Guardin, Kennedy XOXO, Fijimar
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Magoo
Magoo is a progressive bluegrass quartet from Denver, Colorado, redefining the boundaries of modern bluegrass with fearless creativity and world-class musicianship. Known for their dynamic live performances, the band delivers a powerful blend of intricate arrangements, tight three-part harmonies, and extended improvisations that bring new life to the genre. Their debut album What a Life arrived in February 2026, capturing the group’s adventurous spirit and balance between heartfelt songwriting and soaring instrumental work. The record honors the roots of bluegrass while boldly exploring its modern evolution, featuring a guest appearance from bluegrass legend Sam Bush on fiddle and harmony vocals and mastering by two-time GRAMMY Award winner David Glasser at Airshow Mastering. Each member of Magoo brings a distinctive voice and musical strength to the project. Dobroist Dylan Flynn, winner of the 2024 RockyGrass Dobro Competition, adds soulful depth and melodic warmth. Guitarist Erik Hill, runner-up in the RockyGrass Flatpicking Contest, drives the band’s rhythmic pulse with power and precision. Mandolinist Courtlyn Bills injects fiery solos and inventive arrangements, while bassist Denton Turner grounds the sound with groove, timing, and subtle dynamics. Together, they form a sound that is rich, cohesive, and unmistakably their own. Magoo’s recent achievements include first place at UllrGrass Band Competition and Clash of the Strings, second at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival Band Competition, and a sold-out headlining show at the Bluebird Theater in Denver. Their festival appearances at Winter WonderGrass, Grand Lake Folk Festival, RapidGrass, and Huck Finn Jubilee have solidified their reputation as one of the most exciting new acts in the progressive bluegrass scene. With What a Life now out to the world, Magoo stands poised for a breakout year, bridging the heart of traditional bluegrass with the fearless innovation of a new generation. Facebook · Instagram · YouTube · Spotify · TikTok
Cole Barnhill
Hailing from what he proudly calls “the music capital of the world,” Lubbock, TX, Cole Barnhill kicked off his music career at just 17 years old—cutting his teeth in local bars with his band. In the years since, he’s carved out a signature Texas Rock sound that blends raw energy, melodic vocals, and heavy guitars. The result? Millions of streams across platforms and a fiercely loyal fanbase that stretches far beyond state lines. Known for their electrifying live performances, Cole and his band deliver a high-octane, no-frills rock show that leaves a lasting impression. Whether it’s a packed club in Austin or a festival crowd in Oklahoma, they bring unmatched energy that gets every crowd on their feet. After Cole exploded onto the scene with his first collaboration, “Daydreams” with giants in the scene, Treaty Oak Revival, Cole is now rolling out his first EP since his debut album, *Welcome To My World*. The first single offers a glimpse of what’s to come: “Run,” a gritty, guitar-driven anthem that showcases Cole’s sharp songwriting and undeniable momentum. With a fresh sound in an oversaturated scene, Cole Barnhill is quickly becoming a name to watch in modern rock and Texas Red Dirt country—and he’s just getting started. Website
Dillon Fence
Dillon Fence—Greg Humphreys, Chis Goode, Scott Carle, and Kent Alphin—returns in 2026 to celebrate their second album, Outside In! The band, formed as college students at UNC Chapel Hill and Wake Forest in the late ‘80s, made a splash with their first album Rosemary, with songs honed at countless beer-soaked frat parties and nightclub shows. Their follow-up sophomore album, Outside In—produced by Lou Giordano at Fort Apache Studios in Boston, MA—was quite different than Rosemary. Many DF fans consider Outside In to be the band’s best collection of songs. Outside In took the band out on tours with bands like X, Lush, and Weezer, and onto MTV’s 120 Minutes with music videos for “Collapsis” and “Black Eyed Susan.” Dillon Fence will feature songs from Outside In at this year’s run of holiday dates—along with many crowd favorites. Website · Spotify · Instagram
Porch Light – Hush Tour
Minneapolis five-piece Porch Light’s year ahead has a collection of big, unabashed rock tunes, full of riffs that announce themselves and choruses that reach and grab. All of them are songs meant to be played on stage, by five people without bells or whistles. It’s an approach that’s taken them far — the five-piece have reached over a million monthly Spotify listeners and sold-out headline shows across the country before their debut project hit the market. They are all over this year’s festival circuit playing Summerfest, Yacht Club, Hinterland, Lollapalooza and Shaky Knees. They also are setting out on the road this Fall for the ‘Hush Tour’, spanning across 30+ dates including shows at the Troubadour, Bowery Ballroom and more. Instagram · TikTok · Spotify · YouTube
Lucero
It would be difficult to find a band that is more self-aware than longtime touring band Lucero. Since forming in Memphis in the late 90’s, Lucero’s base musical hallmarks have remained similar to the band’s initial sound established with their first record The Attic Tapes. In the history of their expansive discography, Lucero has evolved and embraced everything from southern rock to Stax-inspired Memphis soul, whilst simultaneously maintaining their distinctive sonic foundations. Years later, dedicated fans of the group still flock to hear the band’s punchy driving rhythms, punk-rooted guitar licks, and lyrics that evoke the whiskey drenched sentimentality of Americana singer-songwriters. Website · Facebook · Instagram · Here at the Starlite (Live from Red Rocks)
