. Wise himself calls it "pagan gospel," and that’s as good a description as anything else. --Tom
Show Me The Body
LOCATION: Queens, NY
Show Me The Body is a band name that promises intensity, and Show Me The Body are a band that delivers. All three members have spent their whole lives in New York City, and their debut full-length Body War sounds like the product of an entire city's accumulated waste and pollution and corruption, twisting hardcore, hip-hop, and post-punk into one roiling mass of distorted riffs and lurching rhythms. They play "underground" music in the sense that's it's subterranean and dark and sweaty, and they play it like they just crawled out of a sewer and they're pissed off about the smell. --Peter
Soccer Mommy
LOCATION: New York, NY
The songs on For Young Hearts -- Soccer Mommy's fourth release in the past year and her most fully-realized yet -- play out the warm haze of love in slow motion, chronicling its promising initial spark, inevitable deadening, and all the wishy-washy emotions in between. The casual way in which Sophie Allison sings "I'm think I'm falling, baby, and I won't ever let you go" on highlight "Skinned Knees" speaks to how easy it is to slip into old habits and new loves, and how absolutely enchanting Soccer Mommy's music can be. --James
Strange Ranger
LOCATION: Portland, OR
Strange Ranger are really two best new bands in one. After releasing their sprawling 73-minute debut Rot Forever in February, Sioux Falls changed their name to Strange Ranger, condensed their lineup from a trio to a duo, and softened their '90s guitar anthems into something quieter and prettier and sadder. Compared to the wordy double album Rot Forever, the Sunbeams Through Your Head EP feels small and intimate, content to let its impressionistic contemplation unfurl slowly and gradually. On its own, it's good, but as an indication of where Strange Ranger are headed next, it's even better. --Peter
T-Rextasy
LOCATION: New York, NY
I once compared T-Rextasy to No Doubt, and that bold statement still stands. This is a band that proves there are infinite iterations of "punk," that you can be a take-no-prisoners role model and vulnerable at the same time. T-Rextasy are based in New York City, but there isn't a single band in their surrounding scene that sounds like this; they're fiercely independent and in a league of their own. This band takes down toxic masculinity with the sneering confidence of teens on the brink of adulthood who think they know what’s best. And T-Rextasy have the talent, the songwriting skills, and the charisma, to make that vision of a better future their reality. --Gabriela
Weaves
LOCATION: Toronto, ON
Weaves' self-titled LP zig-zags about with a muddied, frantic energy. They made kitchen sink rock that feels artful and immediate, and each of their tracks are filled with enough whosists and whatsits to make your head spin. Jasmyn Burke's voice provides a gooey, fearsome center for the rest of the four-piece to build up big rubber band balls of tension and noise before letting all of them snap at once. It's a skill that proves winsome throughout their debut, and promises even more escalating heights to come. --James
Yohuna
LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY
Patientness -- not patience -- is the name of Yohuna's debut full-length, and it characterizes the music to a T. Johanne Swanson slowly unfurls minimal soundscapes that require a bit of waiting to hit the crescendo, but it pays off every time. The slow build of emotion, soundscape, and tension seem to hit at the right moment on every track, and she can manipulate this formula for any emotion she damn well pleases. Her ability to communicate a mood is uncanny. --Collin
Young M.A
LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY
Young M.A is more than just some Bobby Shmurda fill-in. Yes, "OOOUUU" sounds a lot like "Hot Nigga" and she's from Brooklyn, but that's where the similarities end. She went viral without an accompanying dance that Drake cosigned. And maybe Shmurda never had the chance to do it, but something tells me he couldn't body a Mobb Deep instrumental like M.A did on "Quiet Storm." Add the intriguing allure of her gully lesbian persona that has all the swagger, machismo, and killer instinct of Felicia Pearson's Snoop on The Wire, and you've got something undeniably special. --Collin
