We’re thrilled to bring you the first wave of artists who will be making a splash at our 10th Festival of Discovery this March!
It’s been a DECADE of discovery since the first Treefort back in 2012 and the lineup for Treefort 10 is off to a stellar start!
You may recognize names like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon (whaaat!), groovy R&B group Durand Jones & the Indications, psych-punk rockers Osees (who’s ready to crowdsurf that madness again?), or the ever so dreamy Men I Trust. In between all those familiar bands, you’ll also find loads of fresh music to discover, like DJ and gender equality advocate LP Giobbi, or Zambian psych-rock band W.I.T.C.H. (widely seen as the most popular band in Zambia in the 1970s), or NC’s Indigo de Souza and SO. MUCH. MORE!!!!
If you want in on all the fun, there is still time to submit your work for an opportunity to be a part of Treefort Music Fest — March 23-27, 2022.
For a full list of artists announced in this first round, check out our lineup page. And we’re just getting started — this is the first of a series of artist announcements so be prepared for more waves of artists to be released soon.
Buy your Treefort pass before the holidays!
KIM GORDON
( new york, new york )
With a career spanning nearly four decades, Kim Gordon is one of the most prolific and visionary artists working today. A co-founder of the legendary Sonic Youth, Gordon has performed all over the world, collaborating with many of music’s most exciting figures including Tony Conrad, Ikue Mori, Julie Cafritz and Stephen Malkmus. Despite the exhaustive nature of her résumé, the most reliable aspect of Gordon’s music may be its resistance to formula. Songs discover themselves as they unspool, each one performing a test of the medium’s possibilities and limits. Her command is astonishing, but Gordon’s artistic curiosity remains the guiding force behind her music.Gordon continues this pursuit on No Home Record, her first-ever solo release, produced by Justin Raisen (Angel Olsen, Yves Tumor, John Cale, Charli XCX, etc.) and recorded at Sphere Ranch in Los Angeles. Borrowing its name from a Chantal Akerman film, No Home Record is, in many ways, a return as much as it is a departure. When Gordon first began playing music in the early 1980s, she used a guitar, a drum machine, and some lyrics sniped from magazine advertisement copy. No Home Record contains echoes of that setup, in both form and concept. Front to back, No Home Record is an expert operation in the uncanny.
DURAND JONES & THE INDICATIONS
( bloomington, indiana )
Durand Jones & The Indications are equally beloved for their energetic, joyous shows, dual lead singers, and thoughtful songwriting. From an Indiana basement (where the band recorded their 2016 self-titled debut LP as college students), the band has catapulted into the soul limelight and onto an international stage. Pushing beyond the boundaries of the funk and soul on their previous releases, The Indications’ third album, Private Space, unlocks the door to a wider range of sounds and launches boldly into a world of synthy modern soul and disco beats dotted with strings. Anchored by a crate-digging sensibility and the high-low harmonies of Aaron Frazer and Durand Jones, Private Space shows The Indications’ mastery at melding revival sounds with a modern attitude. It’s an organic, timeless record that’s as fresh as clean kicks and familiar as your favorite well-worn LP.
OSEES
( bay area, california )
Crack the coffers, Osees bring you their head-destroying psych epics to grok and rock out to. You’ll notice the fresh dollop of organ and keyboard prowess courtesy of noted key-stabber Tom Dolas…the Quattrone/Rincon drum-corps polyrhythmic pulse continues to astound and pound in equal measure, buttressed by the nimble fingered bottom end of Sir Tim Hellman the Brave and the shred-heaven fret frying of John Dwyer. Aside from the familiar psych-scorch familiar to soggy pit denizens the world over, there’s a fresh heavy-prog vibe to Osees that fits like a worn-in jean jacket comfortably among hairpin metal turns and the familiar but no less horns-worthy guitar fireworks Dwyer’s made his calling card.
MEN I TRUST
( montreal, canada )
The story of Men I Trust’s rise to indie fame is a bit more abnormal than most. The group initially started without their lead singer. In 2014 keyboardist Dragos Chiriac and bassist-guitarist Jessy Caron, both Quebec music graduates and high school friends reunited after college and came together to form a duo named Men I Trust. Their music was heavily inspired by the electronic movement of the 2000s. If you take for example a song from their self titled 2014 debut like Endless Strive and compare it to their most recent output you immediately hear the difference in their approach to production. The programmed robotic electronic drums alongside these boisterous synthesizers give you a closer look into how the duo looked at song creation. The basics where all there, the dance-inducing, funkiness and soothe demeanor coupled with great vocal performances by frequent guest collaborators offered a range of different song types. At that was really missing would soon be discovered.
