It’s that time again – time to vote for the Artist of the Week!

This is a round-up of five of the best global bands we found this week. You have until Monday night at 11:59 p.m. USA Eastern Standard Time to vote for your favorite new artist on MTV Iggy, using the bottom poll!

On Tuesday morning, the crowned artist will be featured on the MTV Iggy homepage marquee along with a tell-all interview.

May the best band walk away with the victory!

:Papercutz

There’s an ambient quality to the glitchy sounds of Portugal’s :Papercutz, but it’s nothing meandering or amorphous. The music of producer/songwriter Bruno Miguel mixes the electronic and the organic in a way that’s intimate and intricate. There’s a poetry to it that speaks of complex natural processes – it makes the perfect soundtrack for stuff like dawn breaking, eggs hatching, and flowers closing their petals at sunset. Like the music itself, the boundaries of what :Papercutz is – where it begins and ends – are soft. Though started as a solo project, it has grown into a live touring band – once again balancing the immaterial electronic with the tactile world of instrumentation and band chemistry. In 2009 the group appeared at the UK’s People’s Music Awards and won in the “off the beaten track” category.

Pairs

Pairs is couple of cute kids who live in Shanghai and make an awful lot of noise. F provides the grinding, splintered guitar noise. Rhys, AKA Xiao Zhong, keeps the beat most of the time and yells like he just drank acid and doesn’t have long to live. He’s originally from Australia and met F while watching motocross at the X Games, which is oddly appropriate. Their self-titled debut album came out last year and is available for free on Bandcamp. Some songs oscillate pleasantly like some of Japanther’s early stuff, others have the noisy, chaotic feel  of groups like Eat Skull or Times New Viking — but Pairs’s sound is many times more violent and emotionally unstable than either those bands. They’re certainly abrasive, these two, but there’s something warm about them too.

Emika

Take deep sub-bass, the kind you might have heard in the womb. Add glitchy shrieks and a siren voice that scurries along the shadows. Tie it all together with pop song structure and what have you got? Upcoming electronica queen Emika. The Berlin-based producer/vocalist of Czech heritage dropped her first single last year, giving the public a taste of her seductive, creepy dubstep pop. Skidding along downtempo bass, punctuated with screeches of metal on metal, “Drop The Other’s” dirty production only highlighted Emika’s devastating whispers. With her breakbeats, whisps of keys, and dissonant samples, she’s Portishead for the 21st century — a virtuosic female voice that’s independent, direct, and so so sexy.

Tulipa

Hearing the springlike melody of her song “Efemera,” you might want to label Tulipa Ruiz just another nice pop singer and be done with it. But you should know better. Tulipa’s songs sound like favorites you’ve known forever the first time you hear them. In “Efemera,” her voice flies around like a butterfly on top of layers of sound, a little samba here, a little bossa there. Tulipa released her debut album last year, also entitled “Efemera.” She’s part of a new wave of musicians in Sao Paulo, like Jeneci, Tiê, and Mariana Aydar, who are updating the original Brazilian pop sound  of the eighties by adding a little electro and dropping some of the pretension.

TV Girl

Some might  say Trung Ngo and Brad Petering had a rocky start. Others might say they started with a bang. No matter how you look at it, the TV Girl duo’s indie hit “If You Want It” sampled Todd Rundgren, which angered Warner Bros., who issued a takedown last year. But the sh**storm didn’t go down untilafter the blogosphere gushed about their swoon-worthy 50s-60s psychedelia. Now out with the new EP Benny and the Jetts , San Diego’s Trung and Brad are pleading to the world via Facebook, “No lawsuits this time, ey?”From the standout, darling Dirty Dancing-style “Baby You Were There” to the airy Motown samples in “Lizzie Come Back to Life,” TV Girl, like Portland counterparts Unknown Mortal Orchestra,are fusing the best parts of the mid-20th century with washed out electronics and extra charm.

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