On Sprinter, the latest album by TORRES, Mackenzie Scott does not run away from the big issues. The 24-year old Brooklyn-based artist has clearly grown from her Southern Baptist upbringing, outpacing the usual "country girl meets big city" timeline but not so quickly that she dodges heavy themes of…
When we asked our old friend Elvis Perkins to play a few songs live in-studio at KEXP, he obeyed, or rather, he aubade. The New York singer-songwriter's third album, I Aubade, is filled with love songs for the morning, or any time, with melodies steeped in '60s soul and rich ambient folk that gentl…
Just a few weeks ago, KEXP took over the streets of West Seattle for our Hood-to-Hood Day 2015 celebration with live music from John Danielle of The Mountain Goats, Australian electro-pop group Miami Horror, Michael Lerner of Telekinesis, and howling indie-rockers Hop Along. If you weren't able to …
In the liner notes of her latest album, Ivy Tripp, Katie Crutchfield — better known by her recording alias Waxahatchee — has a photo of none other than Dolly Parton. She laughed when KEXP DJ Stevie Zoom asked her about it. "I have Dolly everywhere I go," she smiled. Like Parton, the Alabama-born Cr…
In this stunning set, William Doyle brings his alter-ego project, East India Youth, into the KEXP live room, unfurling a collection of intriguing tunes from his April 2015 release, Culture of Volume. Marshalling strange, ingenious ideas into coherent, interesting pop music, East India Youth flirt b…
Although they hit you immediately, the depth of Unknown Mortal Orchestra's songs belies their urgency. Underneath a pulsating rhythm or Ruban Nielsen's expressive vocals is always a subtle, just-as-infectious keyboard melody or a texture that alters Nielsen's voice. On the Portland group's latest a…
"We could be in an igloo inside of a cave of ice," gasped a sweaty Dan Deacon. "And I would still be a puddle." To be fair, the KEXP studio's ventilation was only partially the reason why the Baltimore-based musician was drenched in sweat. The other reason was that he was two songs into a breakneck…
"I just wanna keep very, very quiet," admits Aly Spaltro (a.k.a Lady Lamb) at the end of the fourth verse of "Billions of Eyes". It's not an inaccurate statement, but it also doesn't mean she won't get loud when she needs to. Spaltro builds intricate songs that move through dynamics and lyrics more…
When a band self-titles an album midway through their career, it's usually for one of two reasons: they've either run out of ideas or they've taken a significantly new tact. For Portland duo The Helio Sequence, the reason is obvious. Rather than mull over songs in their usual slow-going and contemp…
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.
