Kenna

Neptunes producer Chad Hugo knows there’s soul in music other than hip-hop, and he extracts it from Ethiopian-born Kenna with synthesizers as spartan and chilly as Music for the Masses-era Depeche Mode. Kenna and Hugo hang a thick mist of urgency over music that traverses influences ranging from Duran Duran, the Cure, the Cars and the Eurythmics. Openly derivative yet still original, New Sacred Cow exists in something of a time vacuum, pointing both to the recent pop past and to an ambiguous future. Kenna takes the collective vocabulary of goth and synth-pop and emerges with a dialect that is rousing, haunted and soothing at the same time. It’s heartening to see individualist, pop-savvy work like this from a major label. And you wouldn’t believe it, but none other than Fred Durst helped discover this guy.