Our regular look at artists worth paying attention to now.
Three acts with new music, growing momentum and a reason to get on your radar before everybody else catches up.
– WORDS BY JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
PIGEON
Pigeon make music that feels as though everybody arrived with a different record collection and agreed not to compromise. The Margate five-piece pull from Afro-disco, post-punk, funk, krautrock and electronic music, but none of those references quite explain the strange physicality of what they do. At the center is Guinea-Conakry-born vocalist and percussionist Falle Nioke, whose voice moves between melody, chant and something more instinctive while the band builds around him in sharp, twitching rhythms.
Their debut album OUTTANATIONAL arrived this year after a run of EPs and finally gives that collision enough room to spread out. “NRG” rides a bassline that seems capable of going indefinitely, “Miami” pushes further toward synthetic funk, while “Mirror Test” strips things back into something colder and stranger.
Then there is “Black James Dean,” probably the best place to start. Nioke drops himself into a series of cultural images while the band locks into a restless post-punk groove, turning identity, visibility and aspiration into something catchy enough to work before you have considered any of it.
Pigeon are at their best when the music still sounds as though it might change direction while they are playing it. Plenty of bands borrow from disco and post-punk. Pigeon make both feel like raw material rather than a destination.
FROST CHILDREN
Frost Children make pop music as though every genre they have ever loved is allowed into the room at the same time. Angel and Lulu Prost move between emo, EDM, hyperpop, hardstyle and huge pop melodies without bothering to make the borders visible, and what once felt deliberately chaotic has increasingly become the thing they do with remarkable control.
This summer’s Tweaker Poem EP pushed that instinct somewhere darker. Written during an intense stretch in Tokyo after the siblings left New York following a frightening experience with a stalker, the six songs take paranoia, digital intimacy and uncomfortable proximity and bury them inside some of Frost Children’s biggest electronic production yet.
“Creep,” “Gutted,” “Satellites” and “Light Leak” can sound euphoric even when what sits underneath them is anything but. That contradiction has become central to Frost Children: music built to explode in a room while the emotional material underneath it keeps pulling somewhere less comfortable.
They followed the EP almost immediately with the collaborative Frost Fest Mixtape, opening things back up to friends, internet rap, Jersey club and overloaded EDM.
Frost Children no longer feel like a footnote to hyperpop. They sound more like a band discovering how much of pop music they can absorb without becoming predictable.
YHWH NAILGUN
YHWH Nailgun seem determined to find out how little a song actually needs. The New York quartet of Zack Borzone, Sam Pickard, Saguiv Rosenstock and Jack Tobias use drums, guitar, electronics and voice, but almost none of those things behave the way you expect them to.
Percussion becomes the architecture. Guitar arrives in fragments. Borzone’s vocals appear as clipped phrases, cries and sudden bursts that feel less like something placed over the music than another piece being thrown into it.
Their 2025 album 45 Pounds introduced that language. This year’s Magazine makes it even more concentrated: ten songs in eleven minutes. “Ghost of Love” lasts 95 seconds. “Ballerina” barely reaches a minute. The title track is finished in 35. What should feel slight somehow does not. YHWH Nailgun simply stop the song when the idea is finished. “Hips on a Wheel” jerks forward on percussion that never fully settles, while “Give Blood” finds something almost hook-like inside all the machinery.
They play Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios in Denton on October 14, which is probably the ideal setting for music this physical and this compressed. Eleven minutes into Magazine, you may still not have a particularly useful name for what YHWH Nailgun are doing. You will have enough time to play it again.
