Nell Okonjo

Nell Okonjo writes fast and records faster. ‘Cold Kitchen’ — six songs, one voice, an empty flat — was written in four weeks and finished in eleven days, and the restraint in it is not a stylistic choice so much as a refusal to add anything she could not justify. She is the newest act on the roster and already the one we get asked about most, largely because her songs work everywhere: on a phone speaker, in a car, and in front of two hundred people who have stopped talking. She has been opening for the rest of the roster all year and steadily converting their audiences. A first full-length is being written now, apparently in the same flat, which now has furniture in it.