Image via Complex Original
Not that there’s ever been a shortage of forward-thinking British artists shaping the international charts as well as the underground, but British music has seemed to be experiencing a peak of international and commercial popularity in recent years. British artists are crossing over into American charts and beyond at a rate that seems more frequent than ever. Recently, Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” spent weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, in addition to topping charts in Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, and New Zealand, and set a new record for the most streamed track in a single week in the U.K.
Promising new voices from young British talent like FKA twigs, Sam Smith, MNEK, and Charli XCX have garnered critical praise and offered new blueprints for what pop stardom can look like, defying genre, era, and other formalities. Grime has more mainstream visibility than ever before, with veterans like Skepta crossing over into new international audiences and newcomers probing the sound’s outer limits, and young-gun garage revivalists like Disclosure and Duke Dumont introducing a new generation to house music. And that’s just skimming the surface.
We’ve rounded up 10 artists who are helping to redefine the sound and experience of British music today. Some of them are household names, others are still on the verge of their big break, but all of them are helping to set trends on a local and global scale.
Clean Bandit
Clean Bandit have faced their share of doubters since forming in 2008 while students at Cambridge University. The four-piece band (comprising cellist Grace Chatto, violinist Neil Amin-Smith, keyboardist and bassist Jack Patterson, and drummer Luke Patterson) good-naturedly recounted the confusion that they were met with during early label meetings in a BBC feature last year. Maybe the group’s distinctive fusion of classical compositions and electronic beats isn’t the most obvious formula for pop crossover. But when their first hit—2010’s "Mozart’s House," a winking garage track with vocals from Love Ssega that detours into Mozart’s String Quartet No. 21—took off on YouTube, they knew they were on to something. Fast-forward to 2014, where “Rather Be,” the irrepressible, violin-led fourth single from Clean Bandit’s New Eyes album, broke single-week Spotify stream records in the U.K., crossed into the U.S. Billboard Top 10, and grabbed a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording. And it’s not just the group’s era-defying sound that’s broadening the possibilities of popular dance music. They’ve become known for their gorgeous, conceptual videos, too, which they make themselves via their Cleanfilm production company and are considered an integral part of the overall work. They’re playful and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, but hyper-conceptual and classically trained, with influences as disparate as Beethoven and Aphex Twin—Clean Bandit may sound complicated on paper, but when you hear “Rather Be,” it makes sense.
Charli XCX
It was hard not to notice a prevailing theme of girl power on last year’s pop charts. 2014’s most memorable chart-toppers hinged around Beyoncé, Nicki, Taylor, Ariana, and Iggy, and all-girl collaborations like "Bang Bang" and "Fancy" were inescapable. Charli XCX, the Cambridge-born singer and songwriter who spent her teens performing in London warehouse raves chaperoned by her parents, knows a thing or two about girl power herself: She frequently cites the Spice Girls as inspiration (along with Blackout-era Britney Spears and post-punk band the Waitresses) and named last year’s U.S. tour the Girl Power Tour, supported by all-female acts. 2014 was a breakthrough year for Charli: She featured on Iggy Azalea’s summer-dominating hit “Fancy” (which she also co-wrote), landed her first solo mega-hit with super-catchy single “Boom Clap,” and released her excellent third album, Sucker. But Charli’s been a force behind the scenes for years. At only 22, she’s been writing songs for eight years; she co-wrote Icona Pop’s massive 2012 crossover “I Love It,” and has since been allegedly penning hits for Rihanna and Gwen Stefani, as well as co-writing Azalea’s “Beg for It” and newcomer Ryn Weaver’s “Octahate.” If Charli’s most recent single, the Rita Ora-featuring “Doing It,” is any indication, her reign of cool-girl party anthems is far from finished; and if there’s a single driving force behind the current all-girl pop chart takeover, it’s Charli behind the wheel.
Skepta
Skepta may be a grime veteran, but the 32-year-old MC, producer, and DJ still has new tricks up his sleeve. Born Joseph Junior Adenuga to Nigerian parents who moved to Tottenham when Skepta was 3, he came up on the U.K. pirate radio circuit, DJing and rapping with Tottenham grime unit Meridian Crew. He then formed the Boy Better Know collective in 2005 with his brother JME and Wiley. Since, Boy Better Know has become an empire of its own (they faced off against A$AP Mob and Rebel Sound at last year’s Red Bull Culture Clash in London), and Skepta’s become one of grime’s foremost figures without much major label push. With the exception of his third album, Doin’ It Again, he’s kept his releases independent; his self-released 2012 for-purchase mixtape, Blacklisted, hit No. 4 on iTunes’ best-selling albums chart without much surrounding press. Following his own path seems to be working out for Skepta: 2014 may have been his most visible year yet. Attention-grabbing single "That’s Not Me" became his highest-charting track to date and won a MOBO award for best video. He also made his directorial debut with Wiley’s "On a Level" video, and crept further into the American rap scene with A$AP Mob collab "It Ain’t Safe." For a guy who’s been in the game for over a decade, Skepta doesn’t seem anywhere near out of ideas yet, and it’s a safe bet that his fourth album, Konnichiwa (tentatively scheduled for 2015), will be his biggest yet.
