The Growlers perform live on KEXP in Seattle, Washington
Second on today's broadcast live from KEX hostel at at Iceland Airwaves Music Festival was Icelandic singer-songwriter Axel Flóvent. Axel has achieved recent international prominence after years playing in his hometown of Húsavik (a small fishing village in the north of Iceland), and all around his…
Beck has finally announced his follow-up to 2015's Grammy-winning Album of the Year, Morning Phase. Entitled Colors, he's had the album done for quite a while and has been teasing it for the last year, dropping the singles, "Wow," "Dreams," and "Up All Night." Beck said in a new interview, “I suppo…
Zola Jesus is releasing her 6th album Okovi in September via Sacred Bones. She previously shared the lead single "Exhumed" and today the correlating video for the song has been released. Directed by Jacqueline Castel, the creepy black and white footage bears a resemblance to The Ring, with a simila…
Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard announced in December that he was covering Teenage Fanclub's 1991 album Bandwagonesque in its entirety. Today, he released his version of "The Concept." Gibbard explained why he was covering that particular album: “Bandwagonesque is my favorite record by my favorit…
Earlier this week New York duo Cults (Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion) teased a possible new album by sharing a 20-second clip of a song called "Gilded Lilly" on Instagram. Today they announced the new album, called Offering, and shared its title track, their first release in four years after 20…
It's been a long wait for Ted Leo fans, who haven't gotten new material from him since 2010's Brutalist Bricks, but hope is on the horizon. His next LP The Hanged Man will be released on September 8 and he's offered us the lead single "You're Like Me." The single is a dark detailing of sexual assau…
Weren't we just saying there seems to be a day for everything? Well, today is National Nude Day. We're not sure exactly how this day came to be, but research shows it began in 1976 in New Zealand. (No wonder Flight of the Conchords wrote that song!) Incidentally, today also happens to be Bastille D…
There's a lot of things we love about our KEXP New Home, like having the space to house a beautiful baby grand piano (on permanent loan), and then hearing the gorgeous playing of artist John Grant down the hallways, with each chord reverberating and filling our in-studio space with the purest of so…
KEXP's own DJ Kevin Cole (our Afternoon Show host and Senior Director of Programming) has curated a special mix for Nordic Playlist, a site that devoted to the best sounds from the North. As he explains to the site, "I went with a mix of mostly newer releases, like the Samaris track, which I love, …
Mark your calendars: Icelandic icons Sigur Rós just announced dates for their North American tour, including a Tuesday, September 20th stop at the Paramount Theatre. A press release declares there will be no opening acts, nor additional musicians. "The shows will give the group a chance to road te…
Minneapolis' ubiquitous underground hip hop figure P.O.S has a long list of credentials: guitarist for Building Better Bombs, vocalist and keyboard player for Marijuana Deathsquads, member of well-populated supergroup Gayngs, and a founding member of the Doomtree collective. All of these were runni…
Local lad Will Toledo -- better known to KEXP listeners as Car Seat Headrest -- shares a new video today for the track "Vincent" off the upcoming Matador Records release Teens of Denial, out this Spring (not to be confused with the previous release, Teens of Style). As the YouTube caption states: …
Car Seat Headrest came dressed for success to their first KEXP in-studio session. Adorned in suits and ties, the young Seattle band got down to business with a fantastic five-song set of lo-fi epic indie rock. Despite his relatively young age, frontman and songwriter Will Toledo (reportedly just 22…
Rounding out our last day of the KEXP broadcast live from Kex Hostel at Iceland Airwaves Music Festival is Icelandic dream-pop band Vök. Formed in 2013 as a duo (singer Margrét Rán Magnúsdóttir and saxophonist Andri Már Enoksson) to enter Músíktilraunir (or "Musical Experiment Contest")--a battle o…
It’s time again for Friday on My Mind. Our weekly blog post where we look at videos centered around one common theme. This is a collaborative effort between KEXP and King 5 News. Next Tuesday is Cinco de Mayo and we all know that means - time to drink. Or at least that’s what it tends to mean for a…
Happy 2015! As always at the beginning of a new year there's been a lot of looking back at the year that just passed, but in this series I tend to cast my glance a bit farther back. So let's take a trip to 1984, and a little straight edge hardcore band from Boston called D.Y.S. I'm actually pretty …
