British-Norwegian EDM producer Alan Walker was a mere 18 years old when his track “Faded” became a massive European hit, topping the charts in ten countries and entering the Top Five in six more. Born August 24, 1997 in Northampton, England to a Norwegian mother and British father, Walker moved with his family to Bergen, Norway at the age of two. A true post-millennial child, Walker grew up surrounded by technology and became fascinated by computers. In 2012, inspired by EDM producers K-391 and Ahrix, whom he’d discovered on YouTube, and film composers Steve Jablonsky and Hans Zimmer, he began to create his own music on his laptop. Working in the genre of “drumstep,” a kind of slowed-down drum’n’bass, he eventually uploaded the instrumental track “Fade,” which was soon picked up and re-released via the No Copyright Sounds (NCS) YouTube channel and free net label that promoted the two aforementioned EDM artists. “Fade” was a huge success, eventually garnering a staggering 65 million hits, and was followed by two more equally cinematic (if somewhat less popular) songs, “Spectre” and “Force.”
The majors soon sat up and took notice, and in 2015, Walker signed to Sony Music. His first single for the label was “Faded,” a reworked version of “Fade” featuring uncredited lead vocals by fey Oslo pop singer Iselin Solheim, who had herself burst onto the scene only a couple of years previously with her song “The Wizard of Us.” Driven by Solheim’s angelic, ethereal vocal, a melancholy yet catchy melody, and punchy, high-quality production — as well as a dark, dystopian music video shot in a number of crumbling post-industrial locations in Estonia — the song topped the charts in Sweden (where it went nine-times platinum), Germany, France, Italy, his native Norway, and elsewhere around the world. He later released a stripped-back acoustic “restrung” version with all the EDM elements taken out. Walker made his live debut at the X Games in Oslo in February 2016, and followed this up with a series of high-profile festival appearances. ~ John D. Buchanan, Rovi
Chicago rapper and poet Noname (formerly Noname Gypsy) brings an observant eye and quiet patience to a soulful R&B-meets-hip-hop style influenced by Lauryn Hill, Andre 3000, and Buddy Guy. Born Fatimah Warner in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, Noname frequented open-mike nights and slam poetry competitions when she wasn’t volunteering with the local YOUMedia arts program. Befriending fellow Chicagoan Chance the Rapper proved fortuitous: she appeared on “Lost” from Chance’s Acid Rap mixtape in 2013, helping her gain a wider audience. She guested on Mick Jenkins’ The Waters the following year, before announcing her own project. Before her debut, she contributed to Mont Jake’s Shadow EP and “Finish Line/Drown” on Chance’s 2016 hit Coloring Book. Three years in the making, her first album, Telefone, arrived in the summer of 2016. The coming-of-age blend of soul vocals, atmospheric textures, and Noname’s spoken-word featured production by Chance associate Cam O’bi, Phoelix, Saba, Monte Booker, and Them People.
The Toronto-based singer-songwriter, Charlotte Day Wilson may be fresh on the map, but she’s got the type of slow-burning, smoldering jazz and R&B-influenced sound that already feels classic. The 24-year-old has been quietly churning out hits all year, from the gospel-washed “Work” back in April to a guest spot in BADBADNOTGOOD’s “In Your Eyes” this summer. But with her newly-released debut EP, CDW, Wilson is solidifying her timeless sound, and changing the conversation around the Toronto music scene in the process.
Getting here hasn’t been easy—the artist has been, as she says, “working ass off.” Needless to say, the effort has been worth it. Wilson’s tracks have been featured everywhere from Apple Music commercials to Grace & Frankie (and, natch, our playlists), and the singer kicks off a tour with Local Natives later this month.
Thankfully, Wilson found some time in-between studio sessions in Venice Beach to talk her EP, favorite travel tunes, and coming to terms with the “Toronto artist” label.
