Hometown: London.
The lineup: Sirach Charles (vocals).
The background: We can see Sirach Charles, the 24-year-old singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer known as Angel, being pitched among the "T" types, with some of the urban edge of Tinie and Tinchy and plenty of the R&B polish of Taio Cruz and Trey Songz. A couple of articles have already posited him as a British Usher or Chris Brown, with some of their bad-boy cachet (he's heavily tattooed), and we'd also throw in as comparisons, because of his writing skills and production nous, the names of Labrinth and Loick Essien. Like Labrinth (and Emeli Sande), he comes with "form", having written tunes behind the scenes – ahead of his launch as a solo star – for Roll Deep (Green Light, a No 1 hit in August 2010), Devlin, JLS, Cheryl Cole, Pixie Lott and Alesha Dixon, with future plans to work with everyone from Tulisa (which doesn't particularly excite) to Frank Ocean (which does).
He's got form in another sense, in that he spent eight months in prison on remand, although he was subsequently found not guilty of all charges. We don't know what he was accused of, or when he was put away, but we're assuming it was fairly recently because there was a spate of one-to-watch features about him in 2010 and early 2011 that make no mention of any law infringement, after which it all went quiet until the release late last year of his first official EP, 7 Minutes Before Time, the follow-up to his Patience Is a Virtue mixtape. Not that his stint in stir has done him any harm: he is now being hailed "the new face of UK R&B" by Radio 1, he was nominated for HMV's Next Big Thing and he was in the final five (with, among others, Lana Del Rey and Clement Marfo) for MTV's Brand New award. Crime, even the scent of it, pays.
To their credit Island, which has signed Angel, isn't exactly airbrushing his stay at Her Majesty's Pleasure out of his story; if anything, it goes with the idea of him as the spiky R&B smoothie: on 7 Minutes Before Time there are cameos by Wiley, Scorcher and Giggs, while Wretch 32 – the paradigmatic example of a pop star with A Past – raps on Angel's first bona fide bid for solo stardom, Go In, Go Hard, his new single and one of the lead releases from the soundtrack of Streetdance 2. Like everything on the 7 Minutes … EP, and indeed like much contemporary R&B, Go In, Go Hard is equal parts gleam and grime, with the gloss to satisfy pop kids and the grit to assuage their older siblings. The lyrics talk about his Journey from the proverbial underground to the charts, with a hip-hopper's bravado ("There's nobody else on my level") and an autobiographical candour ("I made mistakes and they hated") to appease Adele fans. Elsewhere on the EP there are gunshots and swear words, rock guitar riffs and melodies that sound as much like emo as they do "soul". Many of the lyrics are cliched and the arrangements cloying, toughness is clearly a preoccupation (there's even a ballad called Hard), and what possessed him to sing about "cuddling" and "willies", we have no idea. But he's definitely going in, hard or otherwise.
The buzz: "Angel is a triple threat. Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and record producer … Possibly the UK pop and R&B industry's best-kept secret" – femalefirst.co.uk.
The truth: He's Britain's first all-singing, all-writing and producing urban boy wonder. Unless you count Labrinth.
Most likely to: Go in.
Least likely to: Go soft.
What to buy: Go In, Go Hard feat Wretch 32 is released by Island on 12 March.
File next to: Loick Essien, Labrinth, Taio Cruz, Trey Songz.
Links: officialangel.co.uk.
Monday's new band: BIGKids.
