KE$HA
If 2009 belonged to Lady Gaga, this year’s electro-shock queen-in-waiting is Ke$ha Sebert, a Nashville-born, LA-based wild child whose songs are every bit as brazen, attitudinal and addictive as her New York kindred spirit’s. Some have already dismissed the 22-year-old as trying that little bit too hard and failing to mask a mighty ambition, much as they did with Gaga — as if, in 2010, ambition, and an unwillingness to conceal it, could ¬possibly be described as distasteful. Ke$ha’s back story is as E-numbered-to-the-hilt as her music: the daughter of a Tennessee songwriter mother who penned hits for Dolly Parton, she has written for Miley Cyrus and the Veronicas, sung backing vocals on Flo Rida’s No 1 single Right Round, and for Paris Hilton, and outsold Jay-Z and Taylor Swift on the American singles charts with Tik-Tok, which was a Top 10 hit here last month.

Collaborators on her debut album, Animal, include Dr Luke (Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson) and Max Martin (P!nk, Britney Spears), and the finished product is stuffed full of potential hits, among them the bitchy kiss-offs Kiss N Tell, Blah Blah Blah and Backstabber, and the swooning, crush-on-you soft-pop of Stephen. Pursed-lipped musical purists would be advised to handle Animal with care: its ruthless pursuit of the killer hook, the delirious crudeness of its chord progressions and choruses, and, above all, the sheer unabashed and scandal-gathering chutzpah of the singer at its centre are likely to induce apoplexy. Anyone unburdened by such an uptight approach to music will love it, and her. Which is, of course, just the way Ke$ha wants it.

Animal will be released on Columbia on January 25; myspace.com/keshaishot

PAPERPLAIN
Helen Page, a 19-year-old from Berkshire, excels at hushed, folk-tinged vignettes whose soft and warm coatings reveal, in time, centres of pure steel. Rather like her most obvious British reference point, Laura Marling, Page writes songs that soothe you with cares¬sing brush strokes which later turn out to have talons at their tips. On her wonderful debut mini-album, Entering Pale Town, the teenager’s home-made recordings weave webs around the listener so subtly, you notice too late that they’ve entrapped you. Foreign Fingers tells the story of an affair, its tiny details building a vivid picture of guilt, dis¬satisfaction and denial, the narrator turning to her lover and saying: “Don’t close your eyes… I’m not sure we’ll sleep great with a whole stream of lies.” Arrangements and textures are basic and threadbare — finger-picked guitar, hand claps, the tap of a knuckle on her six-string’s body, circular, childlike piano figures, ¬double- tracked vocals, harmonies above the main melody in a lethally faux-naïf voice; but these strike you as evidence not of a primitive and undeveloped talent, but rather of a musician who knows exactly what she is doing. On Go Go NY, Page achieves a thrumming, Joanna Newsom-like melding of voice, propulsion and instrumentation. And on Pale Town, the dynamics are so minimal that the entry of a maraca just after she has sung the brilliantly insightful, double-take line “It’s too hard when you don’t ruin my day/With all the lovely kind things that you say” has an impact out of all proportion to its size or volume.

Entering Pale Town will be released on Destructible on January 18; myspace.com/helenpaperplain

ROX
A 20-year-old Iranian-Jamaican singer from southeast London, Roxanne Tataei takes her place in an already crowded field of retro-soul-with-a-twist divas, rubbing shoulders with Adele, Duffy and Corinne Bailey Rae. Amy Winehouse continues to shape the ¬context within which all singers of this stripe are judged, her absence as tantalising as ever. While the Rehab-shy cat remains away, however, the mice can play, and Rox joins the party with a strong set of songs that balance the influences of her childhood and adolescence — church music, lovers’ rock, nu-soul, jazz and trip-hop — and reflect her own youthful tribulations on the rocky road of romance. Performances on Later… with Jools Holland and at the Electric Proms, as an Amy stand-in at a Mark Ronson show, and the use of one of her songs in a Rimmel ad have all helped to build momentum, but she will stand or fall by her voice and her songs.Vocally, Rox recalls the sighing restraint of Lauryn Hill, Bailey Rae and Adele, rather than the ripped- from-the-chest outpourings of Amy. Musically, in league with the producer Al Shux (who co-wrote Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind), Rox is an owner-occupier, not the expert but bloodless mimic or interpreter her brief stint in the National Youth Musical Theatre could have made her: on Sad Eyes, her pauses are as telling as her beautiful vocal arcs; and her new single, My Baby Left Me, manages to convey both shattered heartache and fierce resolve.

My Baby Left Me will be released on Rough Trade on March 15; myspace.com/roxmusik

STORNOWAY
Music with a jolly mien and gait can be a challenging listen, not least because there is often a conflict within the listener between legs that involuntarily twitch and a mind that responds with a stubborn determination not to engage. Add strong cerebral and off-piste elements to the picture — this four-piece from Oxford includes a Russian-language expert, a former cathedral chorister, a PhD and a Masters graduate among their number, and have a rather British Sea Power-style penchant for cross-country hikes and tandem biking — and suspicion can build to the point of hostility. The ace up Stornoway’s sleeve is that their songs, although occasionally sprightly enough to make you feel they’re just one manhandled pipe and tabor away from a mass outbreak of morris dancing, are suffused with unmistakable melancholy and poignancy. Close-harmony vocals that conjure up a huddled-round-the-campfire barber- shop gathering lend an atmosphere of fellow feeling and watching-out-for-each-other supportiveness to songs such as last year’s single, Zorbing, the lulling, banjo-pocked We Are the Battery Human and the Hammond-driven Fuel Up. The Magic Numbers and Noah and the Whale, among others, have en¬countered the sort of wariness that may initially greet Stornoway: the sense that theirs is music for a barn dance, rather than having anything profound to say. Yet, as those bands have demonstrated, and Stornoway surely will, there is an awful lot going on beneath the pretty surfaces, much of it very dark indeed.

Stornoway’s next single will be released on February 22; myspace.com/stornoway

TINASHE
From Zimbabwe by way of Hackney, in east London, where he was sent as a child (to “grow to become a doctor/lawyer… that didn’t go so well”), Tinashé comes across as a human dynamo, fizzing with ideas, forging hybrids and forcing prolix street poetry into retro-soul, Afrobeat-inflected disco and modern urban-pop formats. His ideas fall over themselves as rapidly as his alternately yappy and sweetly crooning vocals scatter hook-filled melodies over his sharp, snappy and infectious songs. Signed to Island, the 25-year-old is possibly going to have his work cut out fitting into one particular radio or genre-specific box; but that doesn’t mean his music isn’t des¬er¬ving of success. Mayday, his debut EP, is a fine showcase for his varied approaches and wonderfully breezy, tremulous vocal style, the title track a Vocoder-tinged house affair glistening with 1970s-disco strings, and Come on Over using his native mbira to stir up the glockenspiel-flecked synth-pop. Other brilliant tracks from his forthcoming debut album include the school-of-hard-knocks Motown stomp of Saved, the power-pop of If You Say So, the Oasis-go-soul of Decency and the piano-driven two-step of Good Times, on which he frets: “I never thought I’d be like this/I’m 19 and I’m looking at a goddamn quarter-life crisis/Two GCSEs and a studio flat in Ruislip.” With the right wind in his sails, Tinashé should be able to avoid that fate and get the break his huge talent so clearly merits.

Mayday will be released on Island on February 15; myspace.com/tinashemusic