Nsqk owes a lot to a broken-down computer his uncle gave him when he was in middle school. “He had given me his old laptop with, like, Windows Vista on it,” the 26-year-old artist remembers with a laugh. “It barely worked.” Yet somehow, Nsqk — whose real name is Rodrigo …

In an era when more music is being released each day than in the entire year of 1989, according to one estimate, it takes a singular talent to cut through the noise. Enter Hanumankind, the curly-haired, tatted-up, India-born rapper who broke through last summer with his viral single “Big Dawgs,” …

A few years ago, Jasmine Cruickshank found herself adrift. After coming out as trans, the English singer-songwriter got divorced and decamped from Bristol to Manchester, where she slept on floors and discovered a new wellspring of inspiration: her true self. “I really struggled, in the years leading up to my …

At the core of Jim Legxacy’s music is a potent clarity of emotion. The London-based musician’s 2023 mixtape Homeless N**ga Pop Music deployed samples like globs of glitter spread across a posterboard: a Miley Cyrus song, the watermark for a Nigerian MP3 website, a snippet from the U.K. grime classic …

Growing up with a dad in the Army, Samara Cyn moved around a lot, living in at least six different states by age 20. At the time, she hated it — like most teenagers, she just wanted to belong. But those experiences ended up fueling her 2024 EP, The Drive …

Last December, Nick Carpenter had an existential experience onstage. He was standing with the band Dawes, screaming along as they performed their signature song, 2009’s “When My Time Comes.” The moment made Carpenter, who sings and writes songs under the name Medium Build, think about his deepest fears and goals …

When Fcukers booked their debut concert at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn in March 2023, they had understandably low expectations for the evening. The electronic act had uploaded their first two songs literally hours before they took the stage, and they’d already logged many frustrating years in separate indie-rock bands …

Egyptian artist TUL8TE doesn’t want you to know anything personal about him. He is here to make you listen — not to his story, but to his music. We spoke over a camera-less Zoom call in December, around 4 p.m. Jordan time, while he was mid-tour. Any question that veered …

Laila! has flourished more in the year leading up to her 19th birthday than some artists do in decades. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and producer first broke through on TikTok with spacey viral ditties “Like That” and “Not My Problem,” showing her intrinsic ear for R&B’s current wave and its off-center …

The world first met gyrofield because of a joke. It was 2019, and Kiana Li was a teenage music producer making beats on her computer from her bedroom in Hong Kong. She had 2,000 Soundcloud followers. “That was a good time,” she says with a smile. “I was feeling like …