Your weekend just got awesomer. That’s right…it’s time to choose MTV Iggy’s Artist of the Week!
This is a round-up 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 band with the most votes will be featured on the MTV Iggy homepage marquee along with a tell-all interview.
Good luck!
Allo Darlin’
Photo Courtesy of Allo Darlin'
Real songs can be hard to find in an indie landscape saturated with reverb, retro-synth, and other sorts of bloggable Astroturf. But unlike many of their genre compatriots, Elizabeth Morris’s London-based band Allo Darlin’ write songs that ease the mind and comfort the heart, because they are about something. Carrying on the tuneful and slightly twisted tradition of Glasgow indie pop heroes Belle and Sebastian, what started as a ukulele-centric solo project for Morris has grown into a solid band that tours the world.
Unison
Photo Courtesy of Unison
Describing Unison as French witch house is too simple. The duo follows an ecstatic muse all their own, and prefers the term death-gaze anyway. Singer Mélanie Moran and singer/guitarist/programmer Julien Camarena live in musical bliss in Niort, a small city in the west of France. Their self-titled debut album, out April 10, draws on trance and hip hop like their witch house touchstones, but there are other things in the mix — ambient, industrial things — and the spirit is different too. There’s more mysticism and less menace. They put the chill in coldwave.
Gods Robots
Photo Credit: Shweta Chanda
Veteran Asian Massive producer Janaka Selekta has worked with icons from Asian Dub Foundation and Karsh Kale, but his most fruitful collaboration started on a visit to Mumbai and a chance meeting with a young singer named Shridevi Kevashan. Over several years of emailing between Mumbai and Janaka’s base in San Francisco, the chill-out dub ragas of Gods Robots were born. Combining Indian classical instrumentation and melodies with London bass and a pop sensibility, Janaka and Shridevi, performing as Taamara, have defined an earworm-inducing sound.
Squalloscope
Photo Cerdit: Philipp Forstner
If you’re a fan of St. Vincent and you happen to be in Vienna and listening to the radio, you might hear something exquisite. Her name is Squalloscope, and while her name is a bit of a mouthful, her debut album Soft Invasions is lovely, lush, and just the right amount of confrontational. After dropping three albums under the moniker Paper Bird, the one-stop singer/musician/producer/videographer Anna Kohlweis shifted gears and will debut as Squalloscope on Seayou Records, April 2–critics are already falling love.
Taken By Cars
Photo Courtesy of Party Bear Records
Rising from Manila’s surging underground rock scene, Taken By Cars is an electro-rock quintet that is quickly conquering eardrums across the Philippines and beyond. The band, consisting of childhood friends, started making music during high school and college with the simple goal of playing at a popular Manila rock club. Their catchy, English-language tunes got the attention of local radio DJs, leading to a deal with Warner Music Philippines for their first album Endings Of A New Kind. Taken By Cars nails the indie-dance sound like few bands in Southeast Asia have done so far.
Voting Booth!