GUIDED BY VOICES
( dayton, ohio )
GUIDED BY VOICES: In 1994, 38-year-old school teacher Robert Pollard & his merry band recorded Bee Thousand in a Dayton, Ohio, basement on a 4-track cassette recorder. This improbable rock classic became an enormously influential album: Pitchfork and Spin have called it one of the best records of the ’90s, and Amazon picked Bee Thousand as #1 on their list of the 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums Of All Time. A legendary live band with a rabid following, the Washington Post called GBV “the Grateful Dead equivalent for people who like Miller Lite instead of acid!”
With 10 studio albums already under their belts in less than 5 years, the band’s present-day line-up is nothing less than a new Golden Age of GBV.
GOTH BABE
( #vanlife )
Goth Babe is Griff Washburn enjoying himself. Originally from Tennessee, Griff currently lives off the grid in his 1996 Ford F-250 with his pup Sadie, surfing up and down the coast of California and Oregon. He writes and records his music in the back of his camper off of solar power, while in the midst of following good weather and good people. After writing songs in his dorm room at age 18, Griff right off the bat knew that he wanted to make this goofy band name more than a side hustle.
After touring in 2016 and living in NYC for part of 2017, Griff packed up his things and made way for the West Coast. He’s recently picked up on the brighter parts of life. Parting ways with social status and relevance, he’s discovered how wonderful living day by day is. Making music to Griff is less a climb to the top, as it is a form of free thinking and enjoyment.
LP GIOBBI
( austin, texas )
With her distinctive blend of live piano loops, high-energy beats, and achingly beautiful melodies, producer, DJ, pianist, entrepreneur, and activist LP Giobbi has become one of electronic music’s fastest-rising stars. Considering herself “a one-woman jam band” behind the decks, the Oregon-born, Austin-based piano house queen has played to thousands of fans across the globe—performing on the stages of Coachella, EDC, Lollapalooza, Firefly, Outside Lands and ACL, and supporting such heavyweights as Galantis, SOFI TUKKER, Madeon, and Diplo.
Named a 2021 “Artist to Watch” by Spotify, Giobbi has racked up nearly 30 million cumulative streams from her singles and remixes, while hits like “Meet Again” ft. Little Boots, “Move Your Body” ft. Hermixalot, and “Close Your Eyes” ft. HANA have landed her on the covers of such high-profile playlists as Spotify’s Mint, Friday Cratediggers, and Housewerk; Apple Music’s Dance XL; Deezer’s New Dance; and Amazon Music’s Fresh Dance. As an in-demand producer, meanwhile, Giobbi has delivered official remixes for the likes of SOFI TUKKER, Dom Dolla, and Hayden James, as well as for such house legends as Junior Sanchez and MK.
KARI FAUX
( little rock, arkansas )
Kari Faux is a multi-faceted artist – rapper, singer, producer, DJ and clothing designer – from Little Rock, AR. She is known for her bold fashion and genre-bending music, fusing elements of southern hip-hop, funk, and alternative soundscapes. Her unique style of rhyming, dashes of sultry vocal harmonizing and confidence have helped garner a cult following and make her a force amongst the new generation of hip-hop’s most fearless and outspoken female voices.
At the start of her career, Kari’s hit “No Small Talk” was remixed by Childish Gambino and featured on HBO’s Insecure. Since then, she has made an imprint on the music industry as an independent artist who has released four projects, headlined tours, opened for acts such as Steve Lacy and Mick Jenkins, and has written or produced on tracks for artists such as The Internet. Kari Faux’s newest album, Lowkey Superstar Deluxe, is out now and features fellow heavy-hitters Smino, J.I.D, Baby Tate and more.
BUILT TO SPILL
( boise, idaho )
Treefort wouldn’t be the same without local indie rock band Built to Spill playing a set or two (or three). The band has played every Treefort Music Fest with the exception of Treefort 2017 where Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch played an acoustic set at the Boise Contemporary Theater.
