Victoryland’s music — dense, driving, and lyrically wry — is reminiscent of 2000s N.Y.C. bands like The Strokes or Interpol, but it is not a pure nostalgia play. His breakout 2026 album, My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It, is about “living in New York,” he says, because it's the “epicenter of whatever cultural sickness is happening in the U.S.

“I love it here, don't get me wrong, but all emotions are ramped up … [It’s] a churning machine of metal and brick, inhuman structures and shit. The desire to distract oneself is much stronger here,” he says, his words strong but his delivery demure and shy.

"When I first started making music, I didn't really know anything about guitars,” says New York City rocker Suzy Clue. “I would sing stuff into my headphones, record that, and then affect it to make it sound really distorted and fucked up."

Suzy Clue was born in Albania but moved to Astoria, Queens, when she was eight — though her memory of her home country is “shoddy.” Music was already in the air: her father was a wedding singer in communist Albania. But even though she was inspired by him, she was too shy to let anyone hear her sing. That changed the first time she heard Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb.” “That was the first time I ever sang around anyone,” she says.

Anysia Kym started her musical career as a drummer (playing with Brooklyn DIY outfit Blair) and producer (for MIKE and Jadasea), but it was her 2024 project, Truest, that established her as a force majeure behind the mic. In 2025, the artist, who sits somewhere between an MC and a vocalist, built on that momentum with two collaborative projects: Clandestine with London experimentalist Loraine James, and the full-length LP Purity made with fellow New Yorker Tony Seltzer. Both center Kym’s stream-of-consciousness flow, which sketches slice-of-life vignettes on romance and anything else her inner monologue conjures with matter-of-fact candor.

Earlier in her career, Kym says she would be frustrated when people called her a rapper — “it felt a little coded” — but these days, being a part of a wider community feels like a gift, a path to connecting with anyone whose feelings are similarly pure.

Lately, inspiration has been hitting Ana Roxanne in between tour stops when she's exhausted and half-asleep and “just trying to survive.” It makes sense that the experimental composer and singer stumbles across musical ideas in these liminal spaces: her hypnagogic songs ripple and molt with a surreal internal logic.

Roxanne’s latest project Poem 1 is a more evolved version of what she was exploring on ~~~. No longer steeped in the lo-fi tape hiss and distortion of her early work, its songs, like “Wishful (draft)” and “Keepsake,” are delightfully direct and deliberate with shades of classical, ambient, and synthpop music.

Last summer, Bronx teenager yuke put out an ultra-fried rap mixtape called Cheetah World 2. But despite his high-energy raps and the typically blown-out lowend, the project didn’t make me want to turn up: it made me feel depressed. As it turns out, that was by design: “The more gritty my song gets, I try to articulate it with the vocals too,” yuke says. “I was sad when I was making that shit, so I wanted people to feel sad.”

Only 18-years-old and totally independent, yuke has been diligently grinding away at music since he was 12. He broke out in 2024 following the release of his mixtape Trap Finesse Cult and kept the momentum going with his spring 2025 project Miss Misery. That project opens on the sunny highlight “superstar” which might as well function as a shining example of what he’s good at: delivering largely anhedonic verses over ultra-danceable instrumentals. By now, some of your favorite underground rappers call themselves his fans — including xaviersobased, Edward Skeletrix, and Nettspend.

Eisenberg is a jazz guitar virtuoso, singer-songwriter, and a music professor at The New School. That latter gig is a source of ongoing inspiration for Eisenberg who is energized by their students who’ve come to “make it” in a place that feels increasingly financially and logistically impossible. “They're braver than me, because it took me until I was like 29 to move here,” says Eisenberg, who moved to the city in 2020 from Western Massachusetts.

“I spend the majority of my set being on the nose exactly what the client wants,” says Ali. “And then that little window of every six to eight songs, I can sneak in things that I personally think are hot right now. I read the room — this freaking group of 50-year-old PR ladies probably don't want to hear some random underground rapper right now — but they might enjoy some diaspora sounds or an edit that they may not be familiar with.”