The playlist: the best new bands of 2014, with Shamir and Prada Mane

Shamir – On the Regular

Shamir Bailey made a considerable splash earlier this year with the EP Northtown, named after the part of Las Vegas he’s from. Its five tracks suggested he might go off in any direction (excepting Killers-style dull-rock), featuring as it did acoustic country, stark electronic ballads, and diva house. XL – which in 2014 also acquired other such favourites of the New bands playlist and New band of the week column as Låpsley and Real Lies – were impressed enough to sign him. And in case anyone thought Northtown was an early fluke, there was On the Regular, issued at the end of October. With its cowbells, kiddie-pop energy and adults-only lyrics “(Yes, yes, I’m the best fuck/ what choo heard?”), not to mention the most addictive bassline since Azalea Banks’s 212 and Bailey’s outrageous androgynous falsetto, no wonder he’s high up in the lists of acts to watch in 2015.

Prada Mane – Blue Prada

“Sad rap” might have been one of the memes of 2013, but it was in 2014 that many of the purveyors of the form – think cloud rap, only submerged in sorrow – fully explored the idea with full-length mixtapes. Prada Mane, by day a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (alma mater of most of Talking Heads), took the grievous emotionalism of Little Pain, Yung Lean, Lil Ugly Mane et al to the nth degree on Blue Prada. And the title track was some kind of apotheosis. Over a detailed dirge (slow-motion explosions, Satie-esque piano) courtesy of producer Yung Gud, Mane moans about “getting rejected” and lists some of the possible reasons why: “Raps not good enough/ voice not good enough/ my face not good enough.” With said visage metaphorically upturned towards the heavens, he asks: “What’s wrong with me?” Then again, this time a (sung) howl of pain: “What’s wrong with me?” He spends the rest of the track “crying awake”, wondering “how can I sleep?” with “so many tears on my cheek”. Sad rap’s How Soon Is Now.

GL – Won’t You See

GL are a duo from Melbourne, clearly working on a shoestring in lo-fi conditions. Yet they damn near match the polished, powerful sound of, say, Sharon Redd operating with the full arsenal – and budget – of New York post-disco label Prelude in 1982 (or early Madonna, newly signed to Warners). Their Love Hexagon EP comprised four examples of their shiny synthetic boogie, all soaring female vocals, glimmering keyboards and handclaps; what GL themselves, Graeme Pogson (electronics) and Ella Thompson (vocals), described as “homemade sequencer jams”. It is hard to choose one single song out of the four on the EP because they’re all tracks of the year, but Won’t You See is a sublime showcase for their high-gloss shimmer and divine dancefloor aura, or rather, Aurra. And as if to prove this is a worldwide micro-movement of sorts, also watch out for British duo Ekkah’s Last Chance to Dance.

Gulf – Tell Me Again

This Liverpool five-piece specialise in not psychedelia (they have been compared to Tame Impala) so much as dreamy pop. Bella Union are rumoured to be interested in signing them, and although bands of their vague ilk (Childhood, Temples) haven’t exactly set the charts alight this past year, they are full of promise. Everything about them appeals, if you like this type of thing. Mark Jones’s voice is the epitome of anti-singing, in the sense of someone straining to reach notes and express (as in: expectorate) their feelings. It is an instrument of cool dispassion, barely breaking into anything beyond a restrained tenor, conveying boyish wonder and yearning. As for the three guitarists, they envelop and entrance like reverb motherfuckers, and while it would be doing the bassist and drummer a disservice to say they lay down a beat – because what they do is more diaphanous than that – you could certainly dance to it. Gorgeous indiepop. Remember that?

M+A – Down the West Side

Straight outta Forli in Italy came this pair of singer/multiinstrumentalists who won the Glastonbury festival’s emerging talent competition, which had thousands of entrants. Winners of that kind of contest are usually four-square guitar-rockers, but not in this case: Michele Ducci and Alessandro Degli Angioli are an electropop duo, only with the emphasis on the pop not the electro. Down the West Side uses a synth motif to approximate the cascading teardrop plink of pizzicato strings, the rhythm is warmly propulsive, the house piano is more New Order circa Republic than Ride on Time, and the melody has a wan charm all its own. There’s a whole album of this stuff, These Days, which is wall-to-wall melancholy disco. Not to be confused with MIA.