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Left-field pop artist Naomie Abergel, who goes by the alias Mark Johns, was the first solo vocalist signed to Skrillex’s OWSLA label. Born to Moroccan parents in Canada and raised in Singapore, she started performing covers while attending college in Miami and uploaded them to SoundCloud. Abergel’s earliest uploads, including versions of Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” were recorded with her phone. She made additional cover versions with fledgling producers such as Manila Killa and Sable; a sleek and booming version of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Ni**as in Paris,” wisely re-titled “In Paris,” caught the attention of Skrillex, who helped set her up in her new home base of Los Angeles and eventually offered an OWSLA deal. Abergel’s first big commercial step, however, was with the Glitch Mob through “Better Hide, Better Run,” released in mid-2015. In early 2016, she was featured on Lemaitre’s “Stepping Stone” and made her OWSLA debut with “BTFU (Mommy Issues).” The breezy and melodious qualities of Abergel’s voice were common elements of all the material, but the comparatively organic and low-key sound of “BTFU (Mommy Issues)” was somewhat surprising. An EP was anticipated later in 2016.
YouTube has become a key factor for the discovery of new talent. The latest YouTube stars, siblings Adexe & Nau, are ready to show that they are more than a social media sensation.
After uploading a series of videos on YouTube, Adexe & Nau — born in Canary Islands, Spain — have collected more than 1 billion views overall (4.5 million daily views and 9 million views per day on weekends). As of today, they have more than 3.6 million subscriptions on the streaming channel. This achievement has highlighted them globally and caught the attention of Sony Music Latin, who signed the pair earlier this year.
Meet this week’s Billboard Latin artist on the rise:
Names: Adexe Gutiérrez Hernández and Nauzet Gutiérrez Hernández
Ages: 11 and 14 years old, respectively
Major Accomplishment: Their first official single, “Tu y Yo,” surpassed 110 million views in less than a year.
Recommended Song: Their new single “Sólo Amigos”
What’s Next: Touring! The brothers are set to visit Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico and the U.S., plus the possibility of doing Brazil’s Rock in Rio next year.
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Combining a voice that sounds made for classic soul with cutting-edge music, Khalid is a singer/songwriter from El Paso, Texas. Raised by a military family, Khalid lived in Germany and upstate New York before settling in Texas. He was first inspired to make music by his mother, who was a singer and loved ’90s R&B artists such as Brandy and TLC. While still a teenager, he began making music in 2015, incorporating influences as wide-ranging as Frank Ocean, India.Arie, Alt-J, and Father John Misty in the songs he posted online. He eventually connected with the producer SykSense, who, along with Tunji Ige and Smash David, worked on Khalid’s bittersweet breakout single “Location.” Released in mid-2016, the song hit the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot R&B Songs chart the following January. Another single, “Hopeless,” preceded Khalid’s debut album American Teen, which arrived in March 2017.
Channeling the spirits of his hip-hop forebears, Walterboro, South Carolina rapper Nick Grant carried the old school into the 2010s with his gift for storytelling and tight delivery. Like contemporaries Vince Staples, Avenue, and Denzel Curry, Grant opted to focus on socially conscious rhymes inspired by real-life observations and packed verses buoyed by production that favored golden age-style sampling over trap boom. Inspired by Biggie Smalls, 2Pac, OutKast, Jay-Z, Rakim, and Nas, Grant developed his respect for rap history at a young age, rhyming with friends in middle school and improving his skills into high school. Backed by Grand Hustle Records, his 2016 mixtape ’88 (Culture Republic) featured his dense bars and classic jazz and R&B samples, as well as guest appearances by Killer Mike, Big K.R.I.T., and BJ the Chicago Kid. Later that year, he released a four-song EP inspired by Solange’s critically acclaimed album, which he called A Seat at the Table Plus One. In early 2017, Grant issued his official debut full-length, Return of the Cool. With increased bravado and lyrical prowess, Return once again featured BJ the Chicago Kid, as well as Ricco Barrino, Dominic Gordon, and WatchTheDuck. The album broke into the Top 30 of the R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.
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Flamenco chill is over and out as frontwoman “dismantles” legendary Spanish band to perform under her own name.
Spanish singer Lamari recently announced the end of Chambao, the group that laid claim to the term “flamenco chill,” the laid-back Spanish electronic groove that has reverberated on hundreds of Ibiza summer nights. Over 16 years, Lamari had fronted the popular band – a summer festival staple in Spain – through personnel changes and a musical evolution. The latest – and presumably last – Chambao album is 2016’s Nuevo Ciclo, whose rootsy fusion of Latin alternative songs she co-produced with Calle 13’s Eduardo Cabra.