Brigitte Calls Me Baby – Irreversible Tour
Since their widely lauded debut album, The Future Is Our Way Out, Chicago-based 5 piece Brigitte Calls Me Baby have brought a greater intensity of vision to their lavish breed of alt-rock, arriving at a boldly singular sound that is both thrillingly new and immediately essential to the modern rock landscape. In a major leap forward for the band, Brigitte Calls Me Baby’s sophomore album Irreversible captures the energy, intrigue and grandeur of their live show, all while pushing further into the exquisite pathos of their songwriting. “Our first album taught me that you’ve got to reach as far down into your soul as possible and be willing to show something real and raw to the world, and with this album that felt even easier and more natural,” says Leavins, whose signature croon imbues every track on Irreversible with a potent emotionality. “There was a time when I tried to bury the kind of feelings we’re displaying on this record, but now I’m at the point where I don’t feel the need to hold anything back.” Produced by Yves Rothman and Lawrence Rothman (Blondshell, Yves Tumor), Irreversible came to life in the midst of a relentless live schedule that’s included performing at leading festivals like Lollapalooza, sharing bills with the likes of Morrissey & Muse, and headlining sold-out tours across the U.S., U.K., and Europe. Recorded live at Lawrence’s the result is a majestic suite of songs that burn bright, hit hard, and passionately celebrate the drama of being alive. Instagram · Facebook · Spotify · YouTube
Friendship, Charlotte Cornfield
Friendship Music for sleeping and waking, walking and driving, hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On Caveman Wakes Up, Friendship’s new album and second for Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of country music grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset by flute pads, bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm section, a song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady Betty Ford fades out with a drum solo, like if Talk Talk came from a dingy Philadelphia basement, and was fronted by James Tate. Songwriter Dan Wriggins’ ragged baritone cuts through eleven murky, swirling country-rock songs with profound lyrical substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock incorporated into the edge of a dream, Caveman Wakes Up belongs equally to the conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background, steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative soul. Over the years, dedication has paid off. Friendship has become a kind of reverse supergroup, wherein the band itself and each individual member is located centrally in an increasingly prominent scene of young folk and country musicians and songwriters. Drummer Michael Cormier O’Leary leads the instrumental collective Hour and, along with bassist Jon Samuels, run Dear Life Records, home to friends and peers who count Friendship as a major influence, including MJ Lenderman, Florry, and Fust. (Samuels also plays lead guitar in MJ Lenderman and the Wind). Guitarist Peter Gill’s band 2nd Grade records prolifically. Wriggins began writing the songs of Caveman Wakes Up on a downtuned classical guitar of Lenderman’s, and finished on a barely-tuned piano in an apartment he shared with Sadurn’s G DeGroot. In the summer of 2023, Wriggins had just left the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where his love for poetry and mistrust for the academic poetry world grew in tandem. A relationship fell apart, and Wriggins crashed for several weeks at Lenderman’s and Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman’s home in North Carolina, where he recorded the first demos of “Resident Evil,” “All Over the World,” and “Love Vape.” Wriggins returned to Philadelphia, and the band got to work on new ideas, finally tracking the album in five days with engineer Jeff Ziegler (Mary Lattimore, War on Drugs). Wriggins recorded vocals with Love the Stranger engineer Bradford Kreiger, and organ, violin (Jason Calhoun), and flute (Adelyn Strei) were recorded by Lucas Knapp in a West Philadelphia church. Charlotte Cornfield Hurts Like Hell, Toronto songwriter Charlotte Cornfield’s March 27, 2026 Merge Records debut, is the most open-hearted, full-voiced album of her career and the first she’s recorded since the birth of her daughter in 2023. Decamping to Philip Weinrobe’s Sugar Mountain studio in Brooklyn, New York in January 2025, Cornfield was joined by Palehound’s El Kempner (guitar/vocals), Lake Street Drive’s Bridget Kearney (bass/vocals), Adam Brisbin (guitar/pedal steel), and Sean Mullins (drums). She and Weinrobe then recruited Feist, Buck Meek, Christian Lee Hutson, and Maia Friedman to sing on the album. “Every musician involved was a dream collaborator,” Cornfield says. These ten songs are at once a reaffirmation of Cornfield standing among the great singer-songwriters of her generation and the first articulation of her future, whatever uncertainty and love it may bring.
