San Francisco rockers Thee Oh Sees have shared the opening track from their upcoming album Mutilator Defeated At Last (out May 18). "Withered Hand" goes for broke with a steady buildup and an explosive payoff. The band has also contributed a song called "The Ceiling" to the 50 Bands & a Cat fo…
Seattle. 1998. The Murder City Devils, a band of Seattle's top garage punks, is playing shows with Pacific Northwestern 90s greats Pearl Jam, Built to Spill, and The Black Halos. Flash forward to 2014, and the band has gone through three albums, a deficit of one member, and most importantly, one br…
New Zealand band Ghost Wave blew us away with their hypnotic set of moody psych-rock songs at our CMJ broadcast last year, so we're especially thrilled to debut the band's music video for the track "Orb." The closing track off their debut Flying Nun Records release, Ages, "Orb" finds the group of A…
The Los Angeles band, Las Cafeteras, named themselves after a community space in El Sereno, L.A. where group members met one another and started to learn and play Son Jarocho music together, influenced by regional Mexican folk music. The band feminized the name to honor women, they note. Modern day…
There isn’t a plethora out there on the wide open spaces of the internet about the wild Seattle band Country Lips, so here's a bit of detail: the 7-piece band sounds like a whiskey-infused, shack-swaying barn party. The staple of their music is their fast moving fingers on violin, guitar and keys, …
Grant Hart, drummer , songwriter, and co-lead singer for the influential rock band Hüsker Dü, has died. He was 56 years old. The cause of death has not been announced, but he had reportedly been fighting cancer. Bob Mould confirmed the news via Facebook. The Minneapolis band was formed in 1979 by H…
Ty Segall is like the American Horror Story of rock 'n' roll. The now-LA based maniacal, musical polymath constantly reinvents while rotating a cast of characters around a shifting approach to one theme: to rock the living shit out of you. Though his latest album - and what we can assume to be just…
There's nothing pretty about Girl Band. In fact, the Dublin-based four-piece play some of the most abrasive pop songs you're likely to hear. But it hadn't always been that way. Singer Dara Kiely and guitarist Alan Duggan had played together in more conventionally "indie" type bands before hitting u…
London's Kitchens of Distinction, like so many bands championed by KCMU, were a promising and critically acclaimed band in the late '80s and '90s that never quite broke as big as they might have hoped, but have maintained a devoted following over the years. Last year, almost two decades after break…
For the past 12 year, EMP's Sound Off! battle of the bands competition has helped many young artists in the Northwest realize their dreams. Quite a few -- like The Lonely Forest, Kithkin, Dyme Def, Brite Futures, Sol, Tomten, and many others -- have gone on to reach wider acclaim and even regular r…
Over the last eight years, alt-country band The Maldives have become one of the Northwest's most celebrated and liked bands. Their live shows are joyful occasions that bring the crowd together, as all good concerts do, with swagger, soul, and hearts-on-sleeves abandon. The Ballard-based band stop…
Vocalist Keenen Magik leads the psychedelic hip-hop big band in this session.
A Sonarchy Archive performance from 2003. Live dub transcending the sequencer from this Portland band.
Next on KEXP’s Iceland Airwaves broadcast live from Kex Hostel is Icelandic indie-rock band Hjaltalín. The band formed in 2004, but didn’t release their debut record
A mysterious glowing orb stalks a young skater girl in this video for the track "Jacaranda" by Oakland-based band Trails and Ways. KEXP is excited to present the world premiere of this sci-fi storyline single off the band's debut full-length, Pathology, out now on Barsuk Records.
The third day of the KEXP broadcast from Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop in Austin during SXSW. Today's lineup begins with Montreal band Suun, followed by Seattle indie pop group Telekinesis, Italian megastar rapper Jovanotti, LA-via-Copenhagen dream pop band Gliss, and Macau, China-via-Sao Paolo, Brazil…
After leaving your rock band and abandoning your faith, you're bound to come back with some kind of statement or not come back at all. Mikko Joensuu chose the former path, creating an ambitious trilogy of albums with songs that often live in spiritual, transcendent moments. Performing with a…
Adam Granduciel has never been one to let success and fame get to his head. “It’s Friday night!” he exclaimed to the Neptune crowd at the The War on Drugs' sold out performance that night,.“Does anyone have any big plans for the weekend?” The innate irony of the question is lost on no one but Gradu…
Taking us into the rainy Reykjavik night is a hard-hitting set live at KEX Hostel from Icelandic psych-rockers Singapore Sling. Though the band was formed in 2000, founder Henrik Björnsson had been writing their songs for years before. He made some 8-track demos on his own, and then put the band to…
In typical Arcade Fire fashion, the band has been teasing and hinting about their new album, Infinite Content, lately without flat out telling us what's up. It now appears the first single is "Everything Now" and some lucky fans have been able to get their hands on a 12" of the track at the band's …
