7 January 2026

The music acts to follow in 2026

It’s already becoming clear which musicians will break through

The other day, watching an old documentary about home furnishings, I heard someone say everybody thinks they have good taste. I’m not sure I do. My taste in music is so unfashionable that I find it impossible to predict stars of the future based on how they sound. But each autumn roundtables of critics – often at the mercy of extreme lobbying and seduced by major labels – produce shortlists of the “sound of” the following year. At this point, they are names only, emptied of meaning. Yet within 12 months these mysterious words will be fruited and colourful, like “Kneecap” and “Chappell Roan”. Each year we watch to see who really makes it, and who will be roadkill.

My favourite so far is the Lewisham rapper Jim Legxacy – yes, he’s already had a mixtape, last year’s Black British Music (2025) – but he hasn’t really had his moment. His song “’06 wayne rooney” was truly original: yearning guitar-led music that seems to mix emo and Afrobeats. He delivers his songs with a real lightness of touch, but his brain blends samples and honest new tunes like a wizard.

Florence Road, a four-piece girl rock band from Wicklow, Ireland, provide, for me at least, a powerful hit of all that was good about Nineties music: a certain authenticity, and lyrics of rich, untherapised angst. They make really melodic music, the kind you heard from Tasmin Archer, Joan Osborne or the Cranberries – gutsy songs marked out by unusual time signatures, such as the waltz of “Caterpillar” or the tricksy rhythm of “Storm Warnings”. In May, they will embark on their biggest tour yet of the UK.

Geese, from Brooklyn, are already famous, but will get more famous, just you watch (which you will actually be able to do in March, when they are coming to England). I enjoy the surprises in their frontman Cameron Winter’s lyrics (“You should be ashamed, you should be shame’s only daughter”), which feel like the sign of songs written quickly in flashes of inspiration. He has a Dylan-y approach to fables and self-mythology, and it’s working: Geese were recently described as “Gen Z’s first great rock band”. It made me wonder whether we are, at some point, due an actual revival of rock. The genre has languished for so long that it looked like it was over for good (no mystery as to why, when its original creators are still staggering about in a live dramatisation of the end). Perhaps rock will only truly be revived when the old bastards have let go of it? Honeybadger, from Brighton, are another new rock band to watch (though their name sounds a little bit rude).

Sometimes you just really like a voice. I love Chloe Qisha’s – soft, grown up, smart, confessional. She sounds like she’s a New Yorker, but she’s not (born in Malaysia, Qisha now lives in London). When she does electropop, the music may be icy but the presence is warm; other songs, such as “21st Century Cool Girl”, have a creamy, Queeny, timeless construction, not unlike something you’d hear from Chappell Roan.

I felt a buzz around a couple of support acts last year, generally a sign of imminent fame. One was neo-soul singer Natanya who supported PinkPantheress; the other was Redolent, a wry Scottish alt-pop band who toured with Hamish Hawk, and are responsible for a favourite lyric of mine: “Good things will happen all your life/Neither of your parents will ever die!”

There will be a new Robyn album out: what a melodic wonder she is. And a new Charli XCX project in February. For an artist who’d been creeping around for ten years before she became a megastar in 2023, there must be a certain anxiety about what happens next, after you came to define a “global movement” – and a summer – so suddenly. What better way through the next stage than to work on a concept album and soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights film – but can Charli really do the avant garde?

Many of Lily Allen’s upcoming gigs for her West End Girl tour have been sold out for months. A true soul of the Noughties, Allen mined her life in her best work to date. And surely Beyoncé will come out with part three of her genre project by the end of 2026? People barely talked about her last tour, so she’d better have something big planned.

Further reading: Albums of the year 2025]