Adam Melchor
Adam Melchor’s journey thus far has been far from conventional. Long story short, this proud Jersey boy picked up a guitar and eventually fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a musician in Los Angeles. But in reality, he got there by singing for mobsters “well-suited insurance guys” at pizza parlors, getting an Opera degree, playing thousands of hours in various dives, churches, and restaurants (sometimes in the same day), and driving across the country to the West Coast in an old Toyota Camry (twice). Moving to Los Angeles during 2018, he had sessions with everyone from Charlie Puth to The Chainsmokers, and has also toured alongside Mt. Joy, Dodie, Rodrigo Y Gabriela, and JS Ondara. Picking up steam, his single “Real Estate” gained impressive traction leading up to the 2020 SUMMER CAMP EP. After racking up more than 40 million streams and garnering acclaim from NPR, Wonderland Magazine, Billboard, Atwood Magazine, and more, he properly made his debut earlier this year with Melchor Lullaby Hotline, Vol. 1. Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | TikTok | Soundcloud | Spotify
Ruston Kelly – Pale, Through the Window Tour
Since making his debut with 2018’s Dying Star, Ruston Kelly has built a catalog of songs that search for transcendence in the most devastating and demanding of experiences: addiction, the strenuous work of self-evolution, the fallout of broken relationships. But in the writing of his latest album, the South Carolina-born artist found himself in unfamiliar emotional territory—a state of sustained joy and inner peace, brought on by a spiritual breakthrough and the dawning of a new love. Brimming with the grit and depth that’s always defined his output, Pale, Through the Window ultimately affirms Kelly as one of modern music’s most astute observers of the human heart and spirit. “For most of my life I’ve felt comfortable writing about darker subject matter with a slight silver lining of hope, asking questions like ‘Why do people suffer, and how can we find communion and joy in the middle of the suffering?’” says Kelly. “Before this album I didn’t quite have the songwriting muscle required to write about joy more directly, which meant that I had to develop some new muscles and find my voice in a whole different way.” The follow-up to The Weakness—a 2023 release that earned major acclaim from the likes of Rolling Stone, The New York Times, NPR and led to his appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers”—Pale, Through the Window finds Kelly reuniting with his longtime collaborator Jarrad K, who also helmed production on Dying Star and 2020’s Shape & Destroy. The first body of work he’s recorded with his longtime touring band, the album centers on a singular sonic palette that often merges synth with pedal-steel guitar while fully embracing Kelly’s ardent love of classic pop-punk and emo—ultimately bringing a raw and potent energy to his soul-searching songwriting. Over the course of Pale, Through the Window’s 13 songs, Kelly offers up everything from the somber rumination of the LP’s title track and the rueful longing of “Twisted Root” (an intimate look at his history with addiction) to the radiant open-heartedness of love songs like “Waiting to Love You” and “Wayside” (a euphoric but unvarnished portrait of love against the backdrop of a world in flames). And in sharing such an all-embracing account of his journey to acceptance and peace, he aspires to provide others with the courage to persevere through their own personal chaos. “If someone’s struggling with doubt or hopelessness because of the state of the world or their relationship with God or with themselves, I hope this record leaves them with the sense that it can be okay and that love truly is the most powerful force we have available to us,” says Kelly. “I also hope they feel at least a sliver of the freedom and joy I felt in writing these songs—even if they’re just having a good time bobbing their head to ‘Waiting to Love You,’ I want everyone to be reminded that the world can be a joyful place.” Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | Soundcloud
Tropa Magica
Tropa Magica was formed by brothers David and Rene Pachecoin2018. Inspiredbythesongsandvibesof their 90’s East LA backyard parties. The band blends in the guitar and rhythms of 60’s Peruvian Cumbias and 90’s grunge with a southern psychedelic twist that transports the listener into a tropical psychedelic dance party. Website | Instagram | Facebook
smokedope2016
Often credited for bringing cloud rap back to life, Virginia rapper and producer smokedope2016 stands out as a visionary. His music has a dreamy and nostalgic vibe, making him one of a kind. Little is known about smokedope2016’s personal life, who seemingly prefers to keep his public and private lives separate, rarely sharing details and often blurring his face in videos, social media posts, and album covers. As he told the Masked Gorilla podcast in February 2025, he had traded his welding job for a full-time music career in summer 2024. Despite this information, fan speculation, on Reddit particularly, is very common, with people often trying to figure out more details about his personal life. smokedope2016’s musical style has often been compared to Black Kray, Eric Dingus, and Yung Lean, all artists known for their experimental, ambient sounds that shape the underground cloud rap scene. In his appearance on the aforementioned Masked Gorilla podcast, he explained that experimentation is necessary to grow artistically, which is crucial for any artist’s longevity: An idea that is truly reflected in his discography. Spotify | Instagram
Jenny Owen Youngs
In the decade since Jenny Owen Youngs last released a full-length album, she’s toured the world, co-written a #1 hit single, launched a wildly popular podcast, landed a book deal, placed songs in a slew of films and television series, moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to coastal Maine, and gotten married, divorced, and married again. She’s done everything, it seems, except release another album. “After writing a zillion songs with other artists and immersing myself in other people’s voices for ten years, I finally started to get excited about making my own music again,” she explains. “It was like I took this extended sorbet course, and after that palate cleanser, I was ready to dig back in.” With her exceptional new Yep Roc debut, Avalanche, Youngs delivers a main course worthy of the wait. Written with a series of friends including S. Carey, Madi Diaz, The Antlers’ Peter Silberman, and Christian Lee Hutson and recorded with producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, The