Rough Trade

No one can deny that the face of planet music is changing at a rate faster than ever before. Whether one believes that it's awkwardly evolving into a beguiling new beast, or imploding into a certain apocalypse, one thing's for sure: the soundtrack will be like nothing you've ever heard before. 21-year-old Mica Levi is the unassuming five foot one figure creating tunes that somehow perfectly define these sometimes scary, often overwhelming, but always exciting times. She's the most singular artist leading the future-pop frontier, with an instinctual understanding of music only possible from one of those rare lives where rhythms, melodies, discord and noise have underpinned every last waking second.

Helmed by her adopted Svengali and seeming long-lost spiritual godfather, Matthew Herbert, Micachu's debut long-player, is a teeny, but visionary peek at the infinite maelstrom of musical carnage that hurtles through her brain 24-hours-a-day. A mangled outpouring of fidgeting guitars, untameable bass splurges, fragile, swoonsome wails, sabre-toothed electronics and snatched sounds, from rattling bottlenecks to demonic hoovers. Whilst on paper it doesn't sound a sing-a-long setup, in between the shudders, splurts, stabs, stutters, stops and starts, spills a pure, pristine thread of melodic playfulness that makes Jewellery one of the most fiendishly addictive breakthrough albums of 2009.