Monobloc
Soaring out of the underground of New York City’s booming DIY scene, Monobloc, helmed by vocalist Timothy Waldron and Michael Silverglade on bass, is an exciting new project forms by two friends with a shared ear for merging pop sensibilities, with a distinctly metropolis post-punk attitude. Completed by Zack Pockrose on drums, and guitarists Ben Scofield and Nina Lüders, Monobloc’s strengths lie in their innate gift of storytelling; pairing textually rich, visceral and emotional detail, with a minimalist instrumentation that sits as confidently alongside some of NYCs artistic greats, as it does in its own lane entirely. Undoubtedly a band to watch out for, Monobloc are rapidly on the rise. With a thriving live reputation across the US, 2024 sees the 5 piece come into their own with the release of singles ‘Where Is My Garden’, and the bonafide classic ‘I’m Just Trying To Love You’. A masterclass in heart-on-sleeve adolescence, ‘I’m Just Trying To Love You’ is equal parts new-age Indie, and timeless. Musically enlightened, and beautifully coming-of-age. Monobloc are the ascending sound of a generation, and we’re only just at the beginning. Website | Instagram
Darren Kiely
Hailing from a quaint town in Co. Cork, Ireland, Darren Kiely’s folk-infused pop sound originates from his inherited love of traditional Irish music, intertwined with modern influences such as The Lumineers, Mumtord & Sons, and Noah Kahan. At just five vears old, Darren learned the tin whistle, and at eight years old he picked up the fiddle, eventually teaching himself to play guitar as well. Darren began singing in 2019, quickly garnering attention for his raw and fervent vocals and emotive delivery. After winning numerous honors at a national level in Irish traditional music, Darren found his way to NYC in 2022 to continue developing his own music and sound, and soon after headed to the songwriting hub of Nashville. Signing to Free Flight Records, Kily’s unique presentation of folk-infused pop and lush storytelling, which echoes the backdrop of the inish countryside where he was raised, is the foretront of his debut EP, Lost. The seven-track project explores the triumphant war of overcoming self-doubt, struggling to find himself, questioning emotions and seeking answers, while his follow up EP, From The Dark, Kiely takes his craft to new heights as he explores the harsh realities that come with growing up and moving on. Lost features track “Mom & Dad,” which debuted in the Top 40 on the Irish Singles chart and lop 5 on the Irish Homegrown chart, as well as tan-tavorite “Sunrise” which reached No. 1 on the chart. Kiely took his new music on the road with his headline THE ROAD HOME TOUR & THE LOST TOUR, where he sold out shows across hishome country of Ireland and in North America and has toured with the 502s and Mat Kearny. Website | Facebook | TikTok | Instagram | YouTube
Andrew Duhon
There’s a mystical allure to the road. Innately literal and figurative, it is both the blacktop and the connective tissue between people, places, and cultures. The opportunity to venture beyond what’s known and comfortable into what’s possible. A rugged romanticism of packing up a standard issue Chevy Express tour van with instruments, scuffed amps, overflowing merch boxes, and a trio of musicians setting sail to share Duhon’s songs with anyone who will listen. For a young Andrew Duhon, the road was the connection from “No Man’s Land” to the “Promised Land.” A chance to truly connect with former strangers through song. To feel equal kinship with the good ol’ boys in Beaumont, TX and the hippies and artists in Bellingham, WA. But with that comes a weight. Duhon has a knack for telling the kind of stories that clearly cost the writer something to tell, the kind of honesty that feels noble and never half hearted. Entertaining? Sure, but when a song written by a stranger heals you, even in the smallest way, that’s a connection beyond entertainment, and that is the journey Andrew Duhon sets out on from his home in Louisiana. His songs are about recognizing our story as much as they are about telling his, and his coast to coast pursuits have given him a clearer view of the American Landscape than most are privy to. But after years of voyaging off to every corner of the country, a new sensation arises with each return to New Orleans. The fondness for home returns and, for the moment, forgives the potholes and the incompetence of local politics to focus on those familiar sights, sounds, and singular culture of Louisiana from the old European feeling of The French Quarter to the rural cane fields of Cajun country where his father’s