Chelcee Grimes
I tried to get Liverpudlian 18 year old Chelcee to audition for a project I was working on about a year ago and sadly it never happened, but I’m very pleased to see she’s now signed to RCA and her MySpace is filled with amazing very 2011-sounding urban-pop tracks! They have a great energy to them and such a fresh, cool but poppy sound. I guess they’ll go down the ‘found on YouTube’ route to promote her as she does have a good following on there, but considering that’s how most new pop signings (that aren’t manufactured bands) get discovered these days it’s a bit of a non-story really. Most YouTube stars are mediocre singer-songwriter types but Chelcee’s a proper popstar. She had a small brush with fame appearing on a track with Wiley, but that song was rubbish so I’m glad she’s moving on to something with much more commercial potential for her proper debut.
Poptasticness: 84% Hit potential: 61%
Rai Knight
Musically Rai Knight makes interesting but not amazing pop, yet I still find her exciting as an artist as she seems like so much fun in her videos. It’s a shame I only heard about her now as her bouncy 2010 single New New is much more to my liking than the new one, Persistence, which is perfectly listenable but could do with an injection of poptasticness. Her sound is definitely indie-pop but she still manages to sound very Gwen Stefani-esque at times, especially on another of her early singles, Pivotal. It’s no surprise therefore that she states Gwen as her no.1 idol on her website. So far Rai’s had a few brushes with fame as New New has been used to soundtrack 90210 and a Pepsi advert, but she says she finds it difficult to fit in with the music scene in her hometown of Chicago and still seems to be mostly selling her music to fans who found her online. Hopefully through this post I can help her find a few more.
Poptasticness: 70% Hit potential: 26%