Second Wave of Artists for Treefort 2023

gold frame overlay

Second Wave of Artists for Treefort 2023

Feast your eyes on the second wave of the Treefort 2023 lineup!

We are stoked to announce another 140+ artists spanning genres and cities from across the globe, all set to perform at the 11th Annual Treefort Music Fest on March 22-26, 2023 in Downtown Boise, Idaho. 

The second wave brings the Treefort 11 lineup to 326 artists hailing from 24 different countries and 31 US states. And there’s even more to be announced next month! 

With nearly 200 artists on this second wave of the Treefort 11 lineup, you have lots of listening to do!

To get you started, check out R&B storyteller and multidisciplinary artist Yaya Bey, alt-country singer-songwriter Rayland Baxter, Chicago’s pop darling duo Whitney, Belgium’s electronic cultural critics Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul, singer, songwriter, and Grammy-awarded producer Louis Cole, along with his big band (a show not to be missed!), flow state rapper MAVI, Canada’s experimental pop star Thanya Iyer, Ghanaian Afro fusion group Wazumbians (a Flipside Fest fave!), self-described experimentalist DEBBY FRIDAY & many, many more! Scroll on down & learn more about some of the artists we cannot wait to see.  

FULL MUSIC LINEUP LINEUP POSTER PASSES LISTEN
Treefort Music Fest 2023 Main Stage Lineup

THIS YEAR! Treefort is taking over a majority of Julia Davis Park and offering festival-goers a myriad of programming at the riverside park. Alefort, Artfort, Foodfort and Kidfort will all have activations in the public area + Main Stage and Hideout Stage are wristband-only. Bring the whole family and camp out there for the day! Here’s a lil sneak peek at the Main Stage schedule and go ahead and get your Main Stage tickets now, so you can start planning your moves and grooves. 

Treefort 11 will kick off on Wednesday, March 22 with a rockin’ Main Stage lineup featuring platinum melodic surf rockers Surf Curse, alt-rock legends Dinosaur Jr., and riot grrrl punk trio Destroy Boys. Things chill out a bit – but not too much – on Thursday, March 23 with groovy psych rockers Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Boise’s very own indie rock trio Built To Spill, and indie pop-rock artist and cultish TikTok star Petey. Start Treefort weekend right on Friday, March 24 with veracious country star (and author) Margo Price, the incredibly soulful Celisse, and Chicago’s pop darling duo Whitney. Saturday, March 25 will be a dreamy day in the park with R&B performer Cautious Clay, feminist icon and DIY pioneer Ani DiFranco, soulful pop goddess Lady Wray, and psychedelic instrumental duo Hermanos Gutiérrez. Things close out with a bang on Sunday, March 26 with the oh-so-fierce, anonymous rapper Leikeli47, UK’s spoken word artist and Treefort fave Kae Tempest, indie rock faves Pinback, and psych pop rock artist Drugdealer. But wait, there’s more!! The full festival, rest of the Main Stage and Hideout Stage schedule will be announced in February. 

ALL passes for Treefort Music Fest are on sale starting Friday, December 16!

🌟 See the full list of artists who have been announced for the Treefort 2023 lineup or get right to listening and download the official Treefort Music Fest app to start hearting your faves!

🌟 All Treefort tickets are on sale beginning Friday, December 16, 2022. Main Stage shows are included with a five-day Festival Pass, ZIPLINE Pass, or U21 Pass. Planning to just hang in the park and catch Main Stage shows? Snag your Main Stage Pass for $50 starting tomorrow! 

🌟 This incudes five-day Festival Passes (super deal!), ZIPLINE Passes (for those who simply refuse to wait in line), Single Day Passes (for those who can only attend one day), and Single Day Main Stage Passes (for those who plan to post up at Main Stage and check out freeforts around the city). Buy your passes now before prices go up in the new year!

BUY NOW!

DINOSAUR JR.

(Amherst, Massachusetts)

We are beyond stoked to welcome Dinosaur Jr. to play their first ever Boise show at Treefort Music Fest 2023.

Credited as one of the most formative influences on American alt rock, Dinosaur Jr. had a huge influence on the alt-rock genre and so many people and artists across the globe, including Doug Martcsh, who would go on to form Built to Spill. 

