Now on their seventh album, The Thermals show no sign of fading away, despite the title of their latest We Disappear, out now on Saddle Creek. With beloved producer Chris Walla behind the boards for the fourth time, the Portland punk trio continue to incite riots with their anthemic, fist-pumping s…
Minneapolis must have been a magical place in the '80s with bands like Hüsker Dü breaking through the mainstream, and venues like First Avenue and the 7th Street Entry helping hone these rising new stars. A little bit of that magic was in the KEXP studios this day as Hüsker Dü's former frontman, Bo…
They look like sisters, maybe even twins, the way that Lucius co-founders Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig style themselves and dress, but like any pair, they can also be opposites - the yin to each other's yang. That duality forms the core of Good Grief, the now LA-based band's second release, which e…
Leave it to a neuroscientist to create an out of body experience. UK's Sam Shepherd blows minds post-doc with his experimental electronic project, Floating Points, combining jazz, space rock, prog, EDM, classical and other genres that can but shouldn't be named into an out of this world experience.…
“There’s so many kinds of music I’m interested in that I just never let into my own songwriting, so in a way with this record, it was kind just of like opening the curtains and letting stuff come in,” Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing says of Life of Pause. Continuing with his style of creating a new worl…
From heartbreak to the end of the world: that's how DJ Troy Nelson describes the trajectory of albums from singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler. "I think this is album seven or something? I don't know," she says with a smile and a shake of her head. Over the past 16 years, this ethereal singer/songwrit…
Kyle Craft leads a storied life. The Portland-based singer-songwriter trails with him a cast misfit characters and messed up relationships from his former home in Shreveport, Louisiana, to populate is his rollicking full-length debut, Dolls Of Highland. He also carries with him a sound with a past …
The city of Los Angeles has always been a backdrop for west coast punk band Bleached: there's a fun-in-the-sun melodic sound paired with a gritty Sunset Strip side. But on their latest album, Welcome the Worms, they escaped to Joshua Tree to find inspiration. "It's funny, because when we would go t…
When Vancouver-based band Black Mountain stepped in the studio, we got a contact high. Not necessarily from their clothing, but definitely from their heavy, sludgy, psychedelic sound. Vocalists Stephen McBean and Amber Webber trade verses over a Black Sabbath-inspired wave of droning guitar and key…
In 2018, KEXP celebrated the 30th anniversary of local record label Sub Pop with a four-month retrospective, "counting up" every catalog number in their vast discography of over 1,200 releases. Dig into the archives of our catalog coverage, featuring in-depth coverage on the history of their releases.