side resides, now noticing the changes after every stretch of time spent away. And from that familiar return comes The Parish Record, a snapshot of life venturing from and returning to one of America’s purest cultural vignettes, and the beauty, conflict, and stories that come with it. The Parish Record was recorded at Dockside Studios in Maurice, LA, where deep in Cajun country sits a wood-panel barn engulfed in oak and cypress trees along the slow butterscotch bayou pace of the Vermillion River. In this isolated hub of Acadiana, Andrew Duhon embarked with his trio of most trusted musicians – Myles Weeks (James Hunter Six, Eric Lindell) on Bass, Jim Kolacek (Feufollet) on Drums, and Daniel Walker (Heart, Ann Wilson, Amy Ray) on Keys – to harness of the sound and feeling of their surroundings. Justin Tockett, the house engineer at Dockside is also, as Duhon claims, his secret weapon. From Duhon, “Justin’s production is the most underrated thing in the room, and his spirit is peaceful and literally at home at that studio. There’s a cat on his lap most of the time he’s mixing. I mean, come on… That’s the feeling I wanted to feel when making this record from what felt like home to me. It wasn’t time to hit Nashville or try out something new on this one. It was about believing in the songs from where the songs came from.” Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Sunflower Bean – Mortal Primetime Tour
Time marches relentlessly on, but it can pass unnoticed unless you find a way to capture it. For the entirety of their remarkable career, Sunflower Bean has made monuments of fleeting moments, by turning them into art, bottling them as song. They broke onto the scene as teens wise beyond their years with Human Ceremony, captured the melancholia of nascent adulthood on Twentytwo in Blue, and confronted the alienation of life under late capitalism on Headful of Sugar. Now in their Saturn Return, the band is back with the most hard-fought and vulnerable album of their career: Mortal Primetime. “You get to decide what your prime is, and you fight for it,” Cumming says. “This is ours, and that can’t be taken away by circumstance. We can’t take it away from each other. This moment, where we are now, is what we’ve always fought for.” That confidence is earned, because Mortal Primetime almost didn’t happen. In the years since Headful of Sugar, the members of Sunflower Bean drifted from one another as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges, tragedies and transformations. Synonymous with New York, the band lost guitarist/vocalist Nick Kivlen to California, leaving vocalist/bassist Cumming to write songs alone for the first time in the band’s history. Soon after, she separated from her long-time partner, informing much of her songwriting. Additionally, drummer Olive Faber birthed a new project, Stars Revenge, after coming out as transgender around the last album cycle. Despite the wealth of success they’d experienced together as a band – from the stages of Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, to touring with Beck, Interpol, and The Pixies – Sunflower Bean struggled to tend to their collective fire and tensions rose. The three friends grew up together and spent their twenties in the spotlight, but away from it, they struggled to make sense of who they were outside of Sunflower Bean. The future seemed finite – it felt like time was up. “Coming close to losing something you fought for, for over a decade, is a really good way to get close to your heart as an artist,” Cumming says. “Every long-term relationship, experiences challenges – you either stop or you go deeper. What is a band but a relationship with a body of work?” Reinvigorated, Sunflower Bean chose to keep the faith and go deeper. “Faith is just another word for a healthy dose of delusion,” Faber says. “We make good music together – how could we walk away from that?” All three original band members convened in Los Angeles, encouraged by the team that’s uplifted them from the very beginning. They doubled down by choosing to self-produce the album, tracking it live to ensure that the immediacy of the performances so essential to Sunflower Bean’s mystique shined through. “It’s such a rare and special thing for a band to have played together this long, so we wanted to lean into the skills we’ve built and take an old-school approach to the recording—which is maybe the most subversive thing we could do at a time when it’s so easy to copy and paste,” says Kivlen. Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | TikTok
Cigarettes @ Sunset, Noah Daniel & The Naked Cowboys
