Researching this article led me to a Yahoo! Answers question that, in a way, cuts to the heart of the aspect of the contemporary music scene I wish to discuss, though ‘username:Cinnibuns’ never realised it: “Why do people think it’s cool to be sad and depressed all the time?” She poses a question that could have been put to any number of the new generation of young male musicians who are fostering a genre of music defined by its sadness.

Being sad, then, is having its musical moment in the sun. Or, rather, a rain-soaked alleyway at night. From Drake’s drunken late-night phone calls (I’ve just stopped picking up) to the Biebs’ post- break-up tears on stage this very week, 2012 is shaping up to be the year of the sad face. More than just a new take on the traditional break-up record, however, a noteworthy new batch of young male artists have broken through with albums that are as genuinely heart-rending as they are potentially hit-making.

Inflected with R&B but resistant to limitation within that genre, artists such as How to Dress Well, Active Child and Deptford Goth are producing music that truly mourns. Moreover, their crossover into the hearts and ears of music fans evidently betrays a universal desire for a long-overdue revitalizing of a specifically male-gendered R&B. So just why are sad boys doing ‘it’ so well? And does the very nature of an album of mourning equal an inevitable, eventual death to such a creative approach? Mourning processes are designed to lead to an eventual moving-on, after all – can the sad boy ever be a career-spanning force to be reckoned with?

‘Doom-pop’, ‘Indie R’n’B’ and even ‘Tumblr-gaze’: 2012 has also been a year for coining silly genre names that resist Wikipedia citation. Such lazy tags, reeking as they do of a critical struggle to assimilate traditional genres into the Internet age, finally do little more than undermine the emotional charge behind these artists and their records. The artists themselves claim an individuality that stands well apart from the pack of influential R&B stars that it might be temping to lump them with.

Tom Krell of How To Dress Well is explicit on this point, telling The Guardian earlier this year that he doesn’t see Frank Ocean, The Weeknd et al as his sonic peers: “Right now, there’s a lot of indie R&B circulating that’s like, whatever…I mean its ready to be played in Urban Outfitters, [but] it’s not ready to be experienced in any meaningful way.” Referencing Urban Outfitters before I get the chance to, Krell comes across in interview as well aware of the critical temptation to place his style within a larger, perhaps artificial, musical movement. Instead, he claims his latest long-player, Total Loss, to be a truly personal record, and this in more than just the sense of its individual realization.

Total Loss is, explicitly, an album of mourning, with Krell ready to answer with clarity the media’s questions on this point: the deaths of a best friend and an uncle, his mother becoming mentally ill and the breakdown of a long-term relationship prefaced the writing of the album. Total Loss, as the name would suggest, is deeply sad and affecting.

Opening to sounds of waves splashing on a distant shore, Krell’s doleful falsetto kicks in with the words, “You were there for me when I was in trouble/ You could understand for me that life was a struggle.” So far, so 80s cheese – and yet, not. Krell has described that he wishes his audience member to react “in like” to the album and its live performances, a statement that prompts the mental image of a room of bawling audience-members after the manner of an eighteenth-century ‘cult of sensibility.’ Strip back this potential mawkishness, however, and the listener does experience real emotional empathy in listening to the album. We don’t just sympathise with Krell, but rather enter into the emotional process of its composition as we are listening.

Why does the record seem so genuine? It’s not the emotional openness of Krell in interviews alone – one need only glance at the weekly piano-laden VTs on X Factor to know that a sob story does not necessarily an empathetic recording make. Just as in real life, the process of mourning cannot be restricted to three and a half minutes; rather, the listener is privy to a track-by-track emotional journey over the entire album. Through a clarity of vocals and a heightened sonic sensitivity – the pluck of a harp, sudden string sections – the album works out its own grief in the manner of a totalizing soundscape; comparable to the niche Krell is working in in 2011’s You Are All I See from Active Child (aka. Pat Grossi).

The record harnesses the same tricks: epic electronical landscapes, and R&B so minimal it belongs in a monastery. And yet, You are all I see, whilst addressing the same ‘you’ of the many direct appeals to us the listeners in Total Loss, loses the connection somewhere in translation. This music might appear formulaic, then, but it takes a very specially crafted whole to translate genuine emotion into seemingly artificial sound.

More exciting, perhaps, is Deptford Goth – nope, not another cringey genre label for the Tumblr generation, but rather South London’s Daniel Woolhouse, whose video for single ‘Life After Defo’ portrays an aesthetic which is as minimal and introspective as its musical means. Woolhouse’s plaintive lyrics, overlaid karaoke-style over Mac Photo Booth greyscale, plays on the artificiality of modernity, yet cuts to the truth of conducting relationships in 2012. The lyrics –‘That’s when it takes you apart/ Something soon enough where another thing was’ are all the more affecting in their evident acceptance of the inadequacy of language to express such emotion.

The album of mourning is a thing of beauty, but not of everlasting beauty. As Krell’s grief works itself out over the process of recording, so too replaying the record reveals new glimmers of hope. Krell has himself said that his album is “about developing a relationship with loss which is spiritually enriching rather than devastating,” and, after a few replays, the listener too will notice the hopefulness that can emerge from grieving, as enacted by these artists’ recordings.

The power of a record of mourning, finally, emerges from this very transformation, but it also requires that artists cannot be considered ‘sad’ in this way forever. The playing of these records prompts a re-visiting of memory which is itself key to moving on from grief, and thus these artists cannot continue to release such sad music without us beginning to disbelieve their authenticity. It will be interesting to see what they do next; perhaps Krell, Grossi, Woolhouse et al will come to discover a musical expression that welds vocals and sound with similar accuracy, but to elicit a ‘cult of happiness’ in its listeners, instead.