Best Independent Artists of 2025, as presented by Obscure Agency
In partnership with Obscure Agency
By Kyle Russell
A New Artists to Watch Special
2025 has been a year of transformation for artists and for the stories that carried them forward.
Across 12 months, Obscure Agency’s New Artists to Watch series has traced the rise of a new creative class: artists breaking past genre, geography, and gatekeepers. Discovering artists from all around the globe, each feature captured a snapshot of what independence truly means not absence of structure, but identity.
This closing edition, Best Independent Artists of 2025, gathers the voices that defined the year through sheer individuality. They are innovators who made risk sound elegant, who treated freedom as craft instead of marketing. Together, they form a map of where modern music is heading: darker, braver, more human.
CARPETMAN
In an era that rewards overexposure, Carpetman has built an empire from absence. The Ukrainian artist, who performs concealed beneath his signature carpet mask, has transformed anonymity into an aesthetic, a shield that lets the music take the spotlight. His sound moves between house, blues, and cinematic electronica, carried by a pulse that feels both human and electronic. Each track unfolds like a confession buried under rhythm: intimate, atmospheric, and yet perfectly suited for the dancefloor.
Behind the enigma lies a relentless work ethic and an instinct for reinvention. Carpetman’s journey from viral curiosity to full-fledged global phenomenon has been anything but accidental. With over 1.7 million monthly listeners, 159 million YouTube views, and audiences stretching internationally, he’s become a symbol of how authenticity can thrive outside the spotlight. His music pulls you in, the visuals take over, and before you know it, the line between sound and performance disappears.
In a digital landscape obsessed with faces, identities, and metrics, Carpetman’s refusal to conform feels radical. The mask as a symbol of freedom. It lets the art exist without explanation, the sound without ego. And that’s precisely why, in 2025, Carpetman stands out as one of the most compelling independent figures in electronic music; faceless, fearless, and utterly unforgettable.
DEATHBYROMY
Every once in a while, an artist arrives who manages to turn personal chaos into cultural resonance. In 2025, that artist is DeathbyRomy. Her debut album Hollywood Forever it’s an exorcism dressed in pop decadentism; a love letter and a requiem to Los Angeles, the city that shaped her, bruised her, and ultimately became her mirror. Through lush production, industrial undertones, and unflinching vulnerability, she’s built a world where pain and beauty share the same stage.
DeathbyRomy’s rise feels almost cinematic. What began as an underground phenomenon has evolved into a global movement: sold-out tours across two continents, thousands of devoted listeners, and a distinct aesthetic that merges high fashion with emotional rawness.
The founder of Obscure Agency, Elnoir, was invited to her show in Milan and she said: “On stage, she’s colossal, magnetic and commanding, with the rare poise of someone who knows exactly where she belongs. The sheer mastery with which she held the crowd, the precision of every gesture, and that kind of righteous arrogance that belongs only to those who don’t ask for permission because they’ve already earned their place”
Beyond the numbers lies something rarer: conviction. DeathbyRomy writes as if the world depends on it, and for many of her fans, it does. Her music has scored television, film, and heartbreak alike, soundtracking a generation caught between rebellion and self-discovery. Now, as she enters her Manic Dream era, the message feels clear: she’s done surviving. She’s here to reign the pop industry on her own terms.
HAIDEN HENDERSON
Haiden Henderson represents the kind of pop that thrives in contradiction. His music lives where polished production meets restless emotion, where the energy of a garage band bleeds into glam. The tension era, and its expanded tension (heightened), captures a moment of transformation, not just in Henderson’s career but in the sound of a generation trying to reconcile chaos with clarity.
Songs like one track mind and lips turn intimacy into movement, pairing sharp hooks with a groovy sense of tension. There’s sweat, distortion, and that adrenaline of being twenty-something and too aware. Even in the more anthemic moments, Henderson resists gloss: the guitars still scratch, the vocals still crack at the edges. It’s pop that hasn’t forgotten the mess that makes it human.
On stage, Henderson radiates the same duality. His shows are physical and chaotic, yet strangely intimate a cross between a coming-of-age confession and a riot. He performs like someone who understands that connection is the point, not the product. That ethos has earned him a growing cult of fans who see themselves in his bold nonchalance rather than his polish.
Behind the new sonic sharpness lies a quiet evolution. Working with legendary songwriter Lauren Christy (Avril Lavigne, Dua Lipa, Bebe Rexha) helped him refine his writing without sanding down its edge. The result is a body of work that feels emotionally volatile but musically deliberate: a portrait of control and collapse in equal measure.
Henderson’s pop doesn’t chase euphoria; it studies it, questions it, and sometimes breaks it open just to see what’s left. For an artist so early in his trajectory, that’s a rare kind of confidence not loud, just true.
SAINT MESA
More than songs, Saint Mesa builds worlds. The Californian producer and multi-instrumentalist crafts soundscapes that feel carved from earth and breath, where tribal percussion meets synths, and melodies move like tides. His music has always lived between the primal and the divine, and 2025 has only made that duality louder. Every track is deeply infused with his aesthetic, which builds a whole universe where music, videos and photos become the prime elements.
