Incoming! | La Roux

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Incoming! brings you a selection of artists that come with Fuse's highest recommendation. Click on the artist to check out their music and videos, read their wiki, and rate your top choices. Check back often for new entries. Look out ears, here comes the awesome!

La Roux

About This Incoming! Artist

This self-possessed young girl, poised beneath an extraordinary gravity defying hair sculpture, making music that looks backwards to leap forwards, has leapt beyond her electropop contemporaries with the raw confessional quality of her songwriting and the sharp sophistication of her through-the-looking-glass 80's aesthetic. La Roux seems to know exactly who she wants to be and is fully aware she's already achieving it with ease.

The music that's sending her onto pop's big table may be channeling the spirit of The Human League and Yazoo, but Elly Jackson first discovered music in her dad's Neil Young and Nick Drake records. From here she picked up a guitar and started writing her own music, debuting early versions of future electronic hits on the South London folk scene.

"Well," she corrects, "there's not really a scene, just a bunch of people calling each other sell-outs. All they'd listen to was Jeff Buckley, and I thought it was so boring I couldn't stand it. I'm not the kind of performer who likes to sit still with a guitar, but that was all I had."

Fortunately, as she strummed away at one house party, a songwriter called Ben Langmaid was watching and soon they were studio partners. "One day me and Ben were working on a song and starting playing with some of the synths lying around at Ben's. We put a synth line over the acoustic track we had been working on and it just took off. From that day the guitar started to seem a little obsolete to us."