Deli Nation,
Our most faithful readers know that January, here at The Deli, is the month of our Year End Polls for Emerging Artists, a painstaking survey we run in each of our local branches to identify all the most promising musical acts across all genres (last year’s result can be found here).
To give this poll more credibility, a good portion of the nominees are picked by a jury of local scene-makers (mostly comprised of venue booking agents) who get to nominate their three favorite local artists of the past year. But to involve all possible artists – even the most unknown, in December we had an open submission form that allowed any act to submit to the poll. These entries were ranked by The Deli’s own branch editors, and this is what this post is about.
Since we always get hundreds of submissions for the NYC year end poll, we organize the open submission results by genre, and this year we’ll start with the ALT ROCK/POWER POP category, two genres that share a rather muscular guitar based sound.
As always, we wish we could let more artists through to the next stage, but unfortunately we have to put a limit to the bands that qualify (we already have too many!). Here we go then:
ALT ROCK/POWER POP
Total submissions in this category: 37
Jurors: Michelle Bacon (Deli KC), Roxy Morrison (Deli Toronto) Paolo De Gregorio (Deli NYC).
Artists Qualified to the next stage (i.e. the Readers’ Poll, starting around 01.15):
1. STRNGRS – 8.33
2. Sons of an Illustrious Father – 8
3. Late Cambrian – 7.83
Honorable Mentions (scores above 6.5) in order of high score:
j and the 9s, Millsted, Courtesy Tier, Kung Fu Crimewave, Sunny Gang, Sepoy, The Freaky Baby Daddies, Kevin McWha Steele, Mind Over Time, Eli Whitney & The Sound Machine, The Como Brothers Band, Mals Totem, Saturday Drive.
Stay tuned for more results, and then for the final poll – this is just the beginning of a month long process!
The Deli’s Saff