Originally formed in 1984, Dinosaur Jr. has released 12 albums with its most recent, Sweep It Into Space, released in 2021 as the band’s fifth studio album. In the decades since the release of Dinosaur Jr.’s original triptych of foundational albums, it has become clear that their sound – once hailed as a sort of  almost-tamed noise – is/was/always-has-been fully functioning pop music of a sort. The subsequent generations of bands who grew up breathing Dino’s fumes managed to tinker around with the edges of their original post-hardcore song-forms enough for listeners to realize there had always been melodies at the center of everything they did. What Dinosaur Jr. produces is nothing but a beautiful new version of the rock continuum – riff, power, beat and longing, created with an eye on the infinite future.

YAYA BEY

(Brooklyn, New York)

Yaya Bey is one of R&B’s most exciting storytellers. Using a combination of ancestral forces and her own self-actualization, the singer/songwriter seamlessly navigates life’s hardships and joyful moments through music.

Bey’s new album, Remember Your North Star (released June 2022), captures this emotional rollercoaster with a fusion of soul, jazz, reggae, afrobeat and hip-hop that feeds the soul. The artist’s knack for storytelling is best displayed in the album’s lead single, “keisha”. It’s an anthemic embodiment of fed-up women everywhere who have given their all in a relationship, yet their physical body nor spiritual mind could never be enough.

Bey’s ability to tap into the emotionally kaleidoscopic nature of women, specifically Black women, is the essence of the entire album. With themes of misogynoir, unpacking generational trauma, carefree romance, parental relationships, women empowerment and self-love, ‘Remember Your North Star’ proves that the road to healing isn’t a linear one – there are many lessons to gather along the journey.

There is no fakeness when it comes to Bey’s music, and her authenticity can be partly attributed to her upbringing in Jamaica, Queens. Early childhood memories included watching her father (pioneering ‘90s rapper Grand Daddy I.U) record in his studio – which also doubled as Bey’s bedroom – and listening to records by soul legends Donny Hathaway and Ohio Players around the house. Beginning at age nine, the artist’s father would leave space for her to write hooks to his beats, using her favorite artists like Mary J. Blige and JAY-Z as inspirations.

Bey is also a critically acclaimed multidisciplinary artist and art curator, creating the artwork for her music through collages of intimate photos and self-portraits. In 2019, her work was featured in the District of Columbia Arts Center’s “Reparations Realized” exhibit and Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA)’s “Let the Circle Be Unbroken” exhibit. She also completed multiple fine art residencies with MoCADA, curating programs that reflect the same theme that drives her music: the Black woman’s experience.

RAYLAND BAXTER

(Nashville, Tennessee)

We’ve always had country tunes at Treefort, and we are extra excited about the country artists coming to Treefort 11, like Rayland Baxter.

The alt-country artist’s fourth and latest album, If I Were a Butterfly, is his debut release as a producer and bears a dazzling unpredictability that has much to do with his limitless imagination as a collector and collagist of sound. To make the album, Rayland Baxter holed up for over a year at a former rubber-band factory turned studio in the Kentucky countryside — a seemingly humble environment that proved to be something of a wonderland. “I spent that year living in a barn with the squirrels and the birds, on my own most of the time, and I discovered so much about music and how to create it,” says the Tennessee-bred singer/songwriter. “Instead of going into a studio with a producer for two weeks, I just waited for the record to build itself. I’d get up and go outside, see a butterfly and connect that with some impulsive thought I’d had three months ago, and suddenly a song I’d been working on would make sense. That’s how the whole album came to be.”

The follow-up to 2018’s critically acclaimed Wide Awake, If I Were a Butterfly finds Baxter co-producing alongside Tim O’Sullivan (Grace Potter, The Head and the Heart) and Kai Welch (Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull), slowly piecing together the album’s patchwork of lush psychedelia and Beatlesesque pop. In addition to working at Thunder Sound (the Kentucky studio he called home for months on end), Baxter recorded in California, Texas, Tennessee, and Washington, enlisting a remarkable lineup of musicians: Shakey Graves, Lennon Stella, several members of Cage the Elephant, Zac Cockrell of Alabama Shakes, Morning Teleportation’s Travis Goodwin, and legendary Motown drummer Bobbye Jean Hall, among many others. In an especially meaningful turn, two of the album’s tracks feature the elegant pedal steel work of his father, Bucky Baxter (a musician who performed with Bob Dylan and who passed away in May 2020). Thanks to the extraordinary care and ingenuity behind its creation, If I Were a Butterfly arrives as a work of rarefied magic, capable of stirring up immense feeling while leaving the listener happily wonderstruck.

