Hotlist 2023: The most exciting newcomers of the year

Who are the best new bands and artists? We look to the future with our hotlist. It starts with the young German pop generation: Acts like Domiziana, Nina Chuba and Becks seamlessly combine international sound with catchy melodies and contemporary German lyrics. You can see everything about this and ten other newcomers* who will shape the pop year 2023 on the following pages.

What does the future of German pop look like? Maybe like Domiziana Helga Gibbels. She wears vinyl or hipsters in the style of the noughties, a graphic haircut and long fingernails, looks a bit like chic retro trash, a bit like an alien, a bit like a girl you meet on an average evening partying in Berlin. Gibbels simply calls himself Domiziana, was born in Freiburg and grew up in the Sicilian, very Catholic Catania. When she first heard a song by Lady Gaga dedicated to Judas, she was blown away, she told Vice magazine in 2022. At 17, Domiziana moved to Berlin. And while her idol Lady Gaga spent years working towards her success, the 25-year-old broke through with just one hit, the song “Ohne Benzin”. Everything else that you need in addition to hits to be a pop star was immediately available at Domiziana: In the photos that she uploads to Instagram, she presents herself as a total work of art. She seems to leave nothing to chance.

With their catchy, high-speed sound that sounds more like Charli XCX than the “Radio Fritz DeutschPoeten”, Domiziana is at the forefront of a new generation of pop acts from Germany. Musicians like Becks and Dilla, like Pantha and Nina Chuba, who released an incredibly catchy summer hit with “Wildberry Lillet”, sound at the same time casual and flawlessly suitable for hits, after umpteen influences at once and at the same time as confidently cosmopolitan as one would expect from pop from Germany was not used to until now.

Because you could say: For a long time the label “Deutschpop” wasn’t exactly a seal of quality. This quasi-genre often sounded like nice, shallow, like a little provincial music, devoid of relevance. In fact, beyond the indie and underground area, in Germany, to put it bluntly, in recent years you have mainly had the choice between four directions: rap of more or less pure teaching, the established rock types for group drinking at the Hurricane Festival, sensitive large-capacity pop by men , who are called Max or Mark or Tim, and a lot of well-meaning things from graduates of the relevant pop academies. If an artist like Balbina appeared in this landscape, the critics always wanted to write her up as the next big thing, knowing full well that the will to do things differently and want to be artistic were more rewarded than the actual impact.

The new generation now seems remarkably light-handed to bring together the best of all worlds: the catchiness of pop and the coolness of rap. It’s an eclectic, international sound. In addition, German-language pop lyrics rarely sounded as unique and rhythmic as they do right now – also because they are no longer limited to the German language. For years, rappers like Haftsperre or Haiyti have been using a polyglot art lingo in their songs, in which different languages, sociology and dialects flow together. The cultural confusion has become an art form that the German-Italian Domiziana, who grew up bilingually, also makes use of: “Just get drunk / Come and take a breath / È semper lo sbaglio di tutte, yeah-yeah / You’re still looking always a reason / I’ll find you in the dark again / high or are we lost?” she sings in “Ohne Benzin”. A verse about a banal pop theme – the bad boy who only intoxicated calls his love interest – unfolds in Domiziana’s very own pull, which is really pop.

It’s almost a truism that the new casualness of “Generation Z” in dealing with fashion styles, scene codes and genre boundaries is also a result of the universal availability of sounds and images from all over the world. What’s more: while trends used to take a while to arrive in German pop, everything is moving a good bit faster now. In the wake of Avril Lavigne revenants like Olivia Rodrigo, the pop punk of 24-year-old Esther Graf also experienced a little hype.

However, not only net culture, but also the architecture of social media is changing the way in which pop is thought about and consumed. In the 1910s, the nature of Spotify was particularly formative for music production, and TikTok has been the medium of the hour for about three years. And that calls for short songs with catchy sequences that users of the app can pick and choose as the background sound for their videos. Anyone who fits smoothly into the algorithm can literally become very, very popular overnight with TikTok. As popular as Domiziana: her song “Ohne Benzin” only really took off when an accelerated version of the song circulated on TikTok and was used by thousands of users. “Ohne Benzin” has now been streamed more than 56 million times on Spotify alone. Not even Billie Eilish has become a star on Soundcloud so quickly.

Of course, it’s not the case that the young guard, who seem to have come out of nowhere, only marched straight through to the Olympus of the charts with luck, talent and loyal TikTok fans. Domiziana, for example, wrote “Ohne Benzin” together with the producer Replay Okay, and Nina Chuba also likes to bring professionals into the house: Flo August, who has already worked with Kraftklub, produced her second hit of the year, the song “I hate you”. Real freshness, the boundlessness of a new generation and an industry that knows how to use this energy ensure that successful pop sounds pretty good in Germany right now – or pretty good pop is just as successful. And by the way extremely feminine. Because of course men like the romantics Schmyt and Betterov also have their share in the new pop wave. In this text and on the following pages, however, they are what women in the music business have long been (especially in Germany): very friendly.

(Juliet Lorenz)

generation faces

It doesn’t matter whether it’s R’n’B, pop-punk or hyperpop: these German-speaking acts are taking off at high speed. We present them on the following pages.

Then we continue with these highly valued international newcomers: