Jensen McRae and 10 More Artists to Watch

New York Times

20-03-2025

Every week, our critics spotlight notable new songs on the Playlist. Here's more about 11 artists behind them, selected by the pop music critics Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz; a culture reporter, Joe Coscarelli; and Caryn Ganz, the pop music editor for The New York Times. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)
Jensen McRae
Jensen McRae writes constantly: journals, poems, fiction, screenplays and, most publicly, songs. 'I've always wanted to do a million things with regard to writing and telling stories,' she said. 'But music was always the first choice.'
Born in Santa Monica, Calif., and still based in Los Angeles, McRae, 27, joins a long history of California folk-pop songwriters — the legacy of the Laurel Canyon era — who draw on the diaristic specifics of their lives for songs that listeners take to heart. Her second album, 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!,' is due April 25, with a tour that starts in May.
As a child, 'I was usually one of the only Black kids in a class,' McRae recalled in a video interview. 'When you're put into the observer, outsider position early on, it makes it pretty easy to figure out who you really are and what you really want, because conformity isn't a choice. I started to develop this identity of being a narrator and a collector of details about my life, about other people's lives.'
McRae has old-school inclinations. Her music relies on hand-played, organic instruments and the power of her unadorned voice. Her 2022 debut album, 'Are You Happy Now?,' included stark songs like 'Wolves,' about sexual predators, accompanied only by her guitar.
But as a 21st-century performer, McRae maintains a robust social-media presence, sharing songs in progress and hosting an interview podcast, 'What Were You Thinking?' Her career has thrived on viral moments. At the height of the Covid pandemic in 2021, she posted a joking tweet predicting that Phoebe Bridgers would write a song about 'hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at dodger stadium' — and then wrote the song herself, a Bridgers homage titled 'Immune.'
An early version of 'Massachusetts,' the song about an ex-boyfriend that concludes her new album, reached millions of views. When McRae toured arenas opening for Noah Kahan, audiences were singing along and raising lighted cellphones before it was officially released as a single. 'That made me cry,' she said.
The songs on her new album delve into 'two relationships that I had in quick succession,' she said; the romances failed. The songs work through tangled emotions and phases: hope, disillusion, ambivalence, deceptions, negotiations, ruptures and stubborn memories. 'I want to give purpose to my pain,' she said. 'Being able to turn it into art that other people can relate to, without having any knowledge of me and my relationships — that is the dream.'
Her songwriting, finished in 2023, was followed by sessions with multiple producers.
Now, with more than a year of distance, McRae has decided that her exes 'were doing their best,' she said. 'If you have a lot of stuff that you haven't worked out within yourself, and then you start interacting with other people, your best is sometimes going to wreak some havoc on your relationships. We're all humans. This is all of our first time on Earth. It's not necessarily that I forgive everything that happened. But I have a lot greater understanding.' JON PARELES
You'll Also Be Hearing More From:
1900Rugrat
A South Florida rapper with a deeply scraped-up voice, extravagantly slurred syllables and a hardscrabble wit. 1900Rugrat broke out last year with a handful of cheeky freestyles that went viral for their sometimes preposterous punchlines, and his rigid seriousness while delivering them.
SOUNDS LIKE A friskier, funnier take on the raw, roundabout flows of a fellow Floridian, Kodak Black; also full of unpredictable rhyme choices à la Lil Wayne.
WHAT'S HAPPENING His biggest hit last year was 'One Take Freestyle,' on which he raps about a drug cornucopia and his whiteness over weepy, sleepy horns. On the back of that song's success, he secured a collaboration with Kodak Black for a remix that appears on 1900Rugrat's boisterous and testy new mixtape, 'Porch 2 the Pent,' which also features collaborations with Lil Yachty and BossMan Dlow, simpatico rappers equally fluent in boasting and roasting. JON CARAMANICA
High Vis
A London band skilled at making music about struggle that doesn't sound like one. Over three albums released since 2019, the five-piece has written about class consciousness (its name is a reference to 'the unifying clothing item of the working class,' the frontman Graham Sayle told the NME of the neon safety gear) and personal battles ('What is truth when your mind's a lie?' he spits on the band's most recent LP).
SOUNDS LIKE Hooky hardcore with chugging riffs and gleaming post-punk flourishes. (Listen for touches of the '90s English alt-rock band Ned's Atomic Dustbin.) The band's third album, 'Guided Tour,' arrived in October stocked with Sayle's shouty vocals, reverb-heavy guitars and lyrics that teeter between hope and despair.
WHAT'S HAPPENING A U.S. tour kicks off on April 15 in Seattle and wraps a month later in Los Angeles. The band will hit the European festival circuit starting in June. CARYN GANZ
Horsegirl
Reverent but slyly inventive students of indie-rock history, the Chicago trio first gained recognition in 2022 for its shoegaze-y debut LP, 'Versions of Modern Performance,' released when its members — Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein and Gigi Reece — were still teenagers. On their springy, confidently minimalist sophomore album, 'Phonetics On and On,' they've moved to New York for college and, it seems, added some new influences to their dorm-room record collections.
SOUNDS LIKE A Gen Z take on the bare-bones, deadpan post-punk of the Raincoats, or a carefully curated K Records playlist set to shuffle. Recent tracks like '2468' and 'Switch Over' are as catchy as playground chants, but a closer listen to their construction reveals compositional complexity and clever wordplay.
