Holy shit, Say Hi knows how to get the party started on a Friday night at 9PM! I honestly think I saw more empty drink cups and shot glasses lining the Barboza shelf of subwoofers tonight than I’ve ever seen at their weekly Saturday night dance gigs. In a city on a hill where we show the Rocky Horr…
How the 80-piece collective started on Twitch and became Seattle's best-selling band
British band Cheatahs sped over to the Cutting Room Studios in NYC, all the way from London, to play a raw live set just for KEXP. Well, not exactly. Last month, the UK group, consisting of Dean Reid, James Wignall, Marc Raue, and Nathan Hewitt, made a quick 7-city jaunt in the U.S. to introduce th…
THUMPERS — not only is the name itself indicative of their sound, but the preferred spelling is all in caps. "Every time people actually do it, I feel a bit bad", confessed John Hamson Jr., one of the band's two founders, in a recent interview with KEXP. But Hamson and his cohort Marcus Pepperell m…
Easily one of the most popular bands to perform during our broadcast from the Bumbershoot Music Lounge, The Joy Formidable have blown up since the first time they played for KEXP back in 2010. Their second and most recent album, Wolf's Law, amps up their shoegazery rock sound to epic proportions, y…
This month, UK electronic act Factory Floor finally release a proper full-length record. This is the London band that started almost eight years ago, bouncing around styles to dial into the pure genius that they’ve come up with now. They released mini album Talking On Cliffs in 2009 and dropped the…
“I don’t care what you think,” sings the red-dressed Portland native Sallie Ford. The lyric is definitely in line with the spirit of her newest album, which has as much to do with the idea of freedom, of not being captured in any genre box, as it does with the huge punching sound of Sallie Ford and…
Back in 2014, legendary shoegaze greats Slowdive reunited for a performance at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival. With their peers Ride and Lush both reuniting after two years and writing new music, it's no surprise that Slowdive have done the same. Stream the track "Star Roving" below, their f…
Jimmy and the Mustangs might be lovely people without a bone of misogyny in their bodies (they did, according to their "I swear a member of the band didn't write this" Wikipedia page, make their live debut opening up for the Go-Go's), but there are a few things about their debut album, Hey Little G…
We've got new releases from a few music veterans this week. British rock legends The Rolling Stones return with their first album in 11 years. KEXP Music Director Don Yates calls it, "a shockingly potent set of Chicago blues. The band sounds raw and vital, and Mick Jagger tears into the set list of…
Anika is the stage name of British-born, frequently Berlin-based singer, songwriter, and political journalist Annika Henderson, a magnetic vocalist and writer that emerged as a solo artist in 2010 with releases on Portishead member Geoff Barrow's Invada Records as well as the highly revered Stones …
This past week's Concert at the Mural proved to be a great kickoff to our weekly concerts at Seattle Center's Mural Amphitheater, featuring music from local acts The Helio Sequence, Summer Cannibals, and COSMOS. These bands were joined by a host of local food vendors, and an enthusiastic audience w…
I have covered Soul Asylum in this space a couple of times before, but it's been almost exactly four years since the last time. I have had four years to dig back into the earlier, and I presume cooler, albums by this long-running Minneapolis alt-rock mainstay (They still exist! They put out a new a…
Sister musicians Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee and Allison Crutchfield ofSwearin' got together to cover Sleater-Kinney's "Modern Girl" for Vulture Festival in New York over the weekend. Before their solo careers, the Crutchfield's were in the beloved pop punk band P.S. Eliot, which broke up in 2…
For many years, the mantle of "most consistently stellar artist" seemed to be squarely on the shoulders of Spoon, but there's an argument for it to be moved over, if it hasn't already shifted, to Laura Marling. Six very good-to-great albums that each built on its predecessor will do that, though. I…
It's no surprise that Radiohead's Saturday show at Key Arena is sold out; the band have amassed a rabid fan base since forming in Abingdon, Oxfordshire back in 1985. And, it's no surprise that this roundup of Radiohead covers goes on and on; many of our favorite artists cite Radiohead as one of the…
L.A. ladies Warpaint share a new song... titled "New Song." Well played, Warpaint, well played. The track is slated for their third full-length, Heads Up, which finds the group moving (no pun intended) in a more dance-oriented direction. Vocalist/guitarist Emily Kokal says, via a press release, "W…
Saturday marks the one-year anniversary of Wilco's surprise release of Star Wars (voted #15 in KEXP's Top Albums of 2015 countdown), and to celebrate, the band have done another surprise release. Check out the single "Locator" below, which you can download for free in exchange for an email address…
Mac Demarco’s declaration of “make yourself at home” at the beginning of his set at Sasquatch! Music Festival on Saturday was a fitting notion, as Mac has been making himself at home in the ears and hearts of fans for years now. The Canadian songster has a knack for writing songs that float and dri…
