Every year there’s hand-wringing about the state of the music industry, but lately the concerns can feel more valid than usual. Algorithms are feeding us more of the same, all while creating a loop that dictates the artistic approach in the first place. Formula is more commercially rewarded than innovation. Even legends are starting to use AI. Can you remember the last time you came across a song that triggered that feeling of pure, unexpected discovery—the moment when the first few notes make you simultaneously bewildered and excited?
But we have good news: In the midst of the chaos, there’s a surge of creativity across all genres for those who have the curiosity and verve to look for it. From pop to electronic to hip-hop, from established stars getting their second wind to novel talent coming into their own, the artists at the forefront of new sounds this year are shaking things up and providing a much-needed rush to our eardrums. In some pockets, you’ll see bold reclamations and a recentering of retro sounds like jazz and R&B. In others, we’ve got an unprecedented clash of categories and futuristic sonic hybrids being created at a breathless clip.
GQ gathered 11 of the brightest and most idiosyncratic acts defining the sounds of 2026 to learn what else they have in store for us. Tap in.
Katseye
Katseye rocketed into ubiquitousness the moment they stepped off the reality show where they formed: a viral Gap commercial, Grammy noms, a truly inescapable earworm in “Gnarly.” “We had the experience that you would have in five years…” Lara Raj says—“More like 10,” Sophia Laforteza interjects—“condensed into two.” Their new EP, Wild, puts a Y2K-pop-influenced spin on their bubbly radio hits—taking the kind of musical risks usually reserved for artists with at least an era or two under their belts. The members say that maturity is most evident in “Unloveu,” the first song that Raj cowrote and coproduced for the group. “We have autonomy over the performance that we deliver, and it hasn’t always felt like that,” she adds. “This is a really beautiful natural progression that we’ve been really wanting and fighting for, but I think it came in due time.”
Mavi
Mavi, with his verbose flow that can toggle between loose or hurried on any given song, is one of rap’s most promising voices, so no surprise that lately he’s been racking up scene-stealing guest verses on tracks with Earl Sweatshirt, Mike, and Mach-Hommy. He knows that only puts more eyes—and higher stakes—on his upcoming fourth album: First in Flight. “It’s a really ambitious thing to name an album. It’s kind of our state slogan, basically referencing the Wright Brothers doing the first flight,” the North Carolina rapper says. As for the actual music? “It’s very different from anything I’ve ever done. It’s super live, super jazzy. It’s super Black music as a genre…. Holding it together is just soul as its essence,” says Mavi. “Also, the spirit of invention versus discovery has been beautiful. What does it look like to invent something that doesn’t exist—to achieve a feeling that nobody’s ever felt, but that you know for sure exists?”
The Hellp
When the Hellp dropped their third album, Riviera, last fall, it felt like an arrival. Or, better yet, a “culmination,” as the shaggy-haired duo put it: years of grinding, sharpening their aughts- indie-rock-meets- electronic sound, and smoothing out their approach. “Right now I feel like we’ve hit the nail on the head of who we are and what we’re expressing through music,” Chandler Lucy says of the group’s recent success. But even as the songs get bigger and the appeal gets wider, the guys are working hard to preserve the core feeling they had when they were just getting started. As Noah Dillon explains: “Everyone usually loves the earlier music from artists because it always has some sort of incalculable, ineffable energy that you just can’t put your finger on…. I don’t think it’s necessarily been lost with us; I just think it evolved slightly.”
Isaiah Rashad
Isaiah Rashad is known for his lengthy gaps between projects, but when he returned in May with an album titled It’s Been Awful, fans knew he certainly hadn’t had it easy in the interim. And while there’s plenty of emotional devastation on the record, Rashad delivered one of the liveliest rap projects of the year. “It’s beautiful music,” he says. “The instrumentation and all that, to bring it down to just a surface-level type of thing…. I tend to appreciate people who are forward with the issues but aren’t swimming in ‘Woe is me.’ ” In other words, we’re all going through something—acknowledge it, deal with it, and push forward. And Rashad’s honesty about deeply personal issues ranging from sex and drug addiction to family problems in turn makes his music universally relatable to anyone dealing with their own stuff.
Slayyyter
Slayyyter’s music is always thrilling, never predictable, and as electric as licking a nine-volt battery. Critics keep trying to wrestle her into subgenres like hyperpop, electro-pop, or Y2K, labels she says “gross me out.” Or worse: They want to know her influences. “People were so wanting me to pick all these niche things, and I’m like, when I think of big pop albums…. Whenever Beyoncé screams, like, ‘Ring the alarm!’; anytime she taps into that angry side, I find that so inspiring.” True to her game, Slayyyter describes her new material as “an inverse” of Wor$t Girl in America, the album she dropped this past spring. “It’s like a brother album. Opposite of what comes before it but still feels inspired by the album…. I like the sonic world that I’m in. I want to live in it for a little bit.”
