In the last twelve months I’ve seen dozens of Northwest acts play live, and it really feels like this region’s rolling in more great music now than it has since the early 1990s. Seriously.

Dizzying variety seems to be the key to this embarrassment of sonic riches. The national media’s been atwitter about Seattle’s post-Fleet Foxes neo-folk/Americana movement, but there’s an incredible groundswell of soul, punk, hip-hop, and straight-up rock bubbling furtively around here, too. It’s made wandering into Seattle music venues in the last year a truly exciting, rewarding, and unpredictable experience.

With all the great local artists out there, it only felt right to go out on a limb and point out a few lesser-known acts with the potential to forge a major mark in 2012. Truth be told, this list could be ten times larger than it is: I could easily summon up forty or fifty worthy bands/artists here. But the five musical entities below, great as they are,  haven’t yet generated the press they deserve. Whether any of them will capture the kind of attention that’s recently been bestowed upon The Head and the Heart or Allen Stone, I don’t know. From this vantage point, though, they damn well should.

Down North: Down North could be the most unapologetically throw-down funk band in Seattle right now, and yet they’re barely registering a blip on the music-press radar. Anthony Briscoe, Down North’s lead singer, possesses an astonishing, roof-rattling voice–a room-filling sound capable of going from gravelly anguish to nimble falsettos on a hairpin turn–and he commands a stage like nobody’s business. His bandmates, meantime, match his fireworks slug-for-slug: Conrad Real’s muscular jazz-tinged drumming and Brandon Storms’ liquid basswork, in particular, form one of this town’s most fiercely funky rhythm sections.  If their incendiary live shows, several stellar new songs, and a forthcoming music video don’t send this band’s stock way up in the next 11 months, something ain’t right with the world.

Whalebones: Forget (or at least set aside) the Neil Young comparisons this Seattle space-rock trio’s netted from a few local journalists. Whalebones’ self-titled 2011 full-length provided the best interstellar musical hit I received all last year. Lead singer Justin Deary snarls and drawls with the snotty offhanded charisma of a less-unstable Anton Newcombe, and the garage and the galactic converge gloriously in his heady guitar playing. Whalebones have always sounded great live, but Deary’s onstage confidence has grown by leaps and bounds since the first time I saw the band at the West Seattle Summerfest last July: That extra push of personality could well take these guys to some serious heights.

Shaprece: Stage presence? Check. Expressive and distinctive singing? Check. A catalog of truly catchy, mostly self-written songs that combine old-school warmth and the rush of a forward-thinking future without sounding like a slave to either? Check. After being a vocal gun-for-hire for everyone from Blue Sky Black Death to Mad Rad, this talented but heretofore-untouted local singer’s moment in the spotlight is long overdue.

Prom Queen: Seattle musician/comedienne Leeni doesn’t sit still for very long, having dabbled in everything from video-game-fueled dance ditties to some wonderfully winsome pop with her duo, Romeo and Juliet. She’s struck a truly sublime vein, though, as Prom Queen. Accompanying herself on guitar with occasional self-recorded symphonette backdrops, she croons haunting originals and masterfully-retooled covers (Madonna’s “Justify My Love”, Guns ‘N Roses’ “November Rain”) that create their own dusky pocket universe. It’s a sound that straddles the perfect balance between arch theatricality and all of the deeper emotions that swirl beneath such artifice, and it’s captivating enough to connect with anyone who’s ever sat in a lonely bar contemplating the darkness. Cult stardom’s only one evocative soundtrack appearance away.

Sugar Sugar Sugar: This region could use a funny, sexually-charged, larger-than-life rock collective about now, and this Bellingham groove-rock trio looks like they’ve more than got the goods from this corner. Andru Creature’s stuttering David Johanson-gone-horndog vocals, Lupe Flores’ stomping kickdrum, and Justin Verlanic’s gloriously greasy glam guitar are just made for cranking at top volume.