WHITNEY

(Chicago, Illinois)

After the breakup of Smith Westerns in 2014, guitarist Max Kakacek joined with drummer Julien Ehrlich, who also played drums for Unknown Mortal Orchestra, to form Whitney.

The Chicago-based roommates and music-making duo released their third and most recent studio album, Spark, in 2022. 

Spark reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, its dozen imaginative and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant electronics. What’s more, Whitney reduces three years of extreme emotional highs and lows into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks a singable lesson in what it is they (and, really, we) have all survived. The recalcitrant ennui of opener “Nothing Remains,” the devastating loss of “Terminal,” the sun-streaked renewal of “REAL LOVE”: However surprising it may sound, Spark is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an honest accounting of how it feels when you move out of your past and into your present, when you take the next steps of your lives and careers at once and without apology. Spark maintains the warmth and ease of Whitney’s early work; these songs glow with the newness of now.

CHARLOTTE ADIGÉRY & BOLIS PUPUL

(Ghent, Belgium)

Cultural appropriation and racism. Social media vanity. Post-colonialism and political correctness. These are not talking points that you’d ordinarily hear on the dance floor but Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul are ripping up the rulebook with their debut album Topical Dancer.

The Ghent, Belgium-based duo, who broke out with their 2019 Zandoli EP on Soulwax’s record label DEEWEE, are rare storytellers in electronic music: they take the temperature of the time and funnel them into their playful synth concoctions – never didactic and always with a knowing wink.

Their new studio record, Topical Dancer, – which cements them as a duo under both their names for the first time and is co-written and co-produced by Soulwax – is both a triumph of kaleidoscopic electro-pop and “a snapshot of how we think about pop culture in the 2020s.” It captures Charlotte and Bolis’ essence as musical collaborators and the conversations they’ve had over the past two years on tour, as well as their perspectives as Belgians with an immigrant background, Charlotte with Guadeloupean and French-Martinique ancestry and Bolis being of Chinese descent.

Conceptually, the pair wanted to put these observations and ideas about culture today and the zeitgeist into a “time capsule shaped like an egg”, with the idea that you could “bury the album somewhere”, says Bolis, for future generations to find and figure out what the 2020s were all about through their eyes. The egg is “a visual shorthand,” they say, “for new life and unhatched potential.”

Topical Dancer expands their worldview outwards. Songs like “Hey” question the shallowness of ‘wokeness’ and searches for a utopia of “equality, harmony and integrity”, while “Reappropriate” is a fluttery R&B-ish song about liberating oneself from sexual trauma. Charlotte sings across English, Dutch, Creole, and French, her signature deadpan delivery at times recalling a vogue house vocalist ora Black Mirror-style virtual assistant, giving the album a hypnotic, fourth-world quality. These are undoubtedly hard-hitting subjects, and yet mischief is a key aspect of Charlotte and Bolis’ musical alchemy, too. It takes a certain self-awareness to include a song about the French pronunciation of Will Smith on the tracklist (‘Huille Smisse’) on the tracklist. Or the moment you first felt sexually attractive: standout track ‘It Hit Me’ details Charlotte and Bolis’s teenage awakenings over a deliciously thwacking industrial techno beat.

LOUIS COLE BIG BAND

(Los Angeles, California)

Louis Cole is a Los Angeles-based singer songwriter, Grammy awarded producer, composer and multi-instrumentalists. Celebrated as one of the world’s most future-sonic-funk drummers and co-founder of KNOWER, his mission is “to create deep feelings through music.”

Cole has proudly been DIY to date, amassing millions of views with his viral videos like ‘Bank Account’, international tours and debut album Time released on Brainfeeder.

