Following Sasquatch's lead, this year's Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has released their schedule, which has done a pretty good job at keeping potential conflicts away from the Farm. (I'm looking at you, "Sigur Ros vs. Phoenix vs. New Order" Coachella.) Traditionally, Thursday has been a showcas…
"I felt a blue wave coming on." If there were any way to sum up the trying events that led up to the amalgamation of Dan Boeckner's latest project Operators, the album's title track does it pretty well. Dan Boeckner, responsible for Wolf Parade (alongside Spencer Krug) and Handsome Furs (alongside …
Sometimes, you don't know how good you have it in Seattle. Just last month, Sheffield garage rock duo Drenge packed the John Peel stage tent so full at Glastonbury that you'd have to fight your way through about 10,000 bodies to get even a reasonable view of the band. This past Monday, you could ca…
Chromatics have had an unprecedented 2015. The world has been talking about their upcoming LP Dear Tommy since December. We've been listening to its singles since February when we got "Just Like You", quickly followed by "I Can Never Be Myself When You're Around". In April, we got the massive "In F…
Sufjan Stevens is an artist who doesn't make many whimsical steps. Whether it be a proper record or a side project or a live tour or a Christmas album, each time Sufjan steps into the spotlight, you are almost guaranteed a proper glance at the current state of the artist. When we last saw Sufjan at…
Since he broke his band up in the most grandiose way possible, James Murphy has stayed incredibly busy - maybe busier than he was when he was in LCD Soundsystem. It seems like every couple months, there's word of a new project from James, though not necessarily musical in nature. Sure, James has co…
Before the Fallon performance, FKA Twigs was a pervasive mystery – a voice and an image spun together in perfect unity to create something entirely other worldly that you felt both drawn to and intimidated by. Maybe it was fear, or maybe it was just mystery, but either way, FKA Twigs was impossible…
Some haters will always hate, no matter what gold you throw at them, but Donald Glover sure silenced a multitude of them with last year's out of nowhere sophomore slinger Because the Internet. As Childish Gambino, Glover started a rap career with immediate pushback, with critics claiming that he wa…
On September 22nd, it’s KEXP’s Good Mail Day! We’ll be playing all requests and reading messages that we get by mail. So send us a postcard!
Each week, The Cobain 50 podcast digs into albums Kurt Cobain listed in his journal as his "Top 50" and how they may have influenced him and Nirvana.
When Seattle hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces announced an album release show for their sophomore LP, Lese Majesty, there was no question that the event would be a family affair. Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire both have deep Seattle roots and have helped assemble a brilliant coalition of artistic min…
Through 2023, KEXP is celebrating 50 Years of Hip-Hop. Each week, we'll celebrate a different year in hip-hop with a deep dive into a particular song released that year.
Next month we celebrate the 20th birthday of High/Low, the timeless full-length debut from New York indie rock stalwarts Nada Surf. The band celebrated the milestone in great fashion, reissuing the record on beautiful orange vinyl through Vinyl Me Please and giving it a fantastic packaging makeover…
Pike is out between Broadway and 12th, the whole block is in a frenzy, and the noise level has almost reached normal weekend levels - it must be time for Capitol Hill Block Party 2015! The layout has adjusted slightly - both Big Mario's Pizza and Vita Coffee sit outside the grounds, making it harde…
"Trouble is my name" is how Dee Dee Penny chooses to end the new Dum Dum Girls record Too True. There's a great reason - the girls are a quietly devastating storm. Their refusal to give way to the all too familiar tropes of the business means that Penny and her band members will never become click-…
Andrew W.K. is a brilliant capitalist. Need proof? Here's one: he's still a cultural zeitgeist even now in 2015. Generations have come to Andrew through a stunning variety of mediums. You may know him from his now-classic 2001 party soundtrack to end all party soundtracks I Get Wet, or from his con…
If the Fremont Abbey and its team are known for anything, it's for finding new visions for how we see intimate shows in Seattle. For a singular example, earlier this year, the Abbey hosted Baltimore dream pop band Beach House for the smallest show the band has put on in Seattle almost a decade. Sho…