I am one of those people that discover new artists accidentally, obsess over them for months and play their albums in loop for hours everyday until I hate them. Ever since the beginning of this academic year, my victims have been Pentatonix – an a cappella group whose YouTube channel PTXofficial I happened to stumble upon one boring day. Since this is not usually my favourite kind of music, I must say that I was not expecting to like them much, but I was pleasantly surprised when I watched my first Pentatonix video.

So who are Pentatonix, and what makes them so special? Pentatonix is, as mentioned, an a cappella group composed of five members (from which the name derives; penta being the Greek numeral prefix meaning five): three lead vocalists, Scott Hoying, Kirsten “Kirstie” Maldonado and Mitch Grassi, vocal bass Avi Kaplan and beatboxer Kevin Olusola.

They were the winners of the 3^rd season of the American talent show The Sing Off, which is a well-deserved recognition seeing as they are some of the most vocally talented people I have ever heard. They have the amazing ability of recreating any note or sound with the sole use of their voices, without the help of any sort of instrument.

They specialise in different types of music videos, and are best known for their covers of various mainstream songs such as Ariana Grande’s Problem, Calvin Harris’ I Need Your Love and Lorde’s Royals. They have also published original songs, which they write and sing themselves. A few examples are Love Again and Run To You, both of which have their own official music video on Youtube.

The best kind of video is, in my opinion, their mashups/medleys, which are typically focused on a single artist whose most famous songs they “mash up” into one single track. They have done this with Daft Punk, Beyoncé and others, and the videos I mentioned both have over 20 million views on Youtube.

As of October 2014, they have published four EP’s and two studio albums. Overall, since the release of their first EP PTX, Vol. I in November 2012, they have sold over 500,000 copies worldwide, so it is safe to predict them for a fruitful career in the music industry.

If you’re still not convinced of how amazing they are, go check out their YouTube channel PTXofficial (www.youtube.com/user/PTXofficial) or their official website www.ptxofficial.com – they’re really worth a shot. And as Avi often says… “Don’t forget to subscribe!”