“I’ve been doing Chambao alone for 11 years but I’ve continued to speak in plural,” she said, during an interview before a sold-out Chambao concert in Barcelona earlier this year.
No more. Lamari will, in her words, “dismantle” Chambao at a concert at Madrid’s Palacio de Deportes stadium next January with a line-up of special guests. She says she’ll perform simply as Lamari from then on, backed by her current band.
While Lamari no longer wants to be identified with Chambao, she’s even less interested in being known for her one-time, but very successful, collaboration with Ricky Martin, “Tu Recuerdo.” The song from Martin’s 2006 MTV Unplugged rose to no. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, and was no. 3 on the Hot Latin Songs year-end chart. It was the ASCAP Latin Song of the Year and was nominated for Record of the Year at the 2007 Latin Grammys.
The song made Lamari a recognized name in the United States. But she laughs at the suggestion that she might have better exploited that success by touring behind the hit, or even moving to Miami, as many other Spanish and Latin American artists have done.
“I didn’t go looking for Ricky Martin,” she says during an interview that begins in the back of her tour manager’s van and continues over beer and pulpo gallego in a corner bar. “He came to me to have my voice on his song. I’m not what you’d call a fan of his music. I can say that I’m a fan of Ricky Martin himself, because he really is a beautiful person. But to me he’s just another guy I know. I didn’t do that collaboration to gain anything by it. It’s not about ‘look what I’ve done, let’s see if I can get booked for another concert.”
Lamari, whose given name is María del Mar Rodríguez Carnero, has collaborated with other well-known artists including Cesaria Evora, Jarabe de Palo and Ivan Lins; Jorge Drexler is among several guest artists who appear on Nuevo Ciclo.
“The collaboration with Ricky Martin was different than others I’ve done because we are so different from one another,” she says in retrospect. “Ricky has always been a sex symbol, and Chambao has been about bare feet, the beach, singing to our neighbor and to the planet and the animals.”
Chambao was casually formed in Lamari’s hometown, Malaga, in Southern Spain, where she got together with two neighbors, musicians Eduardo Casañ (“El Edi”) and Daniel Casañ (“Dani”). The singer explains that they talked about recording a big sound, but had little idea how, let alone the budget, to orchestrate it.
“We said ‘how are we going to put three violins, a bass and all of these things that we wanted to put into it?” Lamari recalls. Enter the Colombian-born Dutch musician and producer Henrik Takkenberg and his MIDI keyboard, an instrument that came to exemplify the group’s sound.
Takkenberg, who came to Malaga to vacation and check out the music scene; discovered the “good vibes” of flamenco, and became the fourth member and producer of Chambao. The group’s music first appeared on Takkenberg’s 2002 compilation album Flamenco Chill on Sony; that led to an enduring contract for the band with that label. The album included Chambao’s version of the Paco de Lucia and Camaron de la Isla classic, “Como el Agua.”
“We didn’t try to find a style,” Lamari recalls. “The style found us. We didn’t have a specific idea when we started making music. But when we did we called it flamenco chill. We could have called it Malagueña fusion, or whatever.”
Chambao’s sound evolved into a kind of flamenco prog rock. The band turned up the volume at its concerts, which featured light shows, and of course, synthesizers. The band won Spain’s prestigious Ondas radio award, among others, for its trippy debut album, Endorfinas en la Mente. But the original group was short-lived. Takkenberg, Dani and El Edi had departed the group by 2005, the year its second studio album, Pokito a Poko was released. (In 2006, Takkenberg committed suicide in Madrid; an obituary in Spanish newspaper El Pais suggested that “he was perhaps too nice to be involved in the music industry.” The Casañs, who are cousins, now own a music production company in Malaga).
In 2005, Lamari was also diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I said I can’t be sitting on the sofa waiting for my next cancer treatment. I’m going on tour. So I put a scarf over my head and got started.” She rebuilt the band and headed out behind Pokito a Poko, which went gold in Spain soon after its release. Her hair was just growing out when she performed at Martin’s Unplugged. She was in treatment until 2010.
