Artemas

Born in 1999 in the environs of Oxford, Artemas Diamandis makes eclectic alternative pop that sounds as if he digested all of the music of the ’90s in the womb. It can be hard to say if any one of his songs is specifically indebted to the rock, pop, R&B, hip-hop or electronic music of the era, but the debt is always there. “Don’t You Start”, for example, is a bouncy Daft Punk-meets-Blur dance party that’s as sad as it is sexy. Then there’s the falsetto bedroom-pop epic “You Were a Dream”, which has bits of Portishead, The Cure and Nine Inch Nails hovering around the edges. It’s the kind of well-made chaos that would make a ’90s wunderkind like Beck proud, yet it’s made possible by a younger generation’s ability to nonchalantly blend influences as if it were their birthright. With musicians as inventive and joyfully irreverent as Artemas remixing the past this way, the future of music is in good hands.