Seattle’s Leeni Ramadan (aka the glitter-gloom pop singer, Prom Queen) has established herself as a singular-voiced, bouffant-boasting player in the Emerald City music scene. If the ultimate goal of any creative person is to establish an immediately recognizable style, Ramadan has done that already…
Thanks to everyone who came out last week for our reading and signing of Trouble Boys: the True Story of The Replacements! We will thrilled to be joined by author Bob Mehr, and former Replacements manager and co-founder of Twin/Tone Records, Peter Jesperson. After Mehr shared the story of how the b…
Most bands start by writing songs at home and recording in their basements. For David Bazan, it took nearly two decades to get there. The former Pedro the Lion bandleader and subsequent solo artist has long been a local treasure, appealing to a generation of Northwest indie kids in the 90s and 2000…
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…
Twenty years ago, music had one of its most creatively abundant years of music. 1994 saw strong debut releases in every genre, from Oasis to Outkast. Grunge was at the height of its power with excellent local releases from Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana released their MTV Unpl…
"It's a complicated place, this planet we're on." That's how Mark Kozelek closes "Dogs", the most confrontational and stomach-churning cut on new Sun Kil Moon record, Benji. It's a great thesis for the rest of the record, really - Kozelek has witnessed some pretty insane shit, and much of it appear…
Leave it to a Welsh indie pop band to take a perfectly innocent game invented by beloved children's author A.A. Milne for his son and turn it into a band name with unpleasantly coprological overtones. (The most unpleasant part: "The Pooh Sticks" works as both a plural noun and a sentence. Ew.) In c…
Just as their name is a consonant away from that of an iconic British candy, Palma Violets's sound is just shades removed from the late 70's UK punk bands like The Clash and those who followed years later like The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys. The young rock quartet has already caused a scene in t…
Damn, 2013, you are looking good! You just keep hitting us week after week with one killer list of new releases after another. This week, there's no way we're not going to run out to pick up the latest from long-time KEXP favorite Frightened Rabbit. As if there was any doubt that this would land hi…
Janice Headley revisits 1981 with the track “Rapture” by Blondie, who leveraged their celebrity to shine a spotlight on hip-hop.
KEXP’s DJ Supreme La Rock talks with the renowned DJ Hollywood, who was there when it all started in 1973.
It’s time again for Friday on My Mind, our weekly blog post where we look at videos centered around one common theme. This is a collaborative effort between KEXP and King 5 News. Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and so in commemoration of this Hallmark event, we’re looking at the greatest…
Half an hour into one of Refused's first performances of 2015, singer Dennis Lyxzen laid out their current manifesto. "You know how when you're teenagers playing music and saying you're revolutionaries everyone just kinda thinks you'll grow out of it?" He grinned. "This is how you know we're just f…
When last we saw Eoin and Rory Loveless, they were making snotty garage rock for boys not yet men who were sick to death of love, and they were doing it in style. The brother duo Drenge found a way to blend some mixture of romance, boyhood, and senseless violence into an addictive, invigorating mix…
"I heard today was the first nice day in quite a while, right?" As his band Cayucas starts in on another track of bright, warm, surf pop gold, he banters with a Seattle winter crowd who got to go out in the sun in early March - a near miraculous event by any account. "Coincidence? I don't think so,…
Dusty Henry and Martin Douglas revisit 1995 with the track “Shook Ones, Pt. II” by Mobb Deep, who we’ll hear from in this episode.
Michael Azerrad, author of the 1993 biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, joins us to talk about his relationship with Kurt Cobain.
The official audio feed for Live on KEXP sessions, featuring the audio-only version of every full performance published on the same day it goes live on YouTube.
For over 50 years, KEXP has championed music discovery. With thousands of performances, 3.5 million subscribers and billions of views o…