Well alright, alright, alright y’all. We’ve reached the end of our open submissions for artists looking to be considered for The Deli’s Best of Austin Year End Poll for Emerging Artists. Many thanks and tacos to all those that submitted their work; we took a listen to it all.

After tallying our editors’ ratings for the Open Submissions stage, it’s time to release the results. Please note that to avoid conflicts no local editor was allowed to vote for bands in their own scene.

Total submissions from Austin: 25

Jurors: Jurors: Cody, Dan, Paolo

Acts advancing to our Readers/Fans Poll:

1. Hard Proof (Afrobeat) – 8.17 (out of 10)

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2. Madisons (Folk/Americana) – 7.5

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3. The Cover Letter (Alt Folk) – 7.5

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4. Jackie Venson (Blues Rock) – 7.33

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5. Tennessee Stiffs (Alt Folk) – 7.33

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6. COSMS (Post Rock) – 7.17

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7. Molybden (Folk/Americana) – 7.17

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Honorable Mentions (ranked above 6.5):

Bazile, SIGNY, Booher, Paula Maya, Steady Legend, Wildcat Apollo, Indoor Creature

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WHAT’S NEXT: These results end the first phase of the poll. We will soon unveil the artists nominated by our local jurors, and then let our readers and our writers influence the poll with their vote.

Keep creating, keep supporting, and stay tuned for your chance to vote!

—The Deli Austin Staff

A musical act with a good sense of humor (that’s actually fuckin’ funny) that’s also straight killer when making more serious-minded shit is a hard thing to find. Count one more then in the ever-growing lists of reasons why Austin, and the world at large, is lucky to have CAPYAC, the city’s premier future funky outfit and the new group that made arguably the biggest impact on at least this writer’s 2015. With their new EP “Movement Swallows Us” still warm out of the oven, CAPYAC has elected not to rest on the merits of its already classic recent work and has released a new track called “Mama Never Told Me” that reveals that the funky-sexy duo also has a damn silly side to it.

“Mama Never Told Me” is basically about cupcakes, bright-ass colors, the funk, babies and some wildly-bedecked Austinites (including the band itself) gettin’ down to it all like it’s some serious fuk’n bizness. Producer Delwin Campbell is still riding the hothand here with another damn fine beat, this time anchored by a “Mama/Said” sample that is timed with sickness, and as ever Eric Peana is a funk vocalist master, this time with a tongue-in-cheek sexyfunk rap thing going on.

In the end though, the best way to get prepped for this excellent new addition to the catalog of Austin’s most exciting, most future-ready act is to read about it in their own inimitable words:

“Official release statement from Capyac:

Hello from Chez Capyac. Today we have the honor and privilege and honorable privilege to introduce to you our first food-related single. Why sing about food? Because singing and food share a mouth. When we were first approached by world famous director Meredith, we knew she had something. What did she have? Cupcakes. Magic. Studio magic. Ever heard of Hollywood?"

We have indeed, CAPYAC. We have indeed.

Hey you- are you a sciencefreak? Do you think that space shit is rad, and the more explodey and whacked out it is (say, the more space-tentacles there are involved), the radder it is? Are you into geometry and angles and orbs and all that perfectly impossible math shit? Does the idea of a rocket-packed four-legged robot, zooming constellations and funky angles over a mind-flipping twinkled-out beat get your futuretech boner a’rarin’ to go?

Well maybe you should watch Austin producer Magic Nanna’s sexy-ass techporn futurebeat science freakout of a music video for his track “Malachite.” This is utterly on-point, heady stuff from a highly talented member of Austin’s world-class beatmusic cadre, showing Magic Nanna’s got his brains in weird, deep and far-out places and we’re all lucky the man’s got the musical chops to relate that shit to us through his beats. This could well be your new go-to get high and spaceout track, so get to it below.

The Bishops might sound like the name of a snarky irreverent indie rock outfit, or maybe a math rock group named after the third-most fun chess piece (this is inarguable, and we’ll challenge anyone who says otherwise to a match), but in fact, this brand new Austin act is something far more rare: It’s a hip-hop supergroup made up of people who are real-life family members each with their own career outside of this new collaboration.

And an exciting, badass collaboration it is, coming in the form of synth-ed up single “Blood Ring.” As crooner Cara Bishop says, you get “Not one, not two, but three” Bishops merged together on the track for a hella fun single with equal roots in hip-hop, RNB and modern dancefloor music (especially trap and deep house on the snares and melody respectively).

Cara herself provides the hook and her verse with an RNB smoothness by way of a bit of a Rihanna Barbados structure, while Luv Bishop opens the track with his own bars done in that highly contemporary way of conscious-leaning youthful rappers like Frank Leone with references to big concepts like the third eye and not living “like we should” peppered into a solid modern flow with an edge.

Holding the whole thing together are the bouncing synth-made steel drums and arpeggios and steady trap-influenced beats of the third prong of this killer trident, producer Troy Bishop, who is a pretty prolific and future-looking producer in his own right outside of this collaboration (as well as in it) and one you should definitely get more familiar with.

This is actually what makes “Blood Ring” so damn exciting and fun to come across: it’s not only a stellar track from three members of that youth hip-hop thing that’s making the future of this genre look so bright, it’s also an introduction to three individual artists with impressively deep and deeply impressive catalogs each their own. The Bishops know this too, with the full lyrics to one version of the song’s hook (of a few) saying, “Not one, not two, but three/You can meet me and the Bishops in the ring/Not one, not two, but three/Our blood runs stronger than you could ever be.”

As a track and as an introduction to these talented kids, “Blood Ring” is immensely successful and is restrained in a way that belies the youth of both its members and this group as an existing thing, and it’s the most promising and exciting thing we’ve heard in Austin hip-hop in both this young year and the last. Check it out below, and then peep each Bishop’s personal Soundcloud below, and be prepared to fall deep into a hole of binge-listening your new favorite ATX hip-hop group, like the one we still haven’t crawled out of yet.

Big, bright things on the horizon for 2016 ATX hip-hop with music like this being made, y’all.

Cara Bishop- https://soundcloud.com/cara-bishop-1

Luv Bishop- https://soundcloud.com/luvbishop

Troy Bishop- https://soundcloud.com/troybishop