Ellie Gould­ing, a 23 year old from Hert­ford­shire is a pretty hot tip for this year. Snapped up in Septem­ber by Polydor, Crit­ics’ choice at last year’s Brit Awards, top choice on BBC’s Sound of 2010, iTunes single of the week for Christ­mas 2009… you don’t really need me to tell you that when her album is released on the first of March, her voice is going to explode onto every radio sta­tion going.

I was poin­ted in her dir­ec­tion the other day, and I’ve found it dif­fi­cult to stop listen­ing to her. She’s actu­ally a little tricky to track down, and although she does have a couple of tracks on Nap­ster and Spo­tify, and Jakwob’s dub­step remix, the best place to find her stuff is You­Tube (it would appear she hasn’t even made it onto the illegal file-sharing web­sites yet). One of the tracks on You­Tube is a live record­ing from Later… with Jools Hol­land, and her voice is just as strik­ing live. Some­where music­ally between Little Boots, Kate Nash and Björk, keep an eye on her — she’s set to explode.