I have loved Dutch punk gods The Ex since seeing them open for American punk gods Fugazi way back in nineteen-ought-ninety-something. The sheer, gleeful energy they bring to their discordant, blissfully ragged music is something that truly needs to be beheld live. The records I own of theirs are fa…
I've covered a few Australian bands in this space over the years, the majority of whom appear to have been related to this Australian band. The Eastern Dark, the Internet tells me, contained ex-members of both The Celibate Rifles (Eastern Dark founder and singer James Darroch) and The Lime Spiders …
I'm really glad I was born when I was. The idea of going through teenagerdom without the blistering, angst-laden pounding of Ministry (particularly late '80s and '90s Ministry) as a soundtrack seems too awful to imagine. Apparently billions of pre-gen-Xers managed it just fine and grew into perfect…
The more or less random selection of Tucson band Naked Prey's third album from the shelves at KEXP was something of a blessing for me - and hopefully for you - as it led me to the web site and Bandcamp page of Frontier Records, a label whose tastes seem to have been wide open and ranging as their n…
Reading's Slowdive were one of the bands that defined the shoegaze sound of the early '90s, although their career suffered somewhat in that their first album, Just for a Day, was released just as the British press was tiring of the scene and ready for some backlash. Today, they're remembered as a k…
Motörhead needs no introduction, right? Right.
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 …
I guess this year I'm making up for the previous lack of XTC posts in this series. The Dukes of Stratosphear were XTC in all but name, working under a different moniker to crank out a couple albums of pop genius that heavily mined some of their favorite sounds of the '60s, from Barrett-era Pink Flo…

In 2018, KEXP celebrated the 30th anniversary of local record label Sub Pop with a four-month retrospective, "counting up" every catalog number in their vast discography of over 1,200 releases. Dig into the archives of our catalog coverage, featuring in-depth coverage on the history of their releases.