As chance would have it Goldsworthy overheard the dulcet tones of actor Olly Alexander (you’ll recognise him from Skins and Stuart Murdoch’s film God Help the Girl) warbling his way through the Fugees’ Killing Me Softly in a friend’s shower and asked him to join the band. When bassist Mikey Goldsworthy and synth player Emre Turkmen first started what would eventually become elegant dance-pop practitioners Years & Years, they were missing a vocalist. Years & Years: ‘elegant dance-pop practitioners’. Keen to ditch the “twee” label that invariably gets attached to any young female singer with an acoustic guitar, her forthcoming debut album, We Slept at Last (produced by Alt-J collaborator Charlie Andrew), has been preceded by Drown, a deliciously unsettling swirl of treated vocals, off-kilter melodies and the sort of doom-laden atmospherics that mark her out as something far more interesting. Having played some of her scratchy early demos to fellow nu-folk troubadour Johnny Flynn, she signed to Transgressive, releasing three EPs of intricate acoustic-led fables that have drawn comparison to previous touring partner Laura Marling. In fact Hackman – who’s of Finnish descent but was born in Hampshire – briefly followed in Delevingne’s footsteps, modelling for Burberry before returning to her true passion of music. The other member? School friend Cara Delevingne. Twenty-two-year-old self-proclaimed “abstract folk” artist Marika Hackman’s first ever gig was eight years ago, playing drums in a ramshackle duo tackling cover versions. Photograph: Rob Ball/Redferns via Getty Images
Marika Hackman: ‘deliciously unsettling’. Key track: World’s Mine feat Prince Rapid, Dirty Danger and Roachee Considering the diverse influences feeding into their music, the album is a remarkably cohesive piece of work – and one that repays eager anticipation. Their self-titled debut album, due out in the spring, delivers on the promise of their early material, with guests including Kelela and rising Chicago rapper Tink flowing over dislocated beats and weird tubular synths. They surfaced a year ago with a splendidly chilly grime track called World’s Mine and signed to Warp Records in September. It consists of buzzed-about Los Angeles duo Nguzunguzu, New York DJ/producer J-Cush and Kuwaiti-born Fatima Al Qadiri who lives in London but whose music sounds like it’s being beamed at us from 25th-century Shenzhen. If the future involves talented producers from disparate parts of the globe uniting to fuse hip-hop and dancehall with alien-noir soundscapes, this quartet is aptly named. KFįuture Brown: ‘delivering on the promise of their earlier material’. Inevitable comparisons have been made with Kendrick Lamar it’ll be interesting to see how far they stretch when Staples releases his debut album in the first half of 2015. This is a dark vision of black American life, blighted by drugs, police brutality and gang violence, but the 21-year-old delivers it with acuity and the confidence of a rapper who knows he’s hitting his stride. The cover of Hell Can Wait – a child’s-eye-view of a suburban LA house on fire, with gangsters on the stoop and a chopper in the sky – sets the scene. He’s been releasing mixtapes of his own over the past few years but it wasn’t until his first EP dropped on Def Jam last month that people sat up and took proper notice. Until recently Vince Staples was just one of many affiliates of LA’s sprawling Odd Future crew, best known as a wingman for the crew’s most gifted rapper Earl Sweatshirt. Vince Staples: ‘a rapper who knows he’s hitting his stride’.