With fall on the horizon, we’re escaping a slow summer and shifting into that final, fertile phase of the music year’s release cycle. Which makes it a ripe time to get some perspective on the year, in terms of the big records from past favorites, and here, the bands that have introduced themselves as new ones. Recently, NME conducted its own exercise in surveying the “new” crop of bands, turning in a list that rankled some of you, because you felt some bands were “old,” or because some bands were not to your liking, or because it was a list. The subjectivity of what makes a band the best at anything is of course primary grounds for debate; what makes a band the best at being “new” gives the argument more dimension. We found ourselves arguing and emailing about our own picks, and rules, and said fuck it: let’s publish this.
So, qualitative concerns are one thing … but what qualifies one as a “2010 act”? After discussing various rules based on arbitrary cut-off dates (debut LP release by x date, or an EP by y, or a first blog mention by z, etc.), we quickly realized that no single formula would satisfactorily account for the shifting, accelerated nature of this new hype-cycle that saturates-upon-contact in some cases, and builds slowly over years in others. By our discussions, Sleigh Bells, a band of which we’re obviously quite fond, felt more like last year’s story than this one’s, staking their claim to newness and arrival in terms of exposure and discussion the week they landed a Band To Watch stamp, during CMJ ‘09. Meanwhile, Warpaint put out an EP earlier that year but it’s only now, with excitement over newer tunes and a cemented lineup that it seems to be their time.
So we settled on a sniff test: If it felt the band’s discussion, their moment, their arrival, was tied to this year in our minds, then it was eligible for this list. So, sorry Local Natives, though we love you.
We invite you to argue with us, and with each other (duh). Argue about the bands’ newness, sure, but mostly, argue about their merits. If this is your first exposure to them, well that brings us to the overarching point of a list like this: Introduction. Each member of this year’s class is listed here alphabetically (no rankings) with a free and legal MP3 for your downloading pleasure. At the bottom of this post all 40 tracks are compiled via two zip files so you can load ‘em up for your Labor Day roadtrip.
