Pop, punk and protest songs: the hottest music on the horizon in 2019
The 1975
The 1975’s progress from cult status to platinum-selling stadium-fillers has looked swift and straightforward, at least from the outside, but it hasn’t come at the expense of their desire to experiment. New album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships teems with ideas from cool jazz to glitchy electronica, brash 80s pop to Drake-ish Auto-Tune, house music to the kind of ballads designed to raise the roof at venues like these.Tour begins 9 January, SSE Arena, Belfast
Celtic Connections
The line up of this year’s Celtic Connections festival is impressively eclectic – everyone from traditional folk acts to Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier to Graham Nash. World music is strongly represented too: a collaboration between Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita and harpist Catrin Finch, Portugese fado singer Mariza, Malian ngoni virtuoso Bassekou Kouyate and Basque accordionist Kepa Junkera.Various venues, Glasgow, 17 January to 3 February
Fucked Up
Canada’s Fucked Up have spent years exploring the parameters of punk rock to vast acclaim. Their last album, Dose Your Dreams, was an 18-track conceptual work that returned to the character of David, from 2011’s similarly sprawling David Comes to Life, and took in everything from prog rock and psychedelia to industrial music and disco. Cerebral, inventive and unpredictable on record, they’re reliably ferocious live.Tour begins 20 January, Ruby Lounge, Manchester
Azealia Banks
Azealia Banks is such a constant, controversy-generating presence on social media (and apparently she is launching her own social media platform, called Cheapy XO) that it’s easy for her abilities as a rapper to get overlooked. Whatever you make
of her trolling on Twitter, her music has been sporadically fantastic, and the sense that anything could happen when she performs live adds a certain piquancy.Tour begins 24 January, O2 Ritz, Manchester
Death Cab for Cutie
Frontman Ben Gibbard and his hardy US indie perennials return to the UK in the wake of their ninth album, Thank You for Today, a more autumnal, fortysomething take on their trademark melancholy sound. New ground remains unbroken, but Death Cab are the stuff of which undying, rabid cult followings are made of, and a certain familiarity is part of the appeal.Tour begins 25 January, Albert Hall, Manchester
Massive Attack: Mezzanine XXI Massive Attack’s third album may well have been dance music’s answer to Radiohead’s OK Computer. Both seemed out of step with the mood of the times: islands of bleak paranoia and darkness amid of a sea of perky Britpop, and beatifically stoned (and indeed Massive Attack-inspired) triphop, respectively. Twenty-one years on, the band take it on tour, apparently reimagined “using custom audio reconstructed from the original samples and influences”. The question of whether the “special guests” will include elusive vocalist Liz Fraser looms large.Tour begins 28 January, SSE Arena, Glasgow Low
There is something deeply improbable about a band releasing their masterpiece 25 years into their career, but that was what Low did with 2018’s Double Negative, a claustrophobic, experimental and brilliant examination of life in Trump’s America that pushed at the boundaries of their long-established “slowcore” sound. It is not the easiest listen but it is an exceptionally moving and rewarding one, evidence of a rare artistic fearlessness.Tour begins 29 January, Tramway, Glasgow
The Specials: Encore
A profoundly unlikely turn of events: 11 years after they reconvened without leader and chief songwriter Jerry Dammers, the Specials release a new album. In the intervening period, drummer John Bradbury has died, guitarist Roddy Byers and vocalist Neville Staple have left. How the remaining trio – vocalist Terry Hall, guitarist Lynval Golding and bassist Horace Panter – will fare without them is an intriguing question, although early reports are promising.Released 1 February
Jimothy Lacoste
The videos Jimothy Lacoste has uploaded to YouTube have become something of a talking point in recent months: are his optimistic lyrics, guileless rapping style and exuberant dancing for real, or one of those impenetrable millennial gags where irony is piled on irony? He insists it’s the former; whatever the answer, there is something undeniably charming and catchy about his music.Tour begins 6 February, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow AJ Tracey: AJ Tracey
Expectations are high for the debut album by the rapper formerly known as Looney. Last year, his self-released single Butterflies made the Top 20, and its dancefloor inflections provide a clue to his eponymously titled album’s sound. Keen for his brand of grime to reflect his Trinidadian roots, he has said the album also features a soca influence and, perhaps a little unexpectedly, tracks inspired by country and western.Released 8 February
Lamont Dozier
A rare UK tour from a genuine soul legend – both as part of Motown’s world-beating Holland-Dozier-Holland writing team and as a solo artist whose 70s oeuvre, not least the oft-covered Going Back to My Roots, should not be overshadowed by the songs he wrote for others. The tour promises “reimagined” versions of his umpteen hits in an intimate, “unplugged” format, interspersed with Dozier telling the stories behind the songs.Tour begins 13 February, Old Market, Hove
Post Malone
Should you ever wonder about precisely how much power critics exert over public taste, consider the case of Post Malone, the face-tattoo-bedecked Texan rapper. Released to a widespread yell of horror from reviewers, his second album, Beerbongs and Bentleys, went on to break streaming records on Spotify and reached No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, making this forthcoming arena tour look not unlike a victory lap.Tour begins 14 February, 3Arena, Dublin
Troye Sivan
As pop stars who rose to fame on television talent shows go, Troye Sivan cuts a pleasingly irregular figure. His second album, Bloom, put his queerness front and centre, quoted Smiths lyrics, featured songs about Grindr and losing one’s virginity as a bottom, and