This year saw the release of Higher and War, two singles that confirm Saint Mesa’s strong identity and aesthetic, an architect of his own mythos.
Beyond his solo work, Danny McCook spent 2025 lending his sonic signature to the mix and master of Equilibrium’s new album, a landmark collaboration with the German folk-metal band that pushed him to explore heavier textures. The result is a striking intersection between raw power and meditative atmosphere, the kind of contrast that defines his artistry.
His music is powered by self-discovery, having taught himself music while recovering from illness as a teenager, Saint Mesa’s work carries a spiritual weight that goes beyond genre. His compositions have been featured across film, fashion, and advertising, yet they remain deeply personal, each track feeling like an invocation rather than a product.
Saint Mesa still believes in slow-burn revelation in a world of quick algorithms.
LA NIÑA
Few Italian artists have redefined the meaning of identity in music quite like La Niña. Born Carola Moccia in Naples, she bridges the sacred and the street, crafting a sound that merges Mediterranean mysticism with modern electronica and sharp urban realism. Her world is one of contrast: devotional chants meet synth bass, Neapolitan dialect slips effortlessly into avant-pop production, and tradition becomes rebellion.
In 2025, her latest body of work Furèsta cemented that duality. The album feels like a descent and a resurrection at once intimate, ritualistic, and impossible to categorize. Tracks oscillate between vulnerability and rage, faith and profanity, tracing the blurred line between spiritual heritage and personal emancipation. It’s not nostalgia; it’s confrontation.
La Niña’s presence on stage mirrors her music: fierce, magnetic, unapologetically theatrical. She performs with the gravity of someone channeling generations before her, yet speaks in the language of the present. That tension makes her one of the most distinctive voices in the Italian and international scene, a figure capable of collapsing boundaries between folklore and futurism, between prayer and protest.
La Niña doesn’t borrow from her roots; she expands them, giving southern femininity a new, electrified vocabulary. Her art reminds us that independence it’s about refusing to shrink your story to fit anyone else’s expectations.
RONIIT
Roniit inhabits a corner of music where goth meets glacier, dark electro-pop that feels built in moonlight and thunder. The Los Angeles singer, producer, and visual artist has shaped a sound that leans into restraint rather than spectacle, built on airy vocals and melodies that leave room for tension to breathe. Her music is the kind that stays with you long after the track ends.
Her vocal fingerprint is unmistakable. Thanks to her acclaimed vocal packs, used across countless productions, Roniit’s tone has become a quiet staple in the electronic world: pure, crystalline, and instantly identifiable. Yet her work extends far beyond samples. Her songwriting and vocal presence have appeared in game trailers, television, and film, giving her sound a cinematic reach without losing its intimacy.
Roniit’s collaborative world is wide. She has worked with influential figures across the electronic spectrum and this year, she stepped into unexpected territory with Equilibrium, the German folk-metal band, lending her voice to the single Borrowed Waters, written by Jessica Rösch. The result shows how seamlessly she can inhabit heavier, orchestral environments without losing the emotional precision that defines her work.
Roniit builds impact through the tension between vulnerability and clarity. In a year defined by maximalist trends, her commitment to subtlety makes her one of the most compelling independent voices of 2025.
BELLE SISOSKI
When Belle Sisoski performs it’s like a ritual. The Malaysian artist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist has turned cultural heritage into spectacle, merging the primal pulse of Southeast Asian instruments with the widescreen sweep of electronic and cinematic production. On stage, she commands everything herself: looping, mixing, singing, drumming; until sound becomes movement, and movement becomes story.
Her shows are visual feasts: hornbill-inspired feathers, hypnotic light, and ancient instruments reborn in modern form. From the Tapi boat lute to the Turali nose flute. Songs like Stop Your Games and The Revelation linger with quiet intimacy, while Hold On and Mother’s Calling radiate urgency and defiance. It’s a sound that carries both myth and momentum, one that feels as rooted in rainforest soil as it is wired for global festivals like Ultra Taiwan and the Singapore Grand Prix.
With over three million followers built entirely through her own creative ecosystem, Belle has become a symbol of what independent artistry can look like when it marries innovation with preservation. Recognized by Tatler as a “Leader of Tomorrow” and winner of BURO’s 2024 Artist of the Year Award, she continues to push Southeast Asian instruments into the global conversation without stripping them of identity.
Belle Sisoski’s music it’s a reclamation, her work feels refreshingly analog in spirit: handmade, ancestral, and alive.
As Obscure Agency wraps up its 2025 New Artists to Watch journey, one thing is certain: independence is no longer the exception, it’s the blueprint. These artists proved that creative integrity can coexist with global reach, and that the future of music belongs to those unafraid to sound unlike anyone else.
The year may be ending, but the search never does.
In 2026, Obscure Agency’s founder Elnoir will keep her eyes wide open, continuing to uncover the next generation of hidden gems, the voices still whispering in the underground before the world learns to listen.
Here’s to the sound of persistence, and to an unforgettable end to 2025.