Known for presenting a show that you will never forget, Louis Cole’s powerful stage presence invites you into his broad and deep sound world. As a multi-instrumentalist his writing is a blend of quickfire, hook-laden electro-funk bullets, wistful humor and soft-focus deep balladry. Always performing from the heart of his vastly imaginative emotional portrait, Louis Cole’s songs evolve with his live concerts that feature his 18-piece brass band, to full brass ensembles with WDR Bob Mintzer, solo shows, or with his 4-piece jazz format.

At the forefront of redefining what jazz, electronics and cinematics sounds like; Louis Cole long time collaborators also flavour his sonic mix, notably Thundercat, Genevieve Artadi, Dennis Hamm to and acclaimed jazz pianist and experimental composer Brad Mehldau who featured on his album Time.  

Treefort is thrilled to welcome Louis Cole and his Big Band for a show that none of us will forget. 

MAVI

(Washington, DC)

In 2019, 22-year-old rapper MAVI released his stunning debut album Let The Sun Talk to thunderous applause and widespread critical acclaim.

Following the success of Let The Sun Talk, Mavi had prepared a sophomore album set to release in 2020, but due to unforeseen personal circumstances, he decided to ultimately shelve the project. Instead, in 2021 MAVI returned with the stellar 5-song EP, End of The Earth, featuring fan-favorites like “TIME TRAVEL” and “THOUSAND MILES”, with a LoneWolf-directed visual, before hitting the road on tour in the tail-end of 2021, accompanying Jack Harlow on his headlining Cremé De La Cremé tour alongside Detroit bar spitter Babyface Ray.

In an era where metrics rule all, MAVI has emerged as a unicorn: an artist whose output remains uncompromising, but still manages to maintain a sizable and mobile fanbase, even with a two-year break between releases and only an album and an EP released. Only adding to his unique stature, MAVI is also a fully independent and financially self-sufficient artist, bringing a certain level of urgency to his work that is incomparable. Now, after years of reflecting, contemplating, and of course, rapping – Mavi is delivering his highly-anticipated sophomore effort, Laughing So Hard It Hurts.

THANYA IYER

(Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Thanya Iyer is an enigmatic songwriter who crafts sparkling experimental pop music.

Her live band, with Pompey, Daniel Gélinas, and Shaina Hayes, wields acoustic and electronic instruments to flesh out these serene, spiritual compositions. Thanya and the band’s arrangements empower listeners to embrace mindfulness, aesthetic beauty and the interconnectedness of all things. After their 2020 Polaris long-listed, sophomore visual album Kind, the band recently released their new EP, rest, in the summer of 2022.

WAZUMBIANS

(Accra, Ghana, Africa)

Afro fusion group Wazumbians is a Ghanaian music group whose sound re-echoes the famous Ghanaian group Osibisa; famous for their pioneering role in world music around the globe.

With musical direction from long experienced producer Wazumbi, this new band of long serving musicians is a spicy mix of catchy tunes served with ornamented rhythmic grooves steeped in African traditions into one soul satisfying broth.

The band’s music is influenced by greats including Bob Marley, Salief Keita, Fela Kuti and Lucky Dube yet, for such a wide array of influence, they carry a coherent sound all carefully mixed together yet carelessly shared with their audience and listeners with great fun for equal measure.

The band has shared stage with great renowned artists such as Kanda Bongo Man, Ambuley, Part Thomas as well as other renowned international bands. The band has also traveled to Europe for performances and recording of their third album in France. Wazumbians also toured the United States of America in 2022 where they played fifteen shows in different states, including Flipside Fest, the new little sister festival to Treefort Music Fest.

Much loved in their home city of Accra, the Wazumbians have helped bring back a vibrant live music scene in the bustling city.

DEBBY FRIDAY

(Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

A self-described experimentalist, born in Nigeria, raised in Montreal, and now working in Vancouver; DEBBY FRIDAY is an anomaly.

Her work spans the spectrum of the audio-visual, resisting categorizations of genre and artistic discipline. She is at once a sound theorist and musician, composer and performer, video artist, poet and punk god. In 2018, she released her first self-produced EP, titled BITCHPUNK, to reverberating underground acclaim. Friday’s multi-disciplinary practice explores themes of ritual and feminine aggression as well as discourses of power, forces of diaspora and the aesthetics of eroticism.

