So, here we are once again — the end of another year. While 2020 presented its own obvious challenges, 2021 (in general) fared much better for artists with the return of festivals and live events. Though, even that came with its own caveats with vaccine and testing requirements, and now omicron bumping up case loads across the world. COVID might just be something we have to deal with for the rest of our lives. Thankfully, we have music to fill our lives with joy and there are plenty of names you should be paying attention to heading into the new year.
We happy present our annual Your EDM’s Top 40 Artists To Watch list for 2022, with 40 fresh names, some you may have heard of, others maybe not. In particular this year, we have a few artists with less than 100 monthly listeners on Spotify (at time of publishing): DRFT (21), Sejo (28), and Tearsofmine (67). On the vast other side, we have ACRAZE with 21 million listeners, thanks to his breakout his “Do It, To It.” Typically we wouldn’t include someone with that many active listeners, but considering it was his first breakout hit, we need to see what more he has to offer next year.
Another point of pride in this year’s list is the diversity, with 37.5% of the names being women, and 25% of them people of color. Artists like Tsu Nami, SENZA, and HoneyLuv are putting in double work proving that POC women not only deserve a seat at the table, they are in some cases doing far more than their male counterparts.
Our featured artist this year is Justin Hawkes, who has been the most vocal proponent of drum & bass in America over the last year. Formerly known as Flite, Justin Hawkes has been a driving force in pushing the genre in the US and has the track record, both discography and shows, to show for it.
As we do every year, we’ve picked our 40 artists who we feel will have an incredible year in 2022, not just in their own personal careers, but also on the electronic music scene as a whole. As a reminder, we do our best not to repeat names year after year so as to give new artists the spotlight. So if you don’t see the name of an artist you feel has had a great year and is destined for more, it’s more than likely we featured them in the past six years.
2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021
See Your EDM’s Artists To Watch in 2022 list below. Congratulations to all who are featured! We expect big things of you next year.
helloworld | Sejo | BRUER | qwaston | Dot | Tsu Nami | SENZA
Friendzone | Claymore | Saka | REVEL | Justin Hawkes | Pauline Herr | ACRAZE
Entel | Tearsofmine | DRFT | lupa | Poni | HELLBOUND! | LAYZ | Canabliss
Miane | HoneyLuv | FrostTop | Capozzi | NotLö | VEIL | Gelus
AIRGLO | PawS | Mport | Ranger Trucco | Joshwa | Nikademis
Redrum | KILL SCRIPT | Zingara | Gibson Parker | Allen Mock
Featured image via Jake West Photo