Destin Conrad
Destin Conrad still feels like he’s too fresh on the scene to weigh in on the incessant debates about the state of R&B music. Instead, he’s just happy to keep experimenting in every aural direction. “The definition of whimsy means ‘something that’s not linear,’ ” Conrad says of the title of his 2025 project, Whimsy!, an album heavy on the jazz elements, like on “Wash U Away”—which enlists Terrace Martin, one of Kendrick Lamar’s producers—or the noir-esque send-up “A Lonely Detective.” But despite Whimsy!’s sonic influences, Conrad pegs ’90s R&B as the scene he wishes he could’ve been a part of, citing the Missy Elliott–Timbaland–Ginuwine collective: “I would love to experience the music back then…there was a lot more gospel influence.” Still, with the Grammys already taking note and established artists like Kehlani tapping him for his pen, he’s doing pretty well for himself here and now.
Kehlani
In peak-music-industry fashion, Kehlani found herself with her biggest hit a decade-plus into being one of the most reliably fire voices in R&B. Faced with following the hype of her 2025 track “Folded” with a full-length album, she quieted the noise by looking inward. “I hit this moment where I was like, I’m kind of in this reintroduction era where I need to cement ‘Here’s who I am,’ but also here’s sonically what made me who I am, why I chose to be an artist.” The result is a project full of traditional R&B jams, backed by a murderers’ row of millennial legends Kehlani grew up on: Missy Elliott, Usher, Lil Jon, Big Sean. “I have a song with Brandy. I have a song with Brandy and we change keys and we have a bridge and we’re singing back and forth! Honestly, there’s just so many moments on this album…. Ten-year-old me would be like, ‘There’s no way you did that.’ ”
Andrew Watt
Watt is a prolific collaborator who has produced and written for a Mad Libs–esque range of names: from the late Ozzy Osbourne to Lady Gaga, Brandi Carlile to Young Thug. When we spoke, Watt was fresh from filming Jimmy Kimmel, where he had just performed the theme he composed for Rooster, Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses’s HBO Max series—another tool in an already deep arsenal. “Music is the great leveler,” Watt says of working with legends and coproducing everything from EDM ragers like Justin Bieber and DJ Snake’s “Let Me Love You” to Gaga and Bruno Mars’s soaring “Die With a Smile.” “It can take you down when you’re willing to let it, and it can bring you up—and I don’t mean that in a bad or good way. I mean that, if Paul McCartney walks into my studio, he’s coming down to my level, and he’s allowing me to come up to his.”
Bella Kay
When it comes to Bella Kay, “bedroom pop” is literal: The singer-songwriter rose to acclaim by posting TikToks where she strummed an acoustic guitar in her own sleeping quarters while singing sweetly about sinking into crushes and getting hurt, the quick-hit clips cut with a Gen Z’er’s natural penchant for maximum virality. But as she plotted her first full-length project, My Reckless Abandon, Kay says she was focused on making sure she isn’t writing with social media in mind. “It’s become a thing of really making sure I put my art first, not always focusing on the Instagram or the TikTok at all,” she says. “You can’t be like, ‘I’m going to write this song for TikTok,’ because I think that’s just how art dies.”
Miles Caton
Miles Caton was touring with H.E.R. and Coldplay before the release of Sinners, the film that put him on everyone’s radar as Sammie, the blues-crooning heart and soul of the Oscar-winning vampire blockbuster. No surprise that a role so huge has him thinking about how to spend more time on the silver screen—but it’s not his main goal. “Music has always been my thing,” Caton says with a smile. “I’ve been singing since I was three years old.” Just like with Ryan Coogler’s juggernaut, Caton and his deep blues baritone have a twist or two coming up on his new project. “I’ve created my own vibe with my vocals that is going to be different for people to experience, but the sonics are really dope,” he says. “I feel like I’m in a futuristic element—I’m really inspired by Coldplay and James Blake.”
Snow Strippers
It’s been a minute since Snow Strippers dropped a full-length project. The electro-pop duo, who met on Tinder (but aren’t dating), are ready to put an end to that sabbatical, with Graham Perez declaring that in 2026, “we’re getting back on that OG tip of just making exactly what we want to hear.” How does one tap into the “OG” vibe? “Weed,” Graham says, breaking up a bud mid-conversation. That, and soaking up some inspiration: “I fuck with Carti, Opium, Destroy Lonely—and all that shit—Ken Carson. Like Florida rap, Detroit rap. I fuck with Fox BD. DJ Frisco. Love Veeze.” As for Tatiana Schwaninger, she’s going more visual. “I’ve been watching a lot of anime recently,” she shares. “My favorite anime, Madoka Magica, has a really good soundtrack. There’s this band Kalafina in it, and they make metal. It’s like J-pop metal. It’s kind of fire.”
Firework content
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of GQ with the title “The Next Kings and Queens of the Streaming Age.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photography by Danielle Levitt
Styling by George Cortina
Hair by Ward Stegerhoek at Bryant Artists
Makeup by Francelle Daly for Love + Craft + Beauty.
Nails by Rachel Messick for Celestine Agency.
For Kehlani: makeup by Troye Antonio; hair by Quran Smith.
For Mavi: hair by the Loc Pharmacy.
Tailoring by Egle Paulauskaite and Susanna Badalyan.
Production by Exposure NY and Kari Dexter for 3 Star Productions.