Cigarettes @ Sunset is a band that hails from the mountains of North Carolina consisting of Garrett Dellinger, Sarah Vann, Ryland Bagbey, Wells Whitman, and Ethan Moore. Forming in 2021, the band calls Boone home. Their debut album Mr. Pucky and the Star Destroyers was released in early 2023 resulting in a sound that merges Appalachian angst with pop, outlaw country, and punk. Since 2021, they’ve been touring regularly through the east coast with such acts as Dexter & The Moonrocks and others. The band’s music juxtaposes driving guitar riffs, drums that swerve out of country and punk, with swelling violin, and Dellinger’s semi-autobiographical lyrics anchor the band in both time and place. Their live shows turn any venue into an intimate and energized space, amalgamating shoegaze, old time, and indie rock into a whirlwind of sound. Linktree
School of Rock Chapel Hill’s Mid-Season Preview
$10 Suggested Donation. 12:00pm House Band set (10 mins)12:10pm Chuck Berry vs Little Richard (30 mins)12:40pm Grace Slick vs Janis Joplin (30 mins)1:10pm Rock 101 set (20 mins)1:30pm Adult Band set (20 mins)2pm Arena Rock (30 mins)2:30pm Led Zeppelin’s In Through The Out Door (20 mins)2:50pm Best of Beck (30 mins)3:20pm House Band set (15 mins)3:35pm Rock 201 set (30 mins)4:15pm Halftime Heroes (30 mins)4:45pm Best of Rage Against The Machine (30 mins)5:15pm Staff Band preview (30 mins) Website | Instagram | Facebook
Brigitte Calls Me Baby
The music of Brigitte Calls Me Baby is equal parts elegant time warp and up-close exploration of our modern-day neuroses. The Chicago-based band ingeniously spans genres and eras, merging the lavish romanticism of mid-century pop with the frenetic energy and spiky intensity of early millennium indie-rock. Centered on Leavins’ hypnotically crooning vocal work, the result is a rare convergence of sophistication and style and unabashed sincerity. As shown on their debut EP This House Is Made Of Corners — a five-song project made with nine-time Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Cobb — Brigitte Calls Me Baby possess a singular musicality informed by Leavins’ eclectic upbringing. Originally from the Southeast Texas town of Port Arthur, he grew up listening to Roy Orbison records at his grandparents’ house next door, while his parents played him new-wave bands like The Cars and his friends turned him onto Radiohead and The Strokes. At age 13, Leavins took up guitar and began writing songs of his own, quickly discovering his distinct vocal style. “At first I didn’t like the way I sang and couldn’t really do anything about it, but as I got older I started to appreciate it more,” he reveals. “My whole inclination toward music came from being in this small town in Texas with nowhere to go and nothing to do, and wanting to be understood without having to say anything.” Upon moving to Chicago in 2016, Leavins immersed himself in the local music scene and soon linked up with guitarists Jack Fluegel and Trevor Lynch, bassist Devin Wessels, and drummer Jeremy Benshish, who joined him in co-founding Brigitte Calls Me Baby. As the band built up their catalog, Leavins was tapped to take part in recreating a series of Elvis Presley songs for Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic Elvis, a turn of events that found him crossing paths with Cobb. “Dave and I hit it off right away and started talking about the music we loved, and when we reconnected later he asked me to send him some of the songs I’d been working on,” Leavins recalls. Soon after sharing a batch of demos with Cobb (whose credits include modern classics like Jason Isbell’s Southeastern and Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music), Brigitte Calls Me Baby headed to Nashville to record their debut body of work at the legendary RCA Studio A. Co-produced by Cobb and Brigitte Calls Me Baby and mostly recorded live, This House Is Made Of Corners opens on a lush and cinematic track called “The Future is Our Way Out,” a prime introduction to the EP’s heightened yet palpably genuine emotionality. “I want to be earnest even when it’s uncomfortable, and write unapologetically about things like my intense fear of death,” says Leavins. “‘The Future is Our Way Out’ is about that fear, but it’s also about hoping there might be something beyond death, a way out of all the mess and the sadness that plagues us in life.” On “Impressively Average,” pounding rhythms and shimmering guitar tones form the backdrop to what Leavins refers to as a “a bit of a self-loathing song, about trying to cope with someone’s very high expectations of you.” And on “Eddie My Love,” Brigitte Calls Me Baby present a gorgeously aching portrait of obsession and despair. “‘Eddie My Love’ paved the way for all the songs that would come after it,” says Leavins, who first penned the track as a ballad. “It felt so vulnerable from the jump, and made me realize that there’s no point in being anything but vulnerable in what we do.” Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | TikTok