Built to Spill started in 1992 and have a large discography covering eight albums, a few compilation albums, and a good amount of extended-plays. Every album is led by Doug Martsch but each album has a different lineup of musicians, though some members make appearances on more than one album. Their first album, Ultimate Alternative Wavers, came out in 1993. Built to Spill made their major label debut with their third album, Perfect From Now On. Both 1997’s Perfect From Now On and 1999’s Keep It Like A Secret are featured on Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 90s’ list. Their eighth and latest album, Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston, was released in 2020.
Built to Spill has returned to the band’s original concept of having a shifting rotation of non-permanent members. The current lineup features Boise bassist Melanie Radford (Marshall Poole, Blood Lemon) and New Mexico drummer Teresa Cruces (Prism Bitch) and longtime BTS contributer, Doug Martsch.
W.I.T.C.H.
( zambia, africa )
W.I.T.C.H. (We Intend To Cause Havoc) were the biggest rock band in Zambia in the 1970s and spearheaded a new genre dubbed Zamrock, fusing influences that ranged from the Rolling Stones to Black Sabbath and James Brown and mixing them with traditional African rhythms and bush village songs.
At the peak of their popularity, the band often needed police to keep fans at bay while their lead singer Jagari – whose name is an Africanisation of Mick Jagger’s – riled up crowds by stage diving from balconies and dancing manically as the WITCH’s blend of psychedelic rock and African rhythms permeated the surrounding atmosphere.
Jagari is the charismatic sole surviving original member of the band. As Zambia’s economy stagnated and the country buckled under the AIDS crisis, WITCH fell apart. Jagari retreated to a life of quasi-anonymity as a university music professor before being wrongfully arrested during Zambia’s toughest hour. Now a man in his 60s, he spends his time mining gemstones hoping to strike it rich, until very recently the band being just a nostalgic memory of his youth.
Largely unknown outside of their home country, WITCH finally got the exposure they deserved when Now Again Records reissued their entire discography in 2012. This allowed Jagari to play outside Africa for the first time and for a new generation of fans to discover his music. In 2016 he began a collaboration with Dutch musicians Jacco Gardner and Nic Mauskoviç, and together with them, in September 2017 WITCH headed out on its extremely successful first-ever European Tour.
In the Fall of 2019, WITCH embarked on their first North American tour, including a well-received performance at Desert Daze.
MERCURY REV
( buffalo, new york )
Since forming in 1989, Mercury Rev has made a career out of boldly exploring the fringes of artistic perception, channeling colors and sounds and visions that always seem just beyond our mortal reach. The Guardian hailed the group as “a rarity in indie rock: a band who have continually evolved their sound, pushing at the boundaries of what rock music actually means over 25 years, borrowing from jazz, funk, doo-wop, techno, folk and more along the way,” while Rolling Stone praised their “majestic chaos,” and the BBC lauded their “shimmering psychedelic pop, immersive indie-rock, [and] spectacularly engrossing passages of sumptuous instrumentation.” The band’s 1991 debut, Yerself Is Steam landed on Pitchfork’s rundown of the Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time, and their 1998 breakthrough, Deserter’s Songs was named NME’s Album of the Year upon its release. Major festival and television performances around the world solidified their status as that rare group capable of straddling the line between mainstream appeal and progressive musical and technological experimentation, but the band’s journey was also a tumultuous one, full of lineup changes, setbacks, and heartbreak.
SHANNON & THE CLAMS
( oakland, california )
“I am terrified of spiders,” says Shannon Shaw. “My mom always told me that they’re drawn to me. Like, they would drop down and dangle in my face as a baby, or they’d get in my bed.” But the powerhouse singer-bassist of retro-rock band Shannon & The Clams had bigger fears when she went to an astrologer two years ago. Shaw was at an emotional tipping point — willing to try anything — because everything she loved was falling apart.
“It felt like the end of an era,” Shaw says, which began to unravel in 2016 with the tragic Ghost Ship warehouse fire in the Clams’ DIY community in Oakland. In 2018, the California wildfires in Napa almost caused her parents to evacuate their homes. In 2019, a lurking intruder drove Shaw out of the beloved apartment she’d lived in for 14 years. And then, right as her band was getting invited on big tours with bands like Greta Van Fleet and The Black Keys, her father was diagnosed with cancer. “The idea of leaving my family was agonizing — it was torture,” Shaw says.
