The playlist: new bands – with the Prettiots, Dua Lipa and Mind Enterprises

The Prettiots – Stabler

The Prettiots are a New York duo – Kay Kasparhauser and Lulu Prat – who offer a knowing, lo-fi indie-cool take on 60s girl group pop, with old standbys like handclaps and sweet harmonies to balance out the more modern-world observations in the lyrics. “You showed up on the crime scene that was my life,” sings Kasparhauser over a beat like Toni Basil’s Mickey and two guitars: one rhythmic and strummed, the other an insinuating motif. “You’ve left fingerprints all over my mind,” she continues, watching the detective – Elliot Stabler, in this case, from NBC’s Law & Order, a man with “an unpredictable temper, a strong sense of family values and some good tattoos” as she sighs, dreamily. It follows on from previous releases Boys (I Dated in High School) and Suicide Hotline; future songs might be about anything from Warner Herzog to sex while influences range from Lightning Bolt to Abba –they’ve been known to cover the Misfits and System of a Down live.

Mind Enterprises – Chapita

Mind Enterprises is Andrea Tirone, and Chapita is the first song from his forthcoming debut album. Should be a good one, too, based on this track: playful, poignant technopop, with a percolating electronic groove, Hot Chippy in its melody and quirky funkiness. Tirone is originally from Turin, now based in north London, and Chapita was apparently inspired by a New Yorker: Salvatore Principato, singer with seminal NYC post-punks Liquid Liquid. His intention was to create, with Chapita, a minimalist take on maximalist Afro-funk, minus its busy polyrhythms and percussion. Job not quite done, then, and no bad thing: Chapita is quite a layered affair, with enough attention to production niceties – a guitar filigree here, a distant echoing female voice there – for this to work as headphone chillout and club … what’s the energy grade below “banger”?

Venn – Real Blood

Venn are a new band, from London and Berlin, comprising Stuart Gardham, John Petrie, and Ben Esser. A new configuration of familiar names – one, anyway: Ben Esser, presuming it’s the same gentleman who featured as a Guardian New Band of the Day back in 2007, when he was unveiled as “Dizzee Rascal [if he] was a skinny white doofus playing Bontempi beat-pop”. Venn are a rather different proposition: dark, droning, with plenty of postpunk edge, the accent on mesmeric motion, and a pop sensibility underneath all the ominous noise and feedback scree, like an industrial outfit with one ear attuned to krautrock and one eye on the charts. Their EP, Runes, is released in December, and it was recorded by Kristian Craig Robinson (aka Capitol K), who has previously worked with the likes of Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, which should give you some idea of the distance Esser has travelled

Tiggs Da Author – Georgia

If this track is any measure, Leon Bridges and Curtis Harding have a rival in the retro-soul man stakes. Tiggs Da Author – born and raised in Tanzania before moving to London at the age of eight – is heavily influenced by classic R&B: his debut single, Georgia, samples Shoes by Bobby “Blue” Bland and in its title there are echoes of Ray Charles. But there’s something that TDA – or perhaps it’s producer Show N Prove (Wretch 32) – does to his source material that brings it up to date; there’s a brightness and an idiosyncratic energy that is quite André 3000ish. His other influences include “obscure 60s documentaries”, east African Jazz, Dizzee Rascal and Motown, and so the expectation is that the 25-year-old rapper, singer, songwriter and producer – currently working on his debut album with Futurecut (Rihanna, Lily Allen) and Tonino (Ella Eyre) – will do far more interesting things down the line than pay tribute to the soul titans.

Dua Lipa – Be the One

The proliferation of solo female artists mirrors the abundance of indie rock bands a decade ago: Amy, Lily, Adele and Florence opened the floodgates as effectively as did the Strokes, the White Stripes, the Libertines and Franz Ferdinand for their guitar-band counterparts. Dua Lipa – from Kosovo, living in London – is a little bit Lana, aimed at a “cooler” sector than Jessie J but with just as big a (smoky) voice, far straighter than Twigs although her previous single was produced by her (and Lana’s) producer Emile Haynie while Be the One was given a synthy sheen and cyber propulsion by London-based electronic producer Digital Farm Animals and is accompanied by a video directed by Nicole Nodland (Lana). She describes what she does as “dark pop”, she has numerous tattoos on her body and her favourite artists include Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons – like all great female pop artists from Madonna onwards, Dua Lipa aims to draw on the avant-garde and bring some of its ideas to bear on the mainstream. It probably doesn’t do any harm that Be the One – notwithstanding the lyrics, a functional blend of romantic expression and glib self-assertion – is a pretty great song, the kind of soaring pop melodrama that gives daytime radio a good name.