Cassie

New York R&B newcomer Cassie sounds blasé about everything, even her sexual history. “I know them other guys, they been talkin’ ’bout the way I do what I do/They heard I was good, they wanna see if it’s true,” she mentions on her debut single, “Me & U.” Her goodies, then, stray far from the jar. She’s accompanied by sound-of-now production (an ice-cream-truck jingle under the verses, keyboards of doom in the chorus, and strings that flare for a millisecond every four bars). Maybe it’s that the postcrunk, drop-it-like-it’s-quiet attitude has us trained to expect less, but this sounds huge.