Her sophomore release, the DEATH DRIVE EP, came out during the summer of 2019, on Deathbomb Arc, to staggering critical acclaim. DEATH DRIVE has features from NON Worldwide’s, Chino Amobi, and labelmate Lana Del Rabies but was written, produced and engineered entirely by FRIDAY herself. Despite zero publicists being involved in the marketing of this album – the EP received Bandcamp Album of the Day, and glowing reviews from Pitchfork, The Quietus, The Wire, The Fader, The Needle Drop, and many, many others.

DEBBY got her start as a DJ, opening for acts including Mykki Blanco and Princess Nokia. She has done mixes for NTS, Thump and Noisey and has collaborated on tracks w/ Clipping, Deli Girls, DJ Haram and Ouri.

DESOLATION HORSE

(Moscow, Idaho)

Kinda sweet, crunchy, sometimes twangy guitar music helmed by Idaho native, Cooper Trail.

Desolation Horse is rooted in pop in a way that takes the listener somewhere much weirder and wilder than they may immediately realize. These are confidently eclectic songs mostly about best friends, both loud and soft, but generally more loud than soft. Dusty, lived-in, and melody-driven; sunshine in the basement.

THE HEAVY HEAVY

(Brighton, United Kingdom)

The Heavy Heavy create the kind of unfettered rock-and-roll that warps time and place, immediately pulling the audience into a euphoric fugue state with its own sun-soaked atmosphere.

Led by lifelong musicians Will Turner and Georgie Fuller, the Brighton, UK-based band began with a shared ambition of “making records that sound like our favorite records ever,” and soon arrived at a reverb-drenched collision of psychedelia and blues, acid rock and sunshine pop. As revealed on their gloriously hazy debut EP Life and Life Only, The Heavy Heavy breathe an incandescent new energy into sounds from decades ago, transcending eras with a hypnotic ease.

In dreaming up Life and Life Only, The Heavy Heavy tapped into many of the musical touchstones that Turner describes as “deeply entrenched in our psyche”: Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, British Invasion pop acts like the Hollies, folk-blues duo Delaney & Bonnie, to name just a few. Pushing past the confines of reverential pastiche, the band imbues their output with a strangely charmed quality and heady authenticity undeniably tied to their status as artists on the fringe, both philosophically and geographically. To that end, Turner hails from the remote town of Malvern, an enchanted stretch of the English countryside once frequented by the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and Kate Bush. “It’s famous for the healing qualities of its water, and there are ancient trees where the Druids used to worship – there’s a sort of magical-hippie aspect to it,” he notes. Fuller, meanwhile, elevates every track with her spellbinding vocals and magnetic yet wholly unaffected presence, building upon a kaleidoscopic career that’s included performing at Montreux Jazz Festival as a teenager as well as acting in the London theater.

Rooted in their effusive harmonies and fuzzed-out guitar work, Life and Life Only contains the first track Turner and Fuller ever recorded as The Heavy Heavy, a lilting piece of psych-pop titled “Go Down River.” “I’d had this song a while and couldn’t quite finish it, but then once Georgie added her vocals it all came together,” Turner recalls. “The male-female harmonies gave it this whole new sound; it just felt like lying in the green grass on a hot sunny day.”

Self-produced in a London flat, the six-track project also brings that transportive power to songs like “Miles and Miles” (a bright and jangly number whose whirlwind velocity calls to mind late-’60s/early-’70s road dramas like Easy Rider and Vanishing Point), “Man of the Hills” (a groove-heavy homage to Turner’s otherworldly hometown), and “Sleeping on Grassy Ground” (a sweetly languid epic featuring a near-operatic vocal performance from Fuller, a classically trained singer).

With their full-length debut due out in 2023, The Heavy Heavy recently expanded their lineup to five members, allowing for an even more vast and bombastic sound now touched with heavenly four-part harmonies. A massively prolific outfit who’ve written and recorded hundreds of songs in the last two years alone, the band feels perpetually inspired by the pursuit of making music that provides a rarefied pleasure. “The driving force behind all our songwriting is to feel good, and to make other people feel good too,” Fuller points out. And thanks to their uncanny grace as sonic alchemists, The Heavy Heavy ultimately perform a certain magic with their music: eliciting a sublime daze that goes far beyond pure escapism.

