Soul legend Mavis Staples has announced a new album called If All I Was Was Black. The album was produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, a regular collaborator with Staples since 2010. The title track has been shared, as well as the cover art and tracklist. Tweedy said of the political messages within the…
The Mynabirds took over a year to record Lovers Know, and while that’s far from unheard of for a band of their stature and import, it’s a figurative lifetime compared to the mere weeks the Omaha pop masters had spent on their previous two albums. Of course, all those additional hours make sense giv…
Donning a red jump suit, Olivia Merilahti, vocalist of The Dø, looked as if she took the spacey ambiance of the KEXP studio to heart and, based on the sonic transformation The Dø's sound undertook in the creation of their third album, it was a fitting sentiment. Leaving acoustic instruments behind,…
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…
"Let's get heavy," Other Lives frontman Jesse Tabish jokes before launching into the principle dichotomies behind the creation of their latest release, Rituals. But whether they're conflating old and new styles or humanity's primal nature and our technologically isolating modern world, the surprisi…
It’s great to see that excellent, keenly questioning, perennially rebellious, truly inspiring, and high quality reading/viewing/listening materials keep being published and produced in this extremely DIY economy. Forged in the fires of pre-economic collapse in 2007, Oakland, CA-based PM Press is a …
Geotic is the alias of Los Angeles' Will Wiesenfeld, a multi-faceted artist that also releases music under the name Baths. His works under the Geotic moniker have often been self-categorized as "passive listening" music, quietly providing a home for his more ambient and meditative creations that fa…
Over decades of milquetoast radio throwaways and sales taking precedent over content, it's undeniable: pop music has lost its sensibility of the extreme. But all is not lost in the brave new world of the digital age. Need evidence? Look no further than Prince Rama's press release for their new albu…
For this installment of Immigrant Songs, I was blessed to have Los Angeles group Chicano Batman live in the KEXP studios. They’ve been getting a lot of attention around the country lately, both by doing some killer opening slots during tours with Jack White and Alabama Shakes and by being on the bi…
If there's one rule about horror movies, it's that you always leave enough of a loose end for a sequel, regardless of whether or not it ever happens. Sure enough, that's exactly what the master of horror and suspense cinema John Carpenter did on his first solo LP outing. Lost Themes, an album compr…
The cover of Skeleton Tree, the sixteenth studio album by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds is the most minimal and least revealing artwork of their career. Against a black backdrop in computerized font, the title of the record glares menacingly like the stuck screen of a heart rate monitor. It's quite…
Man alive, is it a good time to be the 80s or what? We have Stranger Things still tearing up the Netflix ratings, and the show's soundtracking band S U R V I V E on a world tour behind their new album (you can catch them at Crocodile 10/12). Death Waltz and Mondo are introducing a new generation to…
There are few better ways to ring in the new year than staying up until 2am dancing incessantly to furious house music. Thankfully for us, John MacLean and Marcus Marr agree with us, and this week's The Juan MacLean show at the Nectar Lounge was a pretty fantastic way to kick off another year of li…
Nine decades deep into the electronic music genre, and the most startling and effective instrument it uses is still the human voice. From the earliest days of sampling and vocal splicing to the revolutionary vocal manipulations of Bruce Haack and Kraftwerk up through the live vocal looping we've en…
KEXP shares our response to Covid-19 as well as ways others can help artists and the community at large.
