Amber Mark is a blossoming NYC-based vocalist making waves in the music world with her stunning voice and vibrant sound that blends R&B, pop, soul, dancehall, and various club styles. She just released her impressive debut mini-album 3:33am, recently appeared on stand-out singles by DJDS, Demo …
Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and James McAlister have teamed up for a collaborative album called Planetarium and Stevens has directed a new music video for the song "Venus" off the album. Stevens shared the stop-motion cut-out video to his Tumblr with the note, "Peace to you! Stay bod…
Shamir began his set in relatively mellow fashion, dragging from a cigarette as he and his backing band began the song “Vegas.” The calm at Sasquatch! Music Festival was brief, as by their second song, the El Chupacabra tent became a full blown dance party. Shamir bares himself completely in his mu…
Staten Island's The Budos Band tore through a tight set of instrumental funk and soul tinged with a heavy, ominous dose of retro stoner metal. Their set on the Sasquatch main stage drew heavily on their latest album Burnt Offering. This fourth release is a marked departure for the eight-piece band,…
Saturday night in West Seattle, history was made... or remade... when Northwest legends The Sonics performed a special set at Easy Street Records on Record Store Day to benefit KEXP's New Home. The iconic Tacoma band alone were a huge draw to the legion of fans inside and surrounding the store, but…
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…
KEXP, the community of Everett, and the Everett Music Initiative banded together over the weekend of May 16th and 17th to bring some powerful sound (more than 50 bands in total!) to Snohomish County's own sleepy fishing town with the inception of the very first Fisherman's Village Music Festival. A…
There’s an art to first impressions. As an artist, you really only get to make one first step onto the scene, and whether everyone cares or no one cares, that’s the point from which you take every single step after. For Thomas Arsenault, that first step has been a long time in the making. He’s been…
A while back, a producer, a DJ and an MC, each with solid careers of their own, formed a sort of hip hop supergroup to face against rising corporate interests in their fields. Like Gorillaz, Deltron 3030 was high-concept, semi-fictional, character driven project that blew the minds of music fans of…
Radiohead fans are tweaking for today's release of Thom Yorke's new project, Atoms for Peace. The group - featuring producer Nigel Godrich on keys, Ultraista's Joey Waronker on drums, Flea on bass, and Forro in the Dark founder Mauro Refosco on additional percussion - formed originally as the backi…
Berlin-trio Moderat, featuring the combined forces of the German electronic projects Apparat and Modeselektor, stopped by KEXP's studio to showcase a few of their new bangers from their 2016 release, III. The "bored-with-current electronic-music-back-in-the-day" musicians put out a quick caveat tha…
A Four Tet remix has long been a universally accepted stamp of approval and new music from the beatsmith is always met with a rare intensity of excitement. And while new music and mixes from Kieran Hebden’s project are always a cause for celebration, his live sets are surely the best way to experie…
The final day of Bumbershoot 2015 finally saw sunshine and good weather all around. Maybe the crowds could sneak in one more summer festival after all, after the torrential rains that started the whole thing off. The lineup for this day included another solid dose of excellent local bands, like Sis…
Whether it's their surroundings, the air, the water, the isolation or a communal appreciation of the arts, something has given Icelanders a lock on creating otherworldly sonic landscapes. Sigur Rós and Björk are of course the most famous of them, but if you've been listening to KEXP's broadcasts fr…
London's Mike Paradinas is a massively influential figure within the electronic music community. Best known for his works under the μ-Ziq alias, he released his debut album in 1993, played a pioneering role in the emergence of the drill'n'bass and IDM electronic music genres in the 1990s alongside …
Celebrating their fourth LP, A Man Alive, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down stopped by KEXP to throw a little pre-release party. Though the new songs are energetic and completely accessible, as Thao explains to the Midday Show's Cheryl Waters, recording A Man Alive was an incredibly personal, at time…
A massive lighting rig. Pulsating four-on-the-floor beats. A constant, insistent bass presence in every song. Choruses that, in the moment, seem like they can actually propel the audience to the heights the singer is claming she'll go to. This is not Chvrches, the Glasgow basement project that emer…
