Despite being Black Friday, quite a slew of new albums hit the stores last week, including the highly anticipated third album from The Weeknd. It's a star-studded affair featuring guest appearances from Daft Punk, Lana Del Rey, Future, and Kendrick Lamar. Swedish psych rockers Dungen share their la…
Swedish rockers Peter Bjorn and John have been proselytizing their pro-60s pop prowess since 1999. The trio really took the indie world by storm back in 2006 with their dance-floor hit "Young Folks," and ten years later, they're still artfully writing their whistle-catchy songs like the title track…
English indie band The xx released the deluxe edition of their third studio album I See You today which includes three bonus tracks. One of them, "Naive" samples Drake's "Doing It Wrong," while "Brave For You (Marfa Demo)" is a stripped down acoustic recording of their track "Brave For You." They …
You'd be hard pressed to find a list of 2016's most anticipated albums without Porches on it. The moniker of New York's Aaron Maine and friends makes its Domino debut this year with Pool, a record that sounds and feels like a breakout ready to happen. Here, Maine ditches the lo-fi indie rock baseme…
How many indie rock dudes does it take to cover a Sharon Van Etten song? By our count, four, as footage has surfaced of a 2010 concert where Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National, and Colin Stetson covered her single "Love More." Watch below. The footage comes from a Mu…
"Your hippocampus does it alright" That astute observation from Built to Spill's Doug Martsch on his cerebral ode to memory function is a heck of an understatement when it comes to Twin Cities band Hippo Campus. The young four-piece is quickly becoming the pride of the St. Paul scene with their bre…
Spaced out indie psych at its finest, Dreamsalon’s Soft Stab is another piercing offering from the misty shores of the Pacific Northwest. Consisting of members Min Yee, Craig Chambers and Matthew Ford, the Seattle band crafts original and honest songs stewed in complex chord progressions, melodic b…
San Francisco has been doing the shoegaze revival right for a while now. There's something about the way bay area indie rock meshes with the sounds of My Bloody Valentine and Ride to give the classic, noisy 80s textures a brisk, airy sensibility, and the denseness of the classics is made new throug…
Unlikely Friends is a band that really is described by anything but the band's name choice. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised the band hasn't existed up until this point. A collaboration between D. Crane of BOAT and Charles Bert of Math and Physics Club with the help of Chris Mac on drums seems like a …
Seattle's Chastity Belt play energetic indie rock 'n roll. They are sarcastic, sharp and both complex and simple all at once. They are also an all-female band. But does gender matter when it comes to the music they produce? Does it matter for the bands Childbirth, Lemolo or La Luz? You get the sens…
Sunny, scuzzy, moody and melodic - somehow Crocodiles's music encompasses it all. The indie rock duo of Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell worked with a master of a similar darkly seductive sound, Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes, to create an update on their punk and New Wave influences like Ec…
When you hear a band is from Nashville, most likely you think of big coiffed hair, thick acoustic guitar sounds and gallon-sized hats. Well, Wild Cub, borne out of the Tennessee music hotbed, sounds more like they were from Northern California, or even the Pacific Northwest, than from the same plac…
Join KEXP on August 10th and 11th at Camp Long in West Seattle for the 15th annual Arts in Nature Festival, presented by Nature Consortium! Experience music and nature in a multifaceted, interactive way this weekend with a variety of genres, installations and activities for all ages. Headlining th…
Apart from their various shows around the U.S. and Europe, we haven't heard much from Texan lo-fi indie rock band The Baptist Generals since their debut Sub Pop album, No Silver/No Gold ten years ago, but the band is back with the highly anticipated Jackleg Devotional to the Heart. The Baptist Gene…
Wo' Pop host Darek Mazzone had a chance to spend some time in China this year and dug deep into the country's amazing indie music scene: "I was blown away by the complexity, range, and fervor of what I found. I feel that China could be one of the next hotbeds of music and culture - it's just …
Next month we celebrate the 20th birthday of High/Low, the timeless full-length debut from New York indie rock stalwarts Nada Surf. The band celebrated the milestone in great fashion, reissuing the record on beautiful orange vinyl through Vinyl Me Please and giving it a fantastic packaging makeover…
Sometimes I really wish I could jump in a time machine and visit the Seattle of yesteryear. Not because the traffic was better, and there were fewer condos, and people argued on album covers instead of the Internet, but because I really wish I could witness firsthand the version of this city - and …
Next on the Iceland Airwaves broadcast live from Kex Hostel was Icelandic indie-rock artist Júníus Meyvant. Hailing from the remote Vestmann Islands, Júníus Meyvant (the pseudonym used by Unnar Gísli Sigurmundsson) started playing music later than most, after finding a beat-up guitar at his parents…
In honor of Janet Jackson releasing her highly anticipated Unbreakable album today, Tin Angel Records has dropped a tribute album called Dear Janet. The album features a variety of indie artists, who each cover one of 16 Janet classics. For instance, Deradoorian takes on "The Pleasure Principle", …
Portland awoke to the resounding hiss-and-crack of PBR tallboys and the camp-tastic house party vibes of local band Wampire Sunday afternoon at Project Pabst. Their hazy psych rock medley was followed by charmingly twee local pop group Wild Ones, who delivered meticulously jammy indie pop. Lead sin…