The Linda Lindas
The Linda Lindas have partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket sold on our tour will go towards supporting organizations working for equity, access, and dignity for all. www.plus1.org Every day around 4 p.m., The Linda Lindas put down their instruments and jumped in the pool. They used these aquatic moments as a reset during a week-long writing retreat in Palm Springs where phones were banned, the outside world was suspended, and four young people who’ve been making music since tweenhood were writing together in the same room for the first time. In the process, they figured out who they really are. GOTTA GET OUT, the third album from Bela Salazar, Eloise Wong, and Lucia and Mila de la Garza, is the sound of a band discovering itself. Historically, The Linda Lindas have written individually and brought songs to the table. It was a process that served them well through their impressive, Ramones-esque debut Growing Up (2022) and its forceful follow-up No Obligation (2024). The two records took them from L.A. Chinatown all-ages scene mainstays to tours with Green Day and song placements in Inside Out 2. But for this one, they wanted something a little different. “For the first time, we were presenting ideas to each other that weren’t fully formed. That was scary. But we worked through everything together and figured out the role each of us naturally plays,” Lucia explains. “Writing together was a way to find our collective sound,” adds Eloise. “Anything can work if we’re all shaping it together. We can write this slow indie song or a funky dance-y song. And it can all be for the band because we all worked on it together.” At the house with the pool, “I haven’t finished this, but do you wanna hear what I have?” became credo. Bela would conjure a “vibe” — a Logic loop, a guitar part twisted through pedals, a chord progression that was unmistakably hers — and they’d construct a song from there, working out lyrics in real time. They tinkered with synths for the first time, and graduated beyond bar chords. At a second retreat in Long Beach, a Mission Impossible marathon was the background ambiance as they worked out yet more songs — by the end, they had 30 total. “We discovered a lot about being very intentional,” says Lucia, who had recently graduated high school. “Gotta Get Out” was the very first song they wrote. They didn’t intend to make it the title or the theme, but kept coming back to it, rewriting verses right before tracking vocals, clipboard and pen in hand, until, as Lucia says, “we made it mean something.” Opening the LP with big spicy synths and an ominous groove, it captures a central restlessness: the itchiness of being inside while the world moves — the desire to break out of the old habits, the old sounds, the old you. The album’s visual world, designed by Eloise, makes the same argument through imagery: inspired by an old Audubon guidebook, clouds grow across the singles’ art from fair-weather cumulus to full cumulonimbus, viewed from a windowsill. The lyrics are rubber-stamped, the paper is glued, and every smudge is maintained. Website · Instagram · TikTok · YouTube · Facebook · Spotify
Deerhoof
For a band that seems to thrive on collapse, it’s simply amazing that this US/Japanese quartet is now celebrating their 31st year. Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth-and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t seen them live-the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. Each one discovers some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humor. Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom. This music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, carrying an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom. Deerhoof is defined by such paradoxes. Missive 3-19-25: Deerhoof today announced their new album Noble and Godlike in Ruin will be released April 25th (Joyful Noise Recordings), and took an unexpected turn by exclusively premiering its lead single “Immigrant Songs” via Craigslist-two days ahead of the song’s official release at streaming services. In a series of Craigslist ‘Services’ posts advertising themselves for hire in their local communities, including Brooklyn, Tucson, Portland, and Minneapolis, the band shared a message directing readers how to hear their epic album closer alongside photos of the album artwork (front/back, insert, center label). This unconventional premiere serves to spotlight a tech platform that isn’t blatantly supporting fascism. “Immigrant Songs” is an odyssey like only Deerhoof could dream up: beginning with an innocuous lyric about showing up to a party, set to a delicate ostinato for bells and sparkling guitar; and ending with a noise-rock blowout that sounds like reality coming apart at the seams. The band of Satomi Matsuzaki, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier get from one extreme to the other through expertly managed tension and inventive juxtaposition, weaving four-on-the-floor beats through bossa nova guitar chords, following passages of tightly coiled rhythm with wide-open vistas. All the while, the narrative about the party gradually reveals the allegory hinted at in the title. (Which, given Deerhoof’s encyclopedic relationship to music history, is probably also a Led Zeppelin reference.) “Kindness is all I needed from you,” Matsuzaki sings to an unwelcoming host, “but you think we’re in your house.” Not long after, the song detonates, its tightly wound art-pop giving way to several minutes of howling noise. “This song is kind of a sequel to Satomi describing her immigration tribulations in ‘Exit Only.’ It’s what it feels like to see the discourse around immigration get so twisted. The most criminal and barbaric ‘migrant horde’ to invade America was from Europe. There’s a sector of racialized, underpaid immigrants, doing labor white people won’t, who are getting deported and dehumanized in record numbers in recent years. They are really the glue keeping our society from collapsing. It’s these heroic fugitives, not millionaire politicians holding little signs with one hand while sending out fundraising emails about ‘strengthening our borders’ with the other, who actually have a thing or two to teach us all about how to resist and survive.” – Greg from Deerhoof Website · Instagram · Bandcamp · YouTube