The Blog Sound of 2013

Today Breaking More Waves, together with a number of its UK blog peer group is delighted to announce the long list of artists nominated for the Blog Sound of 2013 poll. The final results and most voted for act will be announced on January 3rd 2013.

The Blog Sound Poll was first published last year and its participating voters are solely UK music bloggers. The concept of the poll wasn’t to criticise the established BBC Sound of list (which is due next Monday), but simply an experiment to see if UK music bloggers could come up with its own list of emerging artists that was representative of some of their community (it will never represent all bloggers - there's too much wide ranging taste out there), as well as giving the artists that were nominated some extra publicity. Indeed the idea was to compliment the BBC list in many ways by providing an alternative to compare and contrast, although of course there was (and still is) the risk that the same artists will be nominated for both polls. Last year 2 of the artists on the Blog Sound Poll (Lianne La Havas and Friends) also made the BBC Sound of list.

However, last year’s final long list provided some interesting alternatives to the BBC list; most notably it included Alt-J, this year’s Mercury Prize winners. We won’t deny a small amount of smug glee about the blog scene getting that one over the BBC list.

The Blog Sound of 2013 poll has expanded with 49 UK blogs nominating their 5 favourite emerging artists. The full list of participating blogs can be found at the bottom of this article. Just over 170 acts received nominations and the winning act received votes from around 25% of all bloggers. Of the 5 acts Breaking More Waves chose, 3 of them have made the final 15 – Chvrches, Curxes and Haim. These are all bands that we’ve been heavily supporting over the last year and we’re pleased to see that other bloggers agree with our tastes.

The long list represents the very best of new music and draws from major label, indie label and completely unsigned acts. The likes of Haim may be featuring on a lot of new music tip lists at the moment, but bands such as Curxes and Randolph’s Leap are more specific to the Blog Sound poll, being artists that have little or no financial / PR support to help raise their profile. It’s these artists that we’re most excited to see featured, showing that bloggers voted for the music they truly love, not just because they think the bands in question are going to be the ‘next big thing’ – often a criticism of end of year polls. Guessing 'next big things' is a often a fools game anyway, because nobody can tell what the unpredictable path of pop has round the corner.

It’s also fascinating to see Daughter getting nominated as they also featured on last years poll. However with the debut album not due till next year it seems that maybe bloggers were a little too early in their nominations last year, but haven’t lost faith in Daughter over the course of 2012.

And so here are this year’s Blog Sound of 2013 long list nominees, 15 emerging artists that UK bloggers would like to draw your attention to. We hope you find something that you like amongst them. Click on their names to hear their music. In total 11 of the artists on the list have featured in some form on Breaking More Waves before, so for completeness we’re streaming the other four artists we haven’t featured before at the bottom of the post.

THE BLOG SOUND OF 2013 LONG LIST

AlunaGeorge - Infectious R&B influenced pop from London

Curxes  - Dark industrial-pop electronic duo from Brighton and Portsmouth

Chvrches – Scottish electro pop trio formed from a variety of other bands

Daughter – Minimal / ambient sounding folk

Haim – Classic rock from LA with pop sensibilities

Laura Mvula – Jazz / soul singer hailing from Birmingham

MØ – Hip soulful female vocal electronic pop from Denmark

Palma Violets – Raw and energetic indie rock band

Pins – Edgily cool and raucous all female indie band from Manchester

Randolph’s Leap – Glasgow based indie folk pop with a twist of brass

Rhye – Smooth and blissful pop duo

Savages – Intense post-punk with female vocals

Seasfire – Modern rock band from Bristol who mix electronic beats with guitars

The Neighbourhood – Atmospheric Californian 5 piece rock / pop band 

Tom Odell – Piano based singer songwriter originally from Chichester

Tomorrow Breaking More Waves will be getting a bit Christmassy and we’ll be posting an exclusive Christmas cover version from one of the artists on this list and trust us on this one, it’s an absolute beauty. So check back tomorrow morning  - it will be available for a limited time as a free download.

The panel of bloggers that took the time to place their votes was made up of:

A New Band A Day, A Pocket Full Of Seeds, All Noise, Alphabet Bands, Both Bars On, Brapscallions, Breaking More Waves, Brighton Music Blog, Details Of My Life So Far, Don’t Watch Me Dancing, Dots And Dashes, Drunken Werewolf, Eaten By Monsters, Electronic Rumors, Faded Glamour, Folly Of Youth, Flying With Anna, God Is In The TV, Harder Blogger Faster, Howl, In Love Not Limbo, Just Music That I Like, Killing Moon, Kowalskiy,  Love Music : Love Life,  Mudkiss, Music Broke My Bones, Music Fans Mic, Music Liberation, Music Like Dirt, My Bands Better Than Your Band, Not Many Experts, Peenko, Real Horrorshow, Scottish Fiction, Skeletory,  Song By Toad, Sounds Good To Me Too, Storm’s Brewing, Sweeping The Nation, The Blue Walrus, The Electricity Club, The Mad Mackerel, The Metaphorical Boat, The Music Hoarder, The Recommender, This Must Be Pop, Von Pip Musical Express, 17 Seconds

Here's some music by the 4 artists on the list that we've never featured on Breaking More Waves. Check back on January 3rd where the most voted for artist from the 15 will be announced.

MØ – Pilgrim



Palma Violets – Best of Friends



Pins – Shoot You



Randolph’s Leap – Mutiny