SISTEMAS INESTABLES

(Santiago, Chile)

SISTEMAS INESTABLES (UNSTABLE SYSTEMS) is a sound space where repetition and variation are mixed with layers of noise and ambient, forming a progression that develops over time.

Clear melodies and defined sections emerge that mark changes in the dynamics of the songs, opening or closing the space and taking the narrative through different landscapes.
Javier, Santiago and José Tomás operate an interconnected system of a hybrid set of instruments, synthesizers and drum-machines, synchronized with a minimalist lighting proposal.

They have toured their home country Chile, but also other regions as Colombia, Spain, Belgium and Argentina. Their debut album is O, released in 2018. In May 2021 they released O [Live At Dunk! Fest 2019] and at the time they are working on their next LP that is divided into three EPs.

HARPY

(Providence, Rhode Island)

HARPY is the collaboration of cult musical/performance artists Gyna Bootleg (Tinsel Teeth, Sire, Vomitatrix) and Pippi Zornoza (Rectrix, Bonedust, Vvltvre), who have been pushing at the boundaries of the U.S. underground for nearly a quarter of a century.

Harpy lends their atmospheric sonic musings and manic vocals to a multi-layered aggression that is both deeply haunted and utterly relentless. The shriek of this mythological creature as it rips your bowels in order to tell your fortune. The manic psychological space of one becoming unhinged.

KROOKED KINGS

(Salt Lake City, Utah)

Krooked Kings come from humble beginnings. In 2019, a group of five college friends from the University of Utah came together to write music and play shows in backyards and basements.

Over the course of the last few years, the band has proven time and again their ability to write heartfelt indie rock gems. After signing with Los Angeles based indie label Nobody Gets It Records in 2020, the band released their breakout single, “‘96 Subaru”, which has amassed over three million streams. By September 23, 2021, Krooked Kings released their debut project, The Comedown.

After the release, Krooked Kings hit the road on two support tours with Goth Babe and Rare Americans, as well as three headline dates in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles. Keep an eye out for new music from Krooked Kings in the coming months, as they wrap up recording their sophomore record.

CHARLIE HICKEY

(Pasadena, California)

Charlie Hickey’s debut album, Nervous At Night, began with a journey. Having grown up in Pasadena, in the quiet shadow of downtown Los Angeles, Hickey moved away to college at the same time that he got more serious about music, and found himself moving back and forth between his hometown and his newfound independence to play around with song ideas and demos with his friend and collaborator Marshall Vore.

These two worlds reveal themselves in numerous forms across Nervous At Night, as Hickey explores life’s graceless passage between teenage years and adulthood, and all of the noise that permeates

Nervous At Night comes alive in its juxtapositions, chronicling the constant push and pull of life, both its stagnancy and motion in refreshing and honest ways. Chiefly through, this is an album about connection, how even through those struggles we rely on the people around us to keep moving forwards. “I’d like to write songs that are for everyone, that let people into my inner world while also hopefully making people feel less alone on their own. I hope that these songs can be there for somebody the way my favorite songs have been for me.”

SKATING POLLY

(Tacoma, Washington)

There’s a difficult to describe, yet timeless quality to certain songs that transcends genre or era. It’s something that you can’t fake or contrive and it’s what lies at the core of Skating Polly‘s music.

The multi-instrumentalist duo of Kelli Mayo and Peyton Bighorse started their band in Oklahoma in 2009. They recorded their debut album Taking Over The World in 2010 and achieved instant acclaim from underground music icons like X’s Exene Cervenka (who produced 2013’s Lost Wonderfuls) and Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson (who produced 2014’s Fuzz Steliacoom.) After the release of 2016’s The Big Fit, Veruca Salt’s co-frontwomen Louise Post and Nina Gordon reached out and said they wanted to write with the band. What started as a writing session ultimately became 2017’s New Trick EP. Armed with a third member – Kelli’s brother, Kurtis Mayo – the trio released their album, The Make It All Show in 2018 and two singles, “Play House” and “Flyer”, in 2019. Between a heavy touring schedule, the band is working on what will be their sixth full-length record.

