Sheck Wes is October’s hottest new act

Kanye West-endorsed New York rapper Sheck Wes was the hottest new act of October, pipping emerging Southern hip-hop artist Quando Rondo and UK post-punk five-piece Idles to first place in the Radar Station’s monthly chart.

The Radar Station algorithm calculates the fastest-growing new artists by combining data across a number of online platforms, including Spotify, Facebook, Songkick and Last.fm. Florida rapper YNW Melly was last month’s hottest chart-topper; see the September chart here.

Born to Senegalese parents in 1998, Sheck Wes (né Khadimou Rassoul Cheikh Fall) was signed to Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack and Kanye West’s GOOD Music labels earlier this year, after taking first SoundCloud then Spotify by storm.

His debut single, ‘Mo Bamba’, made №16 in the Billboard Hot 100 last year, while his debut album, Mudboy, released through Interscope on 5 October, reached #16 in the US and #19 in Canada.

Sheck Wes currently has nearly 13m monthly listeners on Spotify. He is represented by Obi Asika and Kazia Davy at Echo Location.

Savannah, Georgia-born Quando Rondo, meanwhile, is another SoundCloud prodigy, with his first mixtape, Life B4 Fame, garnering 1.9m downloads in the space of a week when it dropped earlier this year. The follow-up album, Life After Fame, was released through Atlantic Records on 24 September.

Idles, formed in Bristol in 2011, followed up a support slot for Foo Fighters at the O2 Arena in September 2017 with a string of European festival dates this year, and released their second album, Joy as an Act of Resistance, on 7 September. A Guardian review describes the politically charged LP as “11 songs of focused, cathartic rage” and and calls Idles “Britain’s most necessary band”. They are represented by Natasha Bent and Geoff Meall at Coda Agency, and Paradigm’s Tom Windish and Carly James in North America.

See the full chart, with links to each artist’s Facebook page and booking agency details, below.

For more details about the Radar Station, contact [email protected].

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