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…
We just returned from our second day of filming live sessions from the Trans Musicales festival in Rennes, France, and our host at the Magic Hall Hotel is playing a killer French funk LP from an artist named Michel Jonasz. And here I thought we’d be discovering only new bands, but now I have a new …
KEXP is especially proud to premiere the video from Turkish dream-pop band the Away Days during Pride Month. The clip for the track “Calm Your Eyes” follows a gay couple who are very much in love. KEXP's DJ Shannon will air the song tonight (Thursday, June 25th) at 10:00 PM PST, and you can watch t…
Texas indie band Shearwater have been dabbling in the world of covers for a while now. They released an all covers collection called Fellow Travelers late last year, and it seems their letting this trend continue. The band's newest cover is Nina Simone's melancholy "Black is the Color." [Stereogum]
Antisocialites, the second album from Toronto's Alvvays, takes all of the charms of their stellar 2014 debut and sharpens them - the songs are catchier, the band's interplay is more sleek, and Molly Rankin's hooks are the kind of emotional echoes that cut deeper than their gauzy swe…
When the seminal shoe gaze group Ride reunited in 2015, a new record was just a matter of when, rather than if. Weather Diaries, the band's first record in over two decades, channels their textural tension with a mature, reflective set of songs that shows few, if any, signs of rust. The band…
It's hard to think of a local band that's emerged as explosively this year on KEXP as Great Grandpa, but it's not hard to see why. The quintet write crunchy, catchy, and thoughtful songs, of which there are 10 on their stellar debut Plastic Cough. Four of those air during this sessi…
The Drive-By Truckers have never shied away from writing about social themes, but in the light of recent events, the long running Georgia outfit recorded one of their most striking and overtly political records to date in 2016's American Band. Joining Greg Vandy in the Roadhouse, the band pla…
The band was currently on tour in South America. Hawkins was 50.
It's the second single the band's released this year
The long-running Scottish band bring listeners together during self-isolation.
The beloved British band return with a track to get everyone pumped up.
