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
Sex Week
Photo by: Alyssa Vitalino and Dillon Camp
Sex Week make music that seems to become stranger the closer you listen. The New York duo of Pearl Amanda Dickson and Richard Orofino move between indie rock, skeletal pop, country and bedroom experimentation, building songs that can initially feel delicate before something unexpected begins pushing through the edges.
Their new single “Life Is A Circle,” released through Grand Jury, might be the clearest version of that instinct yet. It begins with the loose feel of a campfire song before pulling in accordions, wooden recorders, 808s and even a manipulated horse sample Dickson found while working in Logic. The pair call it a cornerstone of the Sex Week sound, arriving after recent tours with Mitski and Fcukers and as they head back onto the road with Cardinals.
The unusual pieces never feel included simply for the sake of being unusual. What makes Sex Week interesting is how naturally those ideas sit inside songs that remain melodic and strangely intimate underneath everything else. With European festival appearances and another US run coming later this year, the world around the band is getting bigger without the music becoming any less peculiar.
Bathing Suits
Photo by Lily Maguire
Bathing Suits call themselves a dance-noise band, which is about as useful a description as any for music that seems determined to make the distinction between a guitar show and a club night increasingly irrelevant. The Leeds four-piece pull together industrial noise, electronic music, punk and big, ugly dance rhythms, creating something abrasive enough to feel dangerous but catchy enough that the chaos never becomes the entire point.
Earlier this year they released their debut EP KILL Bathing Suits, built around tracks including “Relay,” “Swan Princess” and breakout single “I Can Be A Freak.” That song has now been reworked with Mandy, Indiana vocalist Valentine Caulfield, whose additional vocals push an already frantic track even further into the collision between experimental guitar music and the dancefloor.
Bathing Suits are still at the stage where things feel capable of moving very quickly. They have already become fixtures around the small-room UK circuit, particularly venues like The Windmill and Shacklewell Arms, but there is a confidence to the music that feels considerably bigger than those rooms. Caulfield has already joked that in ten years she will be able to say she liked them before they were filling arenas. Right now feels like a pretty good time to make the same claim.
Little Grandad
The London four-piece formed in 2025 around brothers Harry and Jack Lower and have spent much of the time since playing shows, gradually turning a small collection of songs into one of the more interesting new guitar-band stories coming out of the UK.
Their latest single “Tiny Feet” arrives alongside news of their debut album, Speak Softly, Son, due January 22. Produced by Kev Jones of Wunderhorse, the record follows earlier songs “Babe, We’ve Run Out Of Time,” “Sleepwalking” and “Unmasked,” while “Tiny Feet” pushes further into the close harmonies and patient, gradually expanding arrangements that have begun defining the band.
Little Grandad already sound unusually comfortable allowing songs to take their time. There are traces of indie rock, folk and alt-country running through the music, but the appeal is increasingly less about where those influences came from than how naturally the four of them fit together. With their first album still months away, they already feel considerably further along than a band this new has much right to be.