FKA twigs
In an increasingly post-genre musical climate, FKA twigs is a beacon of the possibilities allowed when formalities like genre categorization are abandoned for more experimental, omnivorous impulses. Born Tahliah Barnett in Gloucestershire, though currently based in London, she entered the music industry as a backup dancer in videos for artists like Jessie J and Ed Sheeran, but found her true passion in her own musical explorations, writing songs daily in-between day jobs and dance classes. She drew attention with her first two EPs, both of which she co-produced, and her debut full-length, last year’s plainly titled LP1, was a stunning, singular statement with a fully formed and uncompromising vision that balanced uncanny glimmers of pop promise (as with lead single “Two Weeks”) with often jarring sound experiments and haunting, almost hymnal singing. “I love annoying sounds, beats, clicks. Kakakakaka!” she told The Guardian last year, railing against being pigeonholed into any one musical category. “[LP1’s] got loud noises in there, the structures aren’t typical, it’s relentless. It’s like punk; f*** alternative R&B!” Her vision extends well beyond the confines of strictly musical expression. In addition to dancing, she experiments with videography, conceptualizing, producing, and directing videos for herself and others, as with Chicago rapper Lucki Eck$’ “Ouch Ouch” video and her short concept film for Google Glass last year. Having tossed out the rule book, twigs is ready to rewrite the rules—or better yet, do without them entirely.
Sam Smith
London-raised singer-songwriter Sam Smith emerged from obscurity in 2012 as the unknown vocalist on Disclosure’s slow-burning sleeper hit “Latch,” which peaked at No. 11 on the U.K. Singles Chart and made it to No. 7 on the U.S. charts by 2014. Less than three years later—now 22 years old—he’s become a mainstay on both the U.K. and U.S. pop charts; his debut album, In the Lonely Hour, was the second-best-selling album of 2014 in the U.K., and the third-best in the States. Oh, and it dominated this year’s Grammy Awards with four wins out of six nominations, including Album of the Year. It’s hard to deny that voice, schooled in equal parts jazz performance, musical theater, and Whitney Houston. But despite the meteoric rise to fame, just a handful of years after working as a bar-back in London’s financial district, he’s remained strikingly vulnerable both in his music and in person. He’s been open about his often-painful experiences being bullied after coming out as gay, and the lyrics of even his biggest hits tend to be confessional and emotionally raw. Smith represents an unabashedly human pop star, one who’s open about his insecurities and struggles instead of presenting an image of unattainable perfection. And his list of super-fans ranges from Kim Kardashian to Taylor Swift, who gushed to Rolling Stone recently: “Showing yourself as a real, multi-faceted person is hard in this business because it seems at times like many artists are being encouraged to play a character. To play yourself is to truly be exposed, but I think it’s what will set Sam apart from everyone else.”
MNEK
At 20 years old, London producer and singer-songwriter Uzo Emenike, better known as MNEK, has a résumé that runs insanely deep. By the time he was 14, the self-taught Lewisham native had already landed a publishing deal with EMI; at 19, he scored his first Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording as a co-writer for Duke Dumont and A*M*E’s breakthrough hit, "Need U (100%)." In between, he’s written hits and provided vocals for Kylie Minogue, Clean Bandit, Rudimental, Little Mix, and Madonna. Until last year, MNEK was a behind-the-scenes force who rarely stepped into the spotlight in his own right (though he’s credited as a featured artist for Gorgon City’s "Ready for Your Love," the late 2013 hit that reached No. 4 on the U.K. Singles Chart). But in 2014, he proved that he was more than capable of holding down a song on his own. Over the past year, he’s debuted an impressive run of impeccably crafted solo singles (including "Every Little Word" and "Wrote a Song About You") indebted in equal parts to Chicago house, U.K. garage, Janet Jackson, and Craig David. His songwriting skills are paired with a keen eye for visuals and an easy charisma in his videos, despite years thriving behind the scenes. With such a strong voice and deep songwriting catalog before even releasing a debut album, MNEK’s potential in the coming years feels limitless.