Having toured with Deerhoof, X, Kate Nash, Charly Bliss, and Babes in Toyland, Skating Polly’s fanbase consists of an eclectic group from two-year-olds ready to dance with the band all night, to strong young femmes searching for a tight-knit community, all the way to old school punks who don’t usually connect with new music. “The thing that we identify with in a lot of those bands is how they can be really wild and loud while also being super melodic,” Kelli explains, adding that the new dynamic in the band helped them be more expansive when it came to their sound and arrangements. “Everything happened very smoothly when Kurtis became part of the band. It just felt natural having him there and writing with him.” In typical Skating Polly fashion, the trio will still be switching instruments live, something that’s become a hallmark of their performances.

Skating Polly really needs to be seen in a club to fully grasp what makes them so special. “It can get pretty chaotic when we’re playing. People have said it feels like it could fall apart at any moment but in a good way,” Bighorse says with a laugh. “We try to make our music honest and engaging and I think that’s what drew us to people like Nina and Louise or Exene; you can probably guess a lot of the acts that we love, but we’re able to keep making music that always sounds like us,” Mayo explains. “We really try to make the songs the focus instead of trying to flaunt technical musical abilities,” adds Bighorse – and that honesty and optimism is why everyone from legendary musical figures as well as hardcore fans have gravitated toward Skating Polly’s music. 

TROPA MAGICA

(Los Angeles, California)

Psychedelic cumbia garage punk rock band Tropa Magica was founded by brothers David (guitar, vocals) and Rene Pacheco (drums, vocals).

Having toured nationally and on multiple southwest and west coast tours, they have supported established acts such as Bomba Estereo, Molotov, and comedian Felipe Esparza. The band has boldly and successfully taken on larger LA stages at venues such as The Microsoft Theater, El Rey Theater and The Hollywood Palladium. In 2018 and 2019 Tropa Magica performed at So-Cal festival favorites Desert Daze and Tropicalia. At the end of 2019 the band self released a limited edition 7inch vinyl EP Smells Like Cumbia, featuring Nirvana songs as cumbia renditions. Despite the pandemic, 2020 was been a fruitful year for the band. They wrote and recorded the theme song for comedian Felipe Esparza’s new Netflix special and collaborated with the notorious Foo’s Gone Wild on the “Foo Files Cumbia” track released earlier this year. The band has partnered up as ambassadors with 805/Firestone Beer and is sponsored by Fender guitars and Ernie Ball.

ROSE CITY BAND

(Portland, Oregon)

Rose City Band is celebrated guitarist Ripley Johnson. A prolific songwriter, Johnson started Rose City Band as an outlet nimble enough to match the pace of his writing as well as to explore songwriting styles apart from Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo.

Rose City Band allows him to follow his musical muses as they greet him and not be bound by the schedules of bandmates and demands of a touring group.

On Earth Trip, Johnson colors songs with a country-rock twang and a melancholic, wistful undertone. Themes recur such as pining for summers spent in the company of friends to newer meditations on space, stillness and the splendor of the natural world. Johnson’s laid-back and classically West Coast songs communicate emotions entirely of the moment with both his lyrics, intimate vocal style as well as his elegant elongated guitar lines and astute use of counter-melodies on the pedal steel.

Earth Trip’s message of interconnectedness with the environment expands on a long country music tradition that draws a symbiotic relationship between storyteller and the land, celebrating the beauty of the natural world without forgetting our responsibility to preserve it for future.

DIRT MILLER

(Spokane, Washington)

Dirt Miller is an American multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who has been entrenched in music his entire life.

With a saga to tell about a life lived hard, and a recovery fought for even harder, Dirt’s guitar virtuosity combined with his unique singing style and interpretation of humble melodies and lyrics paint a lush scenario of Americana soul. His early influences like Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, and Led Zeppelin, echo in his songs.

Music that comes from pure instinct and deep roots in American folklore and blues history, influenced by the majestic lands of this country and spirituality. Dirt Miller’s music (co-produced by composer Max DiCarlo) is comprised of real instrumentation – cellos, violins and percussion creating a surreal world of images and emotion. Telling the human story with eloquence, fierceness, beauty and a personal edge that hearkens to one’s inner soul, Dirt showcases a dynamic mastery of technical guitar playing matched with a gritty sultry voice that is sure to cut straight to your heart strings – always leaving you wanting more. All written from his true-life experience, the music speaks for itself.

FROST CHILDREN

(New York, New York) 

Frost Children is the project of NYC-based siblings Lulu and Angel Prost.

