The British singer’s high-concept pop songs reside deep in the uncanny valley; her vocals are modulated to sound like a glitchy AI fembot, but her lyrics are written with the wide-eyed naivety of a teenager’s secret diary. When Diamond emerged in 2013 as part of the cooler-than-thou PC Music collective, her hyper-glossy Web 1.0 dance pop skewed towards art school kitsch, but on her long-awaited full-length debut, the crying-in-the-club bangers feel sweet and sincere. Reflections is a tight collection of breakup songs that borrow from Y2K-era trance and bubblegum pop from somewhere in the distant future, thanks to some seriously cutting-edge production from PC Music head honcho A.G. Cook. The second half of “Concrete Angel” is the wildest two minutes you’ll hear in a pop song this year.
- 2015
- Namasenda
- Charli xcx
- Planet 1999