Spector, Noah Stewart and Cold Specks

A London indie band, a Harlem tenor and a Canadian blues singer are our picks for the year ahead. Spector Spector are not your average guitar band. They're probably the only up-and-coming east London five-piece to own a lint brush. Dressed like they're permanently due in court, these are not just a "bunch of lads" assembled "to jam". Sure, Spector have guitar (that's Christopher Burman), bass (the implausibly model-like Thomas Shickle), drums (Sheffield man Danny Blandy) and keyboards (Jed Cullen). But voluble singer Fred Macpherson – sporting owlish specs and coat lapels so inky you could lose a Higgs boson in them – expounds how in 2011 bands had become "almost vulgar" and "outdated"; how guitar pop had become "an almost irrelevant medium". "Outside of the dance realm, where a lot of new ideas seem to be constantly bubbling, [music] feels like picking through the rubble of some horrible accident that's been happening for 50 years and just picking up a child's shoe or a fishing rod or a piece of corrugated iron and building a canoe out of it," rants Macpherson. Guitar pop, then, is starting to sound like a medium ripe for redemption in 2012 by this fiercely modern outfit with a stranglehold on the classics. Spector's songs – such as recent singles "What You Wanted" and "Grey Shirt and Tie" – are pugilistically romantic things, ringing with chords. They wed the widescreen American pop of the Killers to a very British lineage that includes Roxy Music, Pulp and the Smiths. "Romance is pugilistic," concurs Macpherson. "The people I love the most, I feel, are the people I've also hated the most… and that's just the band members." Drummer Danny rolls his eyes. "I used to think that it was a big cliche to write love songs," continues Macpherson, "but that was before I had really been in love." Their name, meanwhile, is less a homage to Phil Spector than an accident caused by their chosen one, SPECTRE ("like the terrorists in James Bond"), being already taken. To use the producer's name carelessly, with a cavalier disrespect for the history of pop, appealed. "And anyway," concludes Macpherson, inhabitant of the ever-present online "now" of pop, "it only matters if you believe time is linear." Noah Stewart Noah Stewart didn't set out to become an opera star. Born in Harlem to a hard-working single mother from New Orleans, he hoped at first to pursue a career in engineering. "Joining the school choir aged 12 was just a way of keeping occupied until Mom came home from work," he says. But then he won a place at a Manhattan performing arts high school and "had a lightbulb moment". He fell in love with opera, and while the other kids were channelling Mary J Blige, Stewart was singing Mendelssohn. This spring, the 33-year-old will release a debut album and make his first appearance at Covent Garden in Miss Fortune, a new opera by Judith Weir. When I meet him at a whisky bar in north London, he's wearing an Ozwald Boateng tux with the bow-tie rakishly undone and looking every inch a star. His journey to this point, however, has been anything but easy. Although he won a scholarship to Juilliard, Stewart had to endure a decade of dashed hopes. "Everyone kept saying: 'You're not ready.'" To keep his dream alive, he took every odd job he could get, from selling pots and pans to manning the reception at Carnegie Hall. His background was a hindrance, he feels, but the "huge absence of people of colour" in opera only made him more determined, and after "years of being told no" he started to break through, finally clinching a record deal with Decca last summer. His debut album, Noah, "bridges the gap between opera, classical music and popular music". Will it alienate opera purists? He doesn't think so. "I studied as a classical musician and I can sing opera in five languages," he says. "I think I've got enough credibility behind me." The critics are inclined to agree. According to the Guardian: "The rich clarity of his tone and dashing persona seem capable of conquering anyone through sheer charisma alone." Cold Specks The voice of Cold Specks is weathered by life and loss; when she performs, it is astounding to realise that it comes from a 23-year-old. It is a strange and compelling sound, at once old-fashioned and timeless, a result, says the singer known off-stage as Al Spx, of studying scratchy Alan Lomax field recordings, "and James Carr and Sam Cooke and all that gospel stuff. It's all I listened to when I was writing the album." The Canadian moved to London last year to work on her debut, after the brother of a friend stole a private demo and shared it around. "I was living in Otobicoke in Ontario, which is a shitty suburb, and I had nothing going for me," she explains. In London she teamed up with a band, including Rob Ellis, known for his work with PJ Harvey and Anna Calvi. "We just call him the guru," she smiles. In November she appeared on Later… With Jools Holland, stealing the show with a cappella "Old Stepstone", from her first single, "Holland". It is old, biblical and worn-in; Spx is serious about the music she aptly calls "doom soul". Immediately afterwards, she was recognised at the airport. "This man said, 'I saw you on telly,'" she says, shyly. "It freaked me out a bit." In 2012, it's something she may need to get used to.