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
VICTORYLAND
Victoryland make pop music that seems happiest when something underneath it is going slightly wrong. Songwriter Julian McCamman and producer Dan Howard pull bright guitar hooks, cheap electronics, distortion and home-recorded fragments into songs that can feel immediately generous even while the lyrics worry at loneliness, desire and the various ways people fail to reach one another.
January’s My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It caught that contradiction perfectly, moving between the polish of a much bigger pop record and the roughness of something assembled in a basement. “I got god” keeps stretching outward, “No Cameras” turns romantic collapse into something almost euphoric, while the six-minute “Fits” gives the whole thing enough room to come apart at the edges.
Victoryland have now signed to Dead Oceans, with a deluxe edition of the record arriving December 11 and new track “The Ugliest Girl On The Beach” pushing the same trick even further: dark, self-lacerating thoughts attached to guitars that practically sparkle.
Victoryland understand that sadness doesn’t have to sound sad. Sometimes the best pop music is the stuff smiling while everything behind it falls apart.
FINE
Fine makes songs that feel strangely familiar until you try to identify what you are actually remembering. Copenhagen songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Fine Glindvad moves between folk, country, dream-pop, soft electronics and old-fashioned songwriting without allowing any one of them to settle long enough to become the whole picture.
Her 2024 debut Rocky Top Ballads introduced that language; new album Jazz Dreams, arriving October 23 through Escho, sounds like she has become considerably more comfortable getting lost inside it. Fine wrote, produced and recorded the thirteen-track record herself, allowing songs to develop through association rather than conventional narrative. “Everything in the shade” might initially resemble a piano ballad pulled from another decade, but its chords keep moving underneath you, while songs including “Sometimes I rush,” “Run,” “Moment” and “Portal” suggest a record constantly rearranging the space around its melodies.
Fine has described making records in terms of dream logic: something strange enters the room and, rather than asking why it is there, you accept it.
That increasingly feels like the right way to hear her music too.
WASIA PROJECT
Photo by Claryn Chong
Wasia Project have spent the last few years making piano-led pop that already felt capable of filling much larger rooms. On debut album Nocturne, sibling duo Olivia Hardy and Will Gao finally let that sense of scale become part of the music itself.
Released in September, the twelve-track record stretches their classical training into something considerably wider: strings, restless electronics, club-adjacent rhythms and cinematic piano-pop moving through a loose journey from dusk until dawn. “Vogue” gives Wasia Project a new rhythmic weight, “2515” heads somewhere darker, while tracks including “Whale Call,” “Bleeding Gold” and “Strike Me Down From Heaven” retain the emotional directness that first brought listeners to the project while refusing to simply repeat it.
That expansion is what makes Nocturne interesting. Hardy and Gao haven’t abandoned the intimacy of their earlier work; they have started building much larger spaces around it, allowing the quietest parts and the most dramatic ones to coexist.
The songs are still personal. The room around them has become enormous.