They’ve released multiple full-length projects since 2020 that combine and transcend genre. They’ve been called “obnoxious, self-obsessed, painfully stylish, convinced of a sense of greatness they’ve yet to earn.” Frost Children are pop music in all its textures and forms.

MAGI MERLIN

(Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Magi Merlin (MADGE-eye) grew up in Saint-Lazare, Canada. A place that may sound unfamiliar to you, but rest assured it is a lot closer to home than you realize.

A wet dream created by people like Nixon in the 70s, a place for white folks, by white folks. The suburbs is the epitome of “normal” unless of course you replace white with black, straight with queer, that is when normalcy is challenged. This, amongst other subjects – such as the impact of capitalism on art, nepotism, the relationship one has to taking pleasure in belonging to those things while rejecting them all – is what drives and inspires the creative universe behind Gone Girl, Merlin’ latest and most audacious effort to date.

The EP draws on influences from 90’s house, drum and bass, Motown, to acid-flecked hip hop. Merlin’s voice, alongside Funkywhat’s recognizable production style, reminds you of a smoky after hours club – if the windows were shattered by bass lines, the walls leveled by 808s. The self-described “cheeky nihilist” combines jazzy scats, raps, and breakbeats together in her musical cauldron to address issues like generational angst, fake friends and casual racism.

It would not be entirely accurate to refer to Magi as only a singer or a songwriter. Music is indeed at the core of her creative universe, but her world expands beyond the medium. It is one that is equally visual as it is auditive, one that is continuously shaped through collaborations with fashion designers, photographers and video directors.

WAVEFORM*

(Monroe, Connecticut)

Connecticut-based duo waveform* is duo Jarett Denner and Don Poppa. Their third album, Last Room, has a purposeful hollowness.

It’s a record you can fall into, a collection of music that’s unafraid to venture into emotion, exploring the gaping distance that develops in some relationships, the constant confusion that accompanies self-discovery, and the darkness that accompanies abandonment.

Recorded on a laptop in Jarett’s bedroom, the album comes with a discernible feeling of intimacy. Despite their close proximity to one another, Jarett and Dan chose to complete much of the album apart, exchanging ideas and finishing bits of music through email. They traded off responsibilities, one focusing on a song’s structure, while another considered the emotional details and coloring.

Formed while still in high school, waveform* was created out of the pair’s mutual appreciation for music. Over the last few years, waveform* has continued to grow, attributing an increasing interest in fans to an era dominated by Internet discovery and streaming. A sound comparable to Melania Kol, Alex G., Title Fight, Have a Nice Life, and Teen Suicide, the band has also performed live with Strange Ranger, Beach Bunny, Pince Daddy and the Hyena, and Lomelda. Their previous releases – Shooting Star and Library – were released in 2018 and 2019. Last Room, released in 2020, is being rereleased through Run for Cover Records.

JUICE

(New York, New York)

Blending rock, pop, R&B, and hip-hop, Juice embraced the diversity of their signature sound early on.

The band – Ben Stevens, Christian Rose, Kamau Burton, Daniel Moss, Rami El-Abidin, and Miles Clyatt – formed in Boston while attending college. 

After graduating, the band recorded and released their first professional EP, 2018’s ‘Workin’ on Lovin’. With new music and two old minivans, the band hit the road for an almost non-stop year and a half of national touring. These collective experiences inspired 2019’s you are simply magnificent.

Juice was set for an exciting 2020. With a new trio of singles – “DiCaprio (Love Me All the Time)”, “Konoha”, and “Make Pretend” – the band was set to embark on their largest headline tour to date. The band’s 2020 tour was, of course, canceled. After spending three months apart (the longest the band had ever been separated since college) the boys were grateful to reunite and start creating something special. The mandatory respite from touring allowed for the band to embrace writing a longer project: Boy Story.

The project was preceded by three singles: “Superimposed,” “Girlfriend Song,” and “Do You Really Feel?” – which garnered press attention from Billboard, Ones to Watch, Line of Best Fit and more. Fall touring culminated in the release of Boy Story in December 2021, along with 2 sold out hometown shows in Boston and New York. The band recently wrapped up a tour supporting flipturn, and is set to release new music in 2023.

KEEP READING