The weekend is finally here and 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 a week, until next Friday morning at 9 a.m. USA Eastern Standard Time to vote for your favorite new artist on MTV Iggy, using the bottom poll!

The band with the most votes will be have prime real estate on MTVIggy.com this week, along with a tell-all interview!

Have fun and good luck!

Claude Violante

Claude Violante has made us fall in love with just one single, “For You.” Here’s an equation: undulating smears of synth, plus minimal drumkit, plus handcaps, equals a very promising start. But there’s more, including Hendrix guitar licks and orchestral layering, and the kicker? The rich but light voice. Claude, from Paris, styles a well-rounded vocal that can hold its own against the melodrama of what’s happening synth-wise.

Shintaro Sakamoto

Shintaro Sakamoto  fronted the wildly successful Japanese psych rock band Yura Yura Teikoku for twenty years. When the band dissolved in 2010 he started making music under his own name and releasing it through his own Zelone Records. His album borrows a bit from every psyched-out corner of the ’70s in a cooly detached manner. There’s a bit of funk and Afrobeat, Caribbean vibes and breezy Brazilian rhythms, hints of tropicalia and Donovan laced with chic flourishes of organ and flute.The ultimate effect is of the classiest lounge ever. Mixing and matching to come up with something as coherent as this is not as easy as it seems.

Icarus Gasoline

Icarus Gasoline can be called stoner rock from Chile, but it’s important to stress just how far they wander from the commonly acknowledged boundaries of the genre, especially on their sophomore album Lo Desparecido. Not chained to the harsh sonic requirements of Sleep and Kyuss, they’re following a gentler muse, one that has room for a little Pixies and My Bloody Valentine. They even wander into more spacey post-rock territory, but just as the Acid Mothers Temple-style wail and distortion lifts you into orbit the rumbling guitar tone and mournful gang vocals will pull you back into the heart of the blues.

Hortlax Cobra

One of the first releases from the Stockholm super-collective INGRID, Hortlax Cobra is the solo project of John Eriksson. He’s the “John” in Swedish indie band Peter Bjorn and John, the group’s drummer and, as it turns out, a formidable producer with a taste for weird and wonderful dance music. His debut album is full of dusty sounds, altered vocals and warm blankets of distortion. Eriksson says he recorded the sounds of the album through broken amplifiers and old pedals. As a result, it’s near impossible to tell which sounds are electronic and which come from “real” instruments; it’s all one pleasant, hazy mash.

Ben Sharpa

Ben Sharpa, a hip-hop artist hailing from Cape Town, has performed in the world’s biggest festivals and collaborated with the likes of Immortal Technique, Foreign Beggars, and Black Thought. Sharpa grew into an underground sensation through hip-hop battles and feature spots, eventually dropping the EP The Sharpaganda Theory: Lesson 1 in 2008. His tracks “Hegemony” and “Off The Rails” marked Sharpa as a pioneer in avant electronic beats under impassioned, poetic hip-hop flow.

Voting Booth!