Kimbra

Borrowing from jazz, R&B, dance music, and rock, Kimbra makes some of the most adventurous pop fusions of the 2010s and 2020s. The New Zealand singer/songwriter experienced a burst of acclaim early in her career, winning awards for recombining nearly a century's worth of pop music on her 2011 debut album, Vows, and appearing on Gotye's Grammy-winning international hit "Somebody That I Used to Know." However, this success didn't make Kimbra take fewer risks in her later work. The effortless genre hybrids on 2014's The Golden Echo made it easy to hear why Prince, Imogen Heap, the Mars Volta, and Minnie Riperton are among her favorite artists, and even the more unified approach she took to pop and R&B on albums like 2023's moody A Reckoning reflected Kimbra's individual yet widely appealing talent.