Jessie Ware
Since her Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, 2012’s Devotion, Brixton-raised singer-songwriter Jessie Ware has been making tasteful look cool, a daunting mission in the pop landscape. After leaving a career as a journalist to work as a backing vocalist for Jack Peñate, she ventured into collaborations with SBTRKT, Sampha, Joker, and Florence and the Machine, finally releasing her first solo single ("Strangest Feeling") in 2011. Ware is now 30, with two commercially successful and critically acclaimed albums under her belt: Both Devotion and its follow-up, last year’s Tough Love, reached the top 10 on the U.K. Official Albums Chart. But her success has come on her own terms, with a sophisticated, quietly experimental breed of soulful pop, much of it closer in spirit to Sade’s back catalog than current chart trends. Still, even in her restraint, Ware knows how to write an undeniable hit—take "110%," a bubbly, Julio Bashmore-produced number (ultimately retitled as “If You’re Never Gonna Move” due to legal troubles from its uncleared Big Pun vocal sample), or gut-wrenching power ballad “Say You Love Me,” co-written by Ed Sheeran. Ware’s smooth, mid-tempo vibes may be at odds with the ephemeral trends of the pop charts, but she’s made it work for her. In January, she concluded her U.K. tour with two sold-out London shows. In fact, her gentle touch has reached some of music’s biggest names, including vocal and songwriting contributions to Nicki Minaj’s tearjerker, "The Crying Game," on The Pinkprint last year.
Disclosure
If you’ve turned on a radio at any point over the last two years, then you’ve been intimately acquainted with Disclosure, the precocious house duo whose 2012 single “Latch” spent 15 weeks in the top 40 of the U.K. Singles chart, infiltrated the U.S. charts two years later, and single-handedly launched Sam Smith’s career. Since then, Surrey-raised brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence have proved that they’re nowhere near one-hit wonders, with bouncy follow-up singles “White Noise” and “You & Me,” and a remarkably polished full-length debut, Settle, which debuted at No. 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart and earned a Mercury Prize nomination. They weren’t yet conceived during house’s formative era—hell, younger brother Guy wasn’t of legal American drinking age during the duo’s extensive 2013-14 world tour—but the brothers have introduced house to a new generation of listeners who came of age with late-’00s electronic trendsetters like Burial instead of Frankie Knuckles (by way of Artful Dodger). The duo’s sophomore album is still on the horizon, but if last year’s “F for You,” a slick, snappy collaboration with Mary J. Blige that re-envisioned the R&B legend as a U.K. garage diva, is any indication, they’ll be upping the ante with whatever’s next to come.
Sampha
Before you may have known South London singer/producer Sampha by name, there’s a strong chance that you knew his voice. He provided the unforgettable hook on “Too Much,” the emotional centerpiece of Drake’s Nothing Was the Same, and his vocals were the unifying factor on SBTRKT’s star-making debut album. He’s a master mood-setter whose presence defines tracks even as a featured artist. Steadily, his singular breed of electronic-tinged soul has caught on, leading to a whirlwind past few years (deep breath): He’s collaborated with Jessie Ware and Katy B, toured as part of SBTRKT’s live show, traveled to Ghana to record with Solange, scored an uncredited guest spot on Beyoncé’s self-titled album (on "Mine"), signed to tastemaking British label Young Turks, and dropped two EPs of his solo material. Sampha’s debut album is still in the works, and he’s yet to fully break through as a solo artist, despite his memorable voice. But if that voice alone is enough to launch a bedroom producer into landing gigs with Drake and Beyoncé, it’s easy to assume that his first solo album will be hard to ignore.
Mark Ronson
By no means is Mark Ronson a new face on the British charts, but he’s managed to remain a surprising and relevant presence over a prolific career. The London-born artist’s production work alone has helped shape the pop landscape over last 15 years in the U.K. and well beyond, adding his neo-Motown sensibilities to some of the most definitive albums of the 2000s (Amy Winehouse’s modern classic, Back to Black, and Adele’s seven-times platinum debut, 19). The singer/songwriter/DJ’s nostalgic solo work has been successful in its own right; he won a Brit Award for Best Male Solo Artist in 2008. But 12 years after his modest solo debut, 2003’s Here Comes the Fuzz, Ronson’s solo career has taken on a new life. “Uptown Funk,” last year’s irrepressible, Bruno Mars-featuring crossover hit that kicked off Ronson’s recent fourth album, quickly became the highest-charting single of his career, topping both the U.K. and U.S. singles charts and setting a new record for the all-time most streamed track in a single week in the U.K. The song nodded to early ’80s funk from the likes of Rick James at the same time as it referenced Trinidad James lyrics. The album, Uptown Special, is a celebration of disco and funk grooves with contemporary dance-pop finishings and a guest list ranging from Stevie Wonder to Mystikal. A Grammy-winning, crate-digging pop veteran finding renewed relevance in an anachronistic funk throwback: In 2015, the only rule is to expect the unexpected.