The astrologer told her to summon Durga when she felt powerless, a Hindu goddess who holds a weapon in each of her eight arms. Shaw saw the connection. “The symbolism of the spider made a full turn in an interesting way,” she says. “I was getting protection from the thing I feared the most.” Plus, she says with a laugh, “Spiders destroy the bullshit bugs. Like mosquitoes. Who needs ‘em?”
Year Of The Spider, the band’s sixth studio album, rages against death and disease with the power of a thousand angry Ronettes. Songs like “All Of My Cryin’,” “Mary, Don’t Go,” and “Year Of The Spider,” pulse with girl-group elegance and punk ferocity. On a Clams record, you always get both.
NUBYA GARCIA
( london, england )
Multi award-winning saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia is back with her much anticipated debut album, SOURCE. Her first release on Concord Records, under the iconic Concord Jazz imprint, has been received with wide critical acclaim. Following her album release, the London-based UK jazz player extraordinaire debuted on Tiny Desk (Home) Concert for NPR, coming off the heels of a New York Times profile, a Pitchfork ‘Best New Music’ honor and a Rolling Stone ‘Album of the Month’ mention for the rising tenor saxophone player. The New York Times describes SOURCE as “a life’s worth of experiences into an hourlong listen,” while Q Magazine says “Elevated throughout by Garcia’s immaculate phrasing, this is music that fuses the tradition and modern with real purpose.“
Produced by Garcia herself in collaboration with celebrated producer Kwes (Bobby Womack, Solange, Nerija), the album was heralded by lead singles “Pace” and “Source”. She’s already made a huge impact in her native UK, with a rousing performance for the BBC’s 2020 Glastonbury, a feature story in MOJO Magazine as well as a Jazzwise cover for their September Issue.
SOURCE serves as Garcia’s first full album to date. Her self-released EP, WHEN WE ARE, the title track of which was described as “effervescent” by The New York Times and named one of NPR’s Best Songs of 2018. Her debut EP, NUBYA’s 5IVE, released in 2017, was hailed as “exceptional” by The Vinyl Factory and sold out on vinyl within 24 hours. In 2018, Garcia also featured on five of the nine tracks on WE OUT HERE, the Brownswood compilation project celebrating London’s young and exciting jazz scene. She won the Jazz FM Breakthrough Act of the Year Award and the Sky Arts Breakthrough Act of the Year Award in 2018, and the Jazz FM UK Jazz Act of the Year Award in 2019.
!!!
( new york, new york )
Combining punk abandon and tightly-coiled dance music has always been bonded into the band’s DNA. It’s this core plus their growth and mastery of songwriting that has seen them outlive the mid-2000s ‘indie/dance punk’ tag and has allowed them to consistently grow lyrically and sonically from album to album. As If is their most transcendent collection of songs yet. “Each album we’ve made has gotten closer and closer to our live set and this, we’re proud to say, is the closest we’ve come yet. We were heavily influenced by current dance music — Nina Kraviz, Moodymann, Paranoid London, Rrose and Delroy Edwards were frequently referenced — and philosophically by the early ’90s house records we love on labels like Trax and Dancemania and by artists like Romanthony and Green Velvet. Those records sound great because they’re fairly raw attempts to use the technology of the time to ape the New York and Philly disco records that those producers loved. We figured, if those old house records sound like they do because the artists manipulated disco samples with MPCs, why couldn’t we just sample ourselves and manipulate the tracks with Ableton Live? The more raw it came out the better it felt, not only because that’s what excited us about those old records, but because it felt more punk, which always feels good.”
CAROLINE ROSE
( new york, new york )
Superstar is an underdog story, and one not far off from Caroline Rose’s real life. After a years-long struggle to release what would ultimately become 2018’s LONER, deemed “a singular artistic statement from it’s unforgettable album art all the way down” (Pitchfork), Rose found herself in the midst of a new widespread audience, one both delightfully intrigued and perplexed about how and where to place her. That, combined with a developed set of studio skills and a challenge to “make something from nothing,” marked the beginning of Superstar. Gone are the polished Hollywood hunks and starlets of olde. Here is a shamelessly odd hero, or rather anti-hero, on a quest to become a someone.
Inspired by cult classics such as The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Mulholland Drive and the mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous, Superstar plays out like a film with a beginning, middle, and an open ending. In album opener “Nothing’s Impossible,” the protagonist receives a mistaken phone call from the glamorous Chateau Marmont hotel. Taking the call as a sign toward a star-studded future, they (gender neutral pronoun) leave behind everything in pursuit of a newly established destiny.
