Seattle's silver-haired soul singer and her backing band, Grace Love & The True Loves stopped by KEXP to perform a few tracks off of their eponymous debut album, and the nine of them filled our live room to beautiful capacity. Their performance was pure vintage - her rich baritone echoing the i…
The past half-decade has seen Jessica Dobson powering through an alt-rock dream career: touring with and joining The Shins, touring with Beck, Spoon, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and starting local cult favorite Deep Sea Diver with her husband Peter Mansen on drums. The first DSD release was the '09 EP…
Seattle duo Crater - Ceci Gomez and Kessiah Gordon - stopped by for an in-studio, both to play us some tracks from their debut, Talk to Me so I Can Fall Asleep, and to talk to DJ Sharlese about drooling in their sleep and The Sims "Hot Date" Expansion Pack. Crater only emerged in 2014 to immediate …
Super-ambient Icelandic duo Kiasmos brought their very space-y minimalist brand of techno to the new KEXP live room in support of their Swept EP, the second they dropped in 2015. The two longtime friends began working professionally together when Ólafur Arnalds was the touring sound engineer for Ja…
Just about the last thing we'd ever ask for in Seattle is "more rain" - unless of course that's the name of the latest album by M. Ward. On his eight studio LP, the Portland based musician doesn't let the Pacific Northwest's soggy gloom get him down, and dares the clouds away with his initially doo…
Portland band Battleme are lovers not fighters. Frontman Matt Drenik may have fueled his project's perpetually punchy new LP with hard-hitting beats and muscular rhythms, but Habitual Love Songs is Battleme's billet-doux to '70s-steeped power-pop and glam guitar rock, populated with characters from…
New Zealand singer-songwriter Marlon Williams brought his band and their foot-pounding vintage folk to the KEXP studios in support of his first solo record. Longtime the front-man of The Unfaithful Ways, Williams relocated to Melbourne to record and release his eponymous solo album. The rocksteady,…
Musical lore has it that Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the iconic South African mbube group, was founded by Joseph Shabalala after having a series of dreams in which he heard their sounds. It goes unmentioned whether or not Joseph dreamt of 50 years of worldwide success as perhaps the most well-known cu…
Elia is the most recent project of Seattle-based singer, musician and producer Ignacio Izquierdo. The name comes from Elia Liut, an Italian aviator, who was the first person to fly over Ecuadorian territory. This reflects both Ignacio's home city of Quito and his life of movement. A son of a diplom…
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.