WHAT'S HAPPENING Horsegirl follows the February release of 'Phonetics On and On,' which was produced by the experimental singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, with a short American tour in late March and a more extensive one later this summer. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
J Noa
For sheer syllables per second, few rappers in any language can match the speed of J Noa from the Dominican Republic, a songwriter who seized attention with intricate, breakneck freestyles in Spanish. J Noa — Nohelys Jiménez — is 19 and has already released an EP and two full-length albums.
SOUNDS LIKE Crisp, hard-nosed, fast and then — often — double-speed rhymes about growing up amid violence and addiction, honing survival skills and flexing her ambitions. And, every so often, a tuneful chorus.
WHAT'S HAPPENING Her third album is likely to arrive in May, and assorted collaborations are in the works. PARELES
Model/Actriz
It's hard to resist the charms of Cole Haden, the frontman of the Brooklyn (by way of Boston) quartet Model/Actriz. Tall, lithe and chatty, he stalks the stage and bounces on monitors in hulking heels, then takes the show into the crowd, singing into faces and giving listeners an extreme close-up as he works the room.
SOUNDS LIKE A very noisy band dragging gothy post-punk songs across the dance floor. Nine Inch Nails is a clear touchstone on the group's debut from 2023, 'Dogsbody,' nearly 38 minutes of arty peels of guitar, precision drumming, unrelenting bass lines and Haden's incantations. In Model/Actriz's latest single, 'Cinderella,' Haden reveals his decision not to have a birthday party with a princess theme when he was 5, leaving him 'quiet, alone and devastated.'
WHAT'S HAPPENING The band's second album, 'Pirouette,' is due May 2, immediately followed by tour dates in the United States and Europe. GANZ
Momma
A band faithfully recreating '90s alternative rock's (mostly) un-self-conscious side. The band's founding singer-songwriters, Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, met during high school outside Los Angeles — 'Bottle blonde, you're a god,' goes one new lyric — and have dialed in their spin on throwback Gen-X-ness across three albums and a pile of singles since 2018, including their 2022 breakout 'Household Name.'
SOUNDS LIKE Diligent students of artful distortion and dreamy melodies, mixing some Smashing Pumpkins, Pixies and Liz Phair with 'TRL'-ready Michelle Branch and Best Coast choruses. Now based in Brooklyn, the four-piece — which also includes the producer and bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch and the drummer Preston Fulks — recorded its new album in both coastal cities, despite the shout-out to the Midwest on the new song 'Ohio All the Time': 'I never got Ohio, babe, but now I do.'
WHAT'S HAPPENING Ahead of the band's new album, 'Welcome to My Blue Sky,' out April 4, the band's Pumpkins-esque single, 'I Want You (Fever),' is finding an audience on alternative radio. Momma will spend the spring on a headlining tour, ending at home in Brooklyn on May 31. JOE COSCARELLI
Oklou
The French songwriter, singer and producer Marylou Mayniel has been releasing music for a decade, singing in English and floating her gentle voice amid otherworldly electronics. Her debut album, 'Choke Enough,' came out in February.
SOUNDS LIKE Oklou coos thoughts about information, disaster, personal connection and blissful sensation on 'Choke Enough.' Her latest collaborators include hyperpop experts like A.G. Cook and Danny L Harle, but her own music isn't glitchy or brittle. The tracks twinkle behind her voice like starry skies.
WHAT'S HAPPENING She tours Canada and the United States in October, with performances in Europe in April and November. PARELES
OsamaSon
SoundCloud rap is now in its fifth or sixth wave, and has transformed from a relatively unified mayhem-first approach to hip-hop into the chaos that ensues when that method becomes exponentially looser and decentered. Last year, it took form in the rise of rappers like OsamaSon and Nettspend, rage-rap rookies whose rhymes come out in digitized bleats that sound as if beamed in from a particularly tumultuous corner of space.
SOUNDS LIKE What happens when you listen to unreleased Playboi Carti snippets for several months straight without interruption. The new OsamaSon songs run about two minutes on average and feel as if they're playing on 1.5x speed — full of coughed-up flirtations and threats that race past in a blur of astral sprinkles.
WHAT'S HAPPENING The latest OsamaSon LP, 'Jump Out,' came out in February. CARAMANICA
Mei Semones
A Japanese American songwriter and guitarist who now lives in Brooklyn, Mei Semones studied at the Berklee College of Music, where she assembled her band and honed her virtuosic, culture-hopping music.
SOUNDS LIKE A breezy, utterly idiosyncratic mixture of jazz guitar, bossa nova lilt, chamber-pop string arrangements, indie-rock crunch and lyrics that switch between English and Japanese, living up to one of her song titles: 'I Can Do What I Want.'
WHAT'S HAPPENING Her full-length debut album, 'Animaru' ('Animal' in Japanese) arrives May 2, followed by a U.S. tour. PARELES
skaiwater
Skaiwater, 24, is a producer, songwriter and melodic rapper from Nottingham, England, now based in Los Angeles, who brings professional-grade hooks to the wilds of SoundCloud.
SOUNDS LIKE A post-Playboi Carti bridge between Lil Uzi Vert's emo-tinged trap music and Lil Nas X's most forward-thinking pop ambitions. (Fittingly, both Uzi and Lil Nas have been collaborators.) While skaiwater's most anarchic internet peers have a tossed-off quality to their genre experiments, skaiwater has an old-school producer's deliberateness, mixing hyperpop maximalism — blown-out bass, laissez-faire attitudes toward widespread sampling — with reverent nods to R&B and Black dance music niches, from London to Philadelphia to Chicago.
WHAT'S HAPPENING After releasing their second studio album, '#Mia' (for 'Manic in America'), on Valentine's Day, and appearing at the Los Angeles edition of the rap festival Rolling Loud earlier this month, skaiwater, who is nonbinary, is keeping their next moves typically quiet. COSCARELLI