Another one to keep and eye on for 2010 will be Minnesota-based Owl City, who will be drop­ping “Fire­flies” the first single from their 2009 LP “Ocean Eyes” on 22^nd Feb­ru­ary. The single had its first air­play this week and I’ve been driv­ing people mad with it ever since. Adam Young has cre­ated a new breed of syn­thpop that’s gentle and easy to listen to, yet hugely infec­tious. Full of catchy hooks and simple yet soul­ful lyr­ics, this band will appeal to any cur­rent fans of Death­cab and the Postal Ser­vice as well as some of the more main­stream pop fol­low­ers, who will be bowled over by songs like the heart-wrenching “Vanilla Twi­light”. As if that wasn’t enough, Owl City have already secured a fan base amongst their peers, most not­ably Reli­ent K (In fact if you listen care­fully on “Fire­flies” you can hear Reli­ent K front­man Matt Thiessen provid­ing the back­ing vocals).

Con­sid­er­ing they’ve only been around since 2007, when Young star­ted writ­ing songs in his parent’s base­ment, he’s have done pretty well for him­self so far, bag­ging him­self a record deal with Uni­ver­sal Repub­lic. “Ocean Eyes” enjoyed mod­er­ate suc­cess in the bill­board charts and “Fire­flies” was a bit hit across the pond, so I can pre­dict only good things for them over here as well. Cur­rently tour­ing in sup­port of the “Ocean Eyes” LP; they are already selling out UK dates, and will be hit­ting Brit­ish soil on the 10^th Feb­ru­ary. I for one will be eagerly await­ing their arrival. Watch this space.