Frank Ocean, Aiden Grimshaw: the biggest surprises of 2012
The unlikely artists and music we loved this year
- Frank Ocean: Channel Orange is definitely the hit of 2012, and no one expected it. Breaking away from OFWGKTA and their controversial lyrics, Channel Orange debuted as a coming out album and a statement. Ocean had just released a statement about falling in love with a boy when he was younger - a strong statement to make in hip-hop - and Channel Orange was a big f**k you to anyone who cared. Revelatory, complex, mature, and one of the best albums of the year.
Tags: frank ocean, Solange Knowles, Aiden Grimshaw
2012 has brought with it a wealth of new music, some of it good and some of it very very bad. And to be fair, most of that was expected - if anyone seriously thought that Tulisa's album The Female Boss was going to be listenable, for example, then they were definitely in the minority. Also, incredibly wrong, but that goes without saying.
However, that's not to say that there weren't a few surprises that even we couldn't predict. If anyone had told us that 2012 would see Katy Perry release a single that didn't decimate our ears, we probably wouldn't have believed them - and if we heard that Taylor Swift experimented with dubstep and the result was something we could actually enjoy, we'd assume that someone had mistaken an article from The Onion as fact.
So we've assembled ten of the best surprises of the year here for your perusal - including some that you might have missed. X Factor alumni, socialite "it" girls and divas' little sisters are all featured here. Check it out now...