Palmyra
Established in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Palmyra captures the collective spirit of three Virginia natives: Teddy Chipouras, Mānoa Bell, and Sasha Landon. Palmyra straddles at least two musical worlds. They are, on one hand, a band from the South that plays traditional instruments and indeed once lived in the old-time locus of Floyd, Virginia. Comparisons to and a kinship with The Avett Brothers and even Old Crow Medicine Show are inevitable. On the other hand, Palmyra writes about grief, gender dysphoria and identity, and coming of age in songs that flirt with soul, post-rock, and even emo; the South, too, is the place of My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, Cat Power, and now, Palmyra. The band’s first full length LP, Restless, is out March 2025 on Oh Boy Records. Framed by moments of struggle, solidarity, and hard-won growth, Restless is an unqualified ringer for anyone who loves the space where the roar of indie rock collides with raw folk. Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Linktree Pulled from the dense clay underneath Cahas mountain in South Western Virginia, Clover-Lynn dresses the sounds of her mountains upbringing with the veil of the Gothic. Blending 3 Finger, Clawhammer, and ballad singing she creates a unique sound that is both unsettling and familiar. Website | Instagram | Spotify
Abbey Road LIVE!
“One of the world’s premier Beatles cover bands” -US News and World Report “unquestionably expert at what they do” -Indyweek Come and experience some Beatles magic as Abbey Road LIVE! delivers its signature performance: the entire Abbey Road album, start-to-finish. Featuring classics such as Come Together, Here Comes The Sun and the epic Side 2 medley, “Abbey Road” has been often dubbed the Fab Four’s finest musical work. And that’s just half of the evening: fans will be treated to a second set of Beatles tunes spanning the band’s 8-year, 200 song career. Abbey Road LIVE! is not your typical look-alike Beatles tribute act. Don’t expect mop-top wigs and phony British accents. Rather, this band is about bringing some of the more complex Beatles music to life in a raw & spirited fashion, while remaining true to the original recordings. And the band’s creative exuberance is infectious. At a typical Abbey Road LIVE! show, audiences young and old can found gleefully singing along with every word, many relishing the chance to hear this monumental music performed live — something the Beatles themselves never did, as they stopped touring in 1966, before many of their best albums were released. Website | Facebook | YouTube
Lauren Sanderson
Hi. It’s me, Lauren. Welcome to my bio, where I am supposed to somehow put 20+ years into a couple paragraphs so buckle in. I grew up in Indiana and let’s be real – things didn’t exactly go according to plan. I didn’t get into college, but somehow, that led me to a TED Talk at 19 where I realized I wanted to do one thing: be my authentic self and inspire people along the way. I started making music in my bedroom, just sharing everything, the highs, the lows, the real stuff. It wasn’t long before a community of people who felt like I did started to grow, and that took me to LA in 2018. In 2019, I was on stage opening for FINNEAS and Chase Atlantic—insane. Then, 2020 came around, and I dropped my debut album Midwest Kids Can Make It Big, which got love from Billboard, Complex, MTV, and even Zane Lowe on Beats 1 (he is one of my favorite interviewers on planet Earth). In 2022, life got crazy when “THERAPY!” blew up on TikTok. That year, I also collaborated with GFLIP on our song GAY 4 ME, which was massive for G & I, and then dropped my second album, Death Of A Fantasy, which has over 20 million streams on Spotify… what the ****. Fast forward to 2023, I release IDC AT ALL with the help of Vic Fuentes from Pierce the Veil. I’m touring the world—37 cities across North America, Europe, and the UK. It’s been surreal, and I’m so grateful for it all. But somehow, this is still just the beginning. I can’t wait to keep pushing boundaries, making music, and, most importantly, inspiring people to just be who they are. My third album will be coming in HOT in 2025. I hope you’re ready for a wild ride. Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud | TikTok