While U.S. Latin music listeners may think of her as flamenco singer, Lamari rejects that label; more accurately, she says, she’s a singer from Southern Spain.
“I’m a great admirer of flamenco and it’s what gets me up out of my chair: the wildness of it, the uncontrollable emotions,” she says. “But I don’t do flamenco per se, I write songs. I don’t live a flamenco lifestyle, I don’t dress flamenco. But I’m from Andalusia. In my house my mother was always singing flamenco, I didn’t learn it from records. So for me it’s very natural. “
She describes Nuevo Ciclo as “a great fusion between the music of Chambao of yesterday and today,” and she credits Cabra with its more percussive, less electronic sound. “Eduardo likes to play with sounds,” she says. “That’s why I wanted him for the album.”
Lamari still lives in Malaga, where she can be with her family and her friends since forever, and, basically, as she describes it, doing whatever she wants to do. “I don’t want my albums to be commercial I want them to be honest,” she says. “What I want to do is have a lot of fun and do a good job because I love what I do.”
This summer, Lamari will lead Chambao on its final tour under that name. The band will play Ibiza and several festivals in Spain. Tickets are now on sale for the final concert in Madrid.
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Jorja Smith is an English R&B singer/songwriter whose soulful, jazz-tinged cadence, heartfelt lyrics, and retro sound invoke names like Alunageorge, Nao, Lulu James, and Amy Winehouse, the latter of whom the Walsall-based artist cites as her biggest influence. Smith issued her debut single, “Blue Lights,” in 2015, but it was 2016’s powerful “Where Did I Go?” that began turning heads. That track, and the follow-up single “Beautiful Little Fools,” eventually culminated in the late-2016 release of Smith’s debut EP, Project 11. The following year saw her international profile elevated via her multiple appearances on Drake’s surprise playlist/LP More Life, which saw her holding court amongst a bevy of high-profile guests like Kanye West, Young Thug, 2 Chainz, and Travis Scott.
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Colombian musician, Mario Galeano, the force behind the band Frente Cumbiero, and English producer Will Holland (A.K.A. Quantic), have joined forces to create the Ondatrópica project.
This project, which is supported by the British Council, exists to explore and expand the tropical sound of Colombia in its rawest form and to marry it with the cool sound of London. The immediate result is not just a new recording – to be released within the next few months – but a hot band which will have the honour of representing Colombia at the cultural *Olympiads* in *London*.Ondatrópica came about as a result of the success of Frente Cumbiero Meets Mad Professoralbum collaboration, which led to the British Council commissioning Mario Galeano to generate a new collaboration, this time with Will Holland (AKA: Quantic).
The project will unfold in three phases. Phase one, focused on the creation and recording of the record, brought together a group of top musicians representing both classic and more modern styles of Colombian music. In this project, which is unique in national music history, artists such as Fruko, Anibal Velásquez, Michi Sarmiento, Alfredito Linares, Pedro Ramayá Beltran, Markitos Mikolta, and Wilson Viveros joined a group of younger Colombian musicians and the UK’s Quantic to (re)generate the excitement that positioned Colombian music as one of the most influential of the continent in past decades.
The aim of exploring a musical path with these pioneers and visionaries from the 60s, 70s and 80s, is not about nostalgia, but is a reaffirmation of the validity and contemporariness of the concept. With this in mind, classic standards of production take centre stage, with equipment and techniques typical of analogue sound – for example, vintage microphones and taking advantage of the expertise of key musical figures such as legendary engineer and producer Mario Rincón, responsible for some of the best recordings of the 1970s.
The legendary Discos Fuentes studio, in Medellin, with a history spanning over 75 years, and with a pedigree which includes Los Corraleros de Majagual, Joe Arroyo, Andrés Landero and Afrosound, was the studio of choice!
The second phase of the project will focus on creating Los Irreales de Ondatrópica, a group of 10 musicians who will, again, represent the old and the new. From a base in Bogotá, the band are adapting the initial Discos Fuentes repertoire, preparing to take the world stage by storm in July 2012.
The last and final phase of Ondatrópica, their presentation in London, will show the world that the most compelling and relevant Colombian music is here to be rediscover.