MAGDALENA BAY
( los angeles, california )
Few artists are at once artful and savvy enough to transcend the endless scroll, but over the past 18 months, LA-based indie-pop duo Magdalena Bay have used social platforms to dispatch their music, and what you might call their philosophy, in hypnotic, ephemeral bursts. A long trip through their feeds produces music videos in miniature, irreverent pontifications on the state of the music industry delivered via home video VHS aesthetics, and existential meditations on everything from International Women’s Day to the clone craze of the early aughts to the indefinite lifespan of plants. To Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Lewin, reality can be unmade, manipulated beyond all recognition; their project is as much musical as it is an experiment in pop persona and visual aesthetics.
On October 8th, Magdalena Bay released their debut full-length LP, Mercurial World, via Luminelle. Entirely written, produced, recorded, mixed and mastered by the duo, Mercurial World proposes an abstract theory of time and explores the staggering “what ifs” that make up the human experience. Approaching reality as a construct allows Magdalena Bay to enact their own, one that is committed to nothing but expanding the possible. Even the album’s sequencing hints at the eternal: the first track is titled “The End,” the last is “The Beginning,” forming a perfect loop when you listen to it straight through. “Matt, Matt, wake up!” Tenenbaum whispers on the introductory track. “I was thinking about how there’s no true end to anything/ Everything comes from and goes to the same place: NOWHERE.”
LIGHTNING BOLT
( providence, rhode island )
Over the course of its two-decade existence, Lightning Bolt has revolutionized underground rock in immeasurable ways. The duo broke the barrier between stage and audience by setting themselves up on the floor in the midst of the crowd. Their momentous live performances and the mania they inspired paved the way for similar tactics used by Dan Deacon and literally hundreds of others. Similarly, the band’s recordings have always been chaotic, roaring, blown out documents that sound like they could destroy even the toughest set of speakers. Fantasy Empire, Lightning Bolt’s sixth album and first in five years, is a fresh take from a band intent on pushing themselves musically and sonically while maintaining the aesthetic that has defined not only them, but an entire generation of noisemakers. It marks many firsts, most notably their first recordings made using hi-fi recording equipment at the famed Machines With Magnets, and their first album for Thrill Jockey. More than any previous album, Fantasy Empire sounds like drummer Brian Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson are playing just a few feet away, using the clarity afforded by the studio to amplify the intensity they project. Every frantic drum hit, every fuzzed-out riff, sounds more present and tangible than ever before.
DEERHOOF
( san francisco, california )
Over eighteen boundless albums as experimental as they are pop, Deerhoof has continuously quested for daring storytelling and radical sounds, creating a new shared language of revolution. 2020’s critically acclaimed, overwhelmingly prescient Future Teenage Cave Artists explored fairytale visions of post-apocalypse, welding intrinsic melodies with absurdist digital recording methods. Its immediate sequel Love-Lore, a live covers medley, channeled futurist mid-century artists – Parliament, Sun Ra and Stockhausen, to name a handful – into a patchwork love letter to the anti-authoritarian expressions that inspire the band. “We suddenly felt extra free and non-judgmental towards ourselves,” says drummer Greg Saunier of their audience’s enthusiastic reception to these records. Galvanized, they landed on their next record’s concept: This is Deerhoof’s “baroque gone DIY” LP. “We wanted our own working person’s version of highbrow, with all the operatic flourishes and twinkles and sparkles,” says Saunier. Deerhoof set to scheming, using their agility, wit, and outlandishness to create this exuberant ode to unexpected growth.
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE
( philadelphia, pennsylvania )
ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH was created using an entirely different writing process than their past records. Where their breakout Hypnic Jerks was recorded in a week, ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH was planned and plotted over the period of 4 months; a dangerous amount of time for a band whose attention to detail is exceptional, allowing for their most focused and exploratory work to date. ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is also the first to be entirely self-recorded and produced by the band giving a wider periphery and deeper scope into their intricate pop genius, a view unlike any SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE record that has come before. The resulting release saw widespread critical acclaim earning the highly coveted Pitchfork Best New Music tag and further praise from The New York Times, Fader, AV Club, Stereogum, Uproxx, Needle Drop, among others.
