This week, Seattle lost a shining star as legendary producer Rick Parashar passed away on Thursday. With his brother Raj, Rick Parashar founded London Bridge Studios, where many of Seattle's iconic records were recorded, including Pearl Jam's Ten, Soundgarden's Louder Than Love, Alice in Chains' Di…
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…
Following the smoky energy of Rose Windows, the Yeti stage was taken over by Secret Canadian's Suuns. The crowd swelled as they dove into their set. At times the trio went into nearly ambient jams, reverb heavy and almost ominous. But mostly the set was rhythm heavy, the audience waving their hands…
DJ Toya B is the alias of Seattle-via-Tacoma DJ Toya Harris, a longtime lover of cutting-edge club music and fashion that's recently propelled onto the local scene as a party-starting DJ making dancefloors bounce and vibe to seductive mixes of hip-hop, R&B, pop, and progressive club selections.…
Record Store Day is monumental in Seattle in a way that isn't seen in the rest of the country: we crawl out of whatever grunge holes we live in and slither over to the nearest record stores and start feeding on vinyl, eating 45s, and rubbing the sleeves all over our bodies, happily rolling around i…
Although they hit you immediately, the depth of Unknown Mortal Orchestra's songs belies their urgency. Underneath a pulsating rhythm or Ruban Nielsen's expressive vocals is always a subtle, just-as-infectious keyboard melody or a texture that alters Nielsen's voice. On the Portland group's latest a…
J-Nasty is the alias of Seattle's Janice Ibarra, an emerging DJ and co-founder of the Women.Weed.Wifi collective/movement, who also finds time to teach yoga, run the online thrift shop Seamlessly Supernatural, and help out at Moksha, an art gallery and clothing boutique in the U-District. A multi-f…
Seattle's Trinity "Trinitron" Meriwood is a beloved local DJ that has been immersed in the underground electronic music scene since the early 1990s and steady rocking parties behind the turntables for the past decade. A passionate purveyor of the funkiest flavors of house music, Trinitron has spun …
Tuxedo is the collaborative project between Michigan-raised, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter/producer Mayer Hawthorne and veteran Seattle-based producer Jake One. Bonding over a shared love of early 1980s boogie, disco, funk, and R&B, the pair soon connected to create modern-day jams steepe…
Announcements for the upcoming Upstream Music Fest + Summit keep, well, streaming in! Last week, we revealed the first wave of breakout sessions. Now the full speaker lineup is here, along with new details on keynotes from Macklemore and some additions to previously announced sessions, like Pearl J…
Are you going hungry... for Seattle grunge nostalgia? Supergroup Temple of the Dog (comprised of Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, and drummer Matt Cameron of both bands) are reuniting for the 25th anniversary of their self-title…
Next on the KEXP broadcast live from Kex Hostel at Iceland Airwaves Music Festival was wild Japanese psychadelic punk band Bo Ningen. A four-piece acid-punk band all hailing from Japan, but got together as a band in London in 2006-7. Taigen Kwabe (vocal & bass) met Kohhei Matsuda (guitar) in 2…
Had they come around some 25 years ago, Nashville's Wild Cub would surely have been "pretty in pink." Formed only a year ago by singer/songwriter Keegan DeWitt and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Bullock, the Nashville group sounds less like their Music City contemporaries and more like they belong on…
Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard talks about his new side project, Painted Shield, a collaboration including singer/songwriter Mason Jennings.
R-Pal is the DJ alias of Seattle's Rachel Kramer. Active on the local DJ scene since first getting behind the decks in 2013, Rachel currently runs a cassette mixtape series called Technodad alongside KEXP's own DJ Sharlese and is a member of Seattle's TUF, a female/non-binary/trans collective based…
Yumi Zouma are four friends that originally grew up together in Christchurch, New Zealand, found themselves in three cities (New York, Paris, Auckland) upon graduating from high school, yet reconnected over the internet to create their charming debut EP in 2014. Their romantic, nostalgia-tinged dre…
It's shoegaze, not navelgaze. Oyama may have a strong My Bloody Valentine-streak, but the Icelandic five-piece have followed up their initial EP with an invigorated their sound on their debut LP, Coolboy, whose woozy, pitch-bending melodies range between airy dream pop and fuzzy psychedelia. We rec…
"This is an instrumental about weed," Acapulco Lips bassist Maria-Elena Juarez said pointedly as the band started their set at the KEXP stage. It got giggles at first, but the second they started leaning into their psych-meets-surf jam, the laughter turned into dancing and some serious vibing. It w…
It's easy to lose context with how massive grunge was in the early '90s. Bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Nirvana are so ubiquitous with the region at this point that it's hard to imagine what the Northwest was like before they came barreling through with heavy punk riffs with lots and lots o…
Melenie Yap Chesneau, or simply Melenie, has long been one of the Seattle's most trusted resources for quality music. A tireless networker dedicated to connecting people with top-shelf music, Melenie has handled a multitude of roles within the local music community. Her passion for promoting shows,…
