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" There&amp;#039;s a lot written about the bands you should pay attention to now, but at this year&amp;#039;s just-ended CMJ music festival in New York City, a sprawling selection of up-and-comers, we decided to look at where a few promising hopefuls might just land in 2014. Here, your predictive guide. Ryan Hemsworth      What it is: A Canadian beat-maker who&amp;#039;s spent years crafting a sound that combines hip-hop&amp;#039;s head-nodding rhythms with dance music&amp;#039;s hypnotic melodies and plunges the whole thing in a pool of ambient reverb and washed-out synthesizers that you can blissfully float on all day. This year he released two records, the EP Still Awake and the brand-new LP Guilt Trips (out this week), that offer more pop punch and could make 2014 a big year for the young producer. Where he&amp;#039;ll be in a year: Behind the boards for a name-brand rapper. Kelela      What it is: A highly buzzed-about vocalist whose new mixtape, Cut 4 Me, is a crafty mix of the deep, dark, minimalist electronic sounds that have been thrown together in the rather unhelpfully named genre &amp;quot;bass music&amp;quot; (which you can hear all over the place on the latest Drake and Kanye records) with a pop sensibility that should appeal to anyone with a soft spot for turn-of-the-millennium radio R&amp;amp;amp;B. Right now there are a lot of artists (including a lot of A-list names) trying to figure out a sound that Kelela&amp;#039;s already well on her way to owning. Where she&amp;#039;ll be in a year: Somewhere near the top of the Hot 100. Jensen Sportag      What it is: A pair of producers who are just nailing the chilled-out hybrid of pop and dance music that&amp;#039;s become a majorly big deal in the wake of Disclosure&amp;#039;s zeitgeist-defining album Settle. It&amp;#039;s energetic enough to spend all night dancing to, but mellow enough to work as your recovery soundtrack the next day. Where they&amp;#039;ll be in a year: Being played in the lobbies of pretty much every boutique hotel on the globe. Calvin Love      What it is: A Northampton quartet playing the kind of eccentric noise-pop originally championed by bands like Helium, Polvo, and the Breeders back in the &amp;#039;90s, which combines substantial amounts of fuzzed-out guitar with slanted melodies that refuse to go where you expect them to but end up in catchy places nonetheless.  Where they&amp;#039;ll be in a year: Still playing music festivals for indie-rock geeks, just further up the bill. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a25334/bands-to-watch-2014-cmj/>