Hold Steady, Cassandra Jenkins, Josh Ritter), the collection is an achingly beautiful exploration of loss, resilience, and growth from an artist who’s experienced more than her fair share of each in recent years. The songs are deceptively serene here, layering Youngs’ infectious pop sensibilities atop lush, dreamy arrangements that often belie the swift emotional currents lurking underneath. The performances, meanwhile, are riveting and nuanced to match, gentle yet insistent as they reckon with the pain of regret and the joy of redemption, sometimes in the very same breath. The result is the most raw and arresting release of Youngs’ remarkable career, a brutally honest, deeply vulnerable work of self-reflection that learns to make peace with the past as it transforms doubt and grief into hope and transcendence. “There’s a good deal of heartbreak and disappointment in this music,” Youngs explains, “but it ultimately gives way to excitement and promise, to the incredible, immeasurable bliss of falling in love and finding yourself again. These songs travel the whole emotional spectrum.” That kind of range has been Youngs’ calling card from the very start. Born and raised in rural New Jersey, she fell in love with The Beatles at an early age before eventually finding her way to The Cranberries and Elliott Smith in high school. Her self-recorded debut, Batten Down The Hatches, landed a high-profile sync in the Showtime series Weeds and led to a deal with Nettwerk Records, which re-released the album along with her 2009 follow-up, Transmitter Failure. Widespread acclaim and dates with the likes of Regina Spektor, Ingrid Michaelson, Frank Turner, and Aimee Mann followed, but by the time Youngs released her third album, 2012’s An Unwavering Band Of Light, she was ready for a change of pace, moving to LA to focus on writing for other artists and for film and TV. In 2016, Youngs co-wrote Pitbull’s “Bad Man,” which debuted at the 58th annual Grammy Awards; in 2017, she co-wrote Shungudzo’s “Come On Back,” which was featured in the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack; and in 2018, she co-wrote Panic! At The Disco’s smash hit “High Hopes,” which went five-times platinum and broke the record for most weeks atop Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart. Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Water From Your Eyes
Life is horribly dark right now. And yet, it is not unfunny. That’s the sentiment that animates Water From Your Eyes on their new album, and first for Matador, Everyone’s Crushed. On the follow-up to the Brooklyn duo’s 2021 breakthrough, Structure, Rachel Brown (they/them) and Nate Amos (he/him) find silliness and fatalism dancing in a frantic lockstep, using heart palpitating rhythms and absurdist, deadpan lyrics to convey stories of personal and societal unease. Described by Brown as Water From Your Eyes’ most collaborative record ever — and, as such, a kind of reset for the pair, almost like a debut, despite technically being their sixth — it’s a swollen contusion of an album: experimental pop music that’s pretty and violent, raw and indelible. The duo started making music together in 2016 while living in Chicago, after Amos played Brown some New Order and they decided they wanted to start a “sad dance band.” Both musicians in their own right, and a couple at the time, they made their self-titled debut EP in a week. Over the next few years, Water From Your Eyes’ music drifted toward rangier and less conventional sounds, incorporating serene industrial polyrhythms, ambient drone music, and contemporary composition. Eventually, Amos and Brown broke up, moved to New York, and began working on Structure. That album found harmony between the duo’s pop and experimental impulses, the tracklist bookended by gossamer pop songs that were a testament to both their keen grasp of vintage hooks and their trollish sense of humor. Despite finding solace in the band, both describe 2021 as one of the worst years of their lives — Brown grappling with the malaise they felt upon seeing the way that capitalism and establishment politics were kicking back into overdrive as the pandemic entered its later months, and Amos working through substance abuse issues with Brown’s support. As a result, Everyone’s Crushed is shot through with unresolved tension, its nine tracks skittishly refusing to seek out resolute endings or stick to traditional structures. Many songs were written using serialism and microtonalism, and at times evoke the futurist-pop moves of Japanese composer Haruomi Hosono and the brutalism of Glenn Branca. “Barley” is a dance-rock track sequenced in alien tonality, with Brown speaking garbled transmissions (“One two three/Counter/You’re a cool thing count mountains”) over a bed of hallucinatory guitars. “14” leans into contemporary classical, with curtains of overlapping de-tuned strings underscoring lyrics that Nate describes as something out of a “gross-out horror movie”: “I’m ready to throw you up.” Water From Your Eyes still possess an off-kilter, shitposty quality. Everyone’s Crushed manages to reference classic rock twice — first, on “Barley,” when Brown accidentally invokes Sting with the lyric “walk in fields of gold,” and again on “True Life,” when they sing: “Neil let me sing your song/It’s been this way for so long/Give me another chance.” Those weren’t the song’s original lyrics — Brown and Amos initially wanted to interpolate the bridge to “Cinnamon Girl” — but this is a typically meta compromise for the pair, a way to turn “True Life” into a song about writing the song “True Life.” Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | TikTok | Soundcloud | Spotify
An Evening with Patty Griffin + Rickie Lee Jones
This is a seated show. Patty Griffin is among the most consequential singer-songwriters of her generation, a quintessentially American artist whose wide-ranging canon incisively explores the intimate moments and universal emotions that bind us together. Over two decades, the 2x GRAMMY® Award winner – and 7x nominee – and Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement award winner, has crafted a remarkable body of work in progress that prompted the New York Times to hail her for “[writing] cameo-carved songs that create complete emotional portraits of specific people…[her] songs have independent lives that continue in your head when the music ends.” 2019 saw the acclaimed release of the renowned artist’s GRAMMY® Award-winning 10th studio recording, PATTY GRIFFIN. One of the most deeply personal recordings of Griffin’s remarkable two-decade career and first-ever eponymous LP, PATTY GRIFFIN made a top 5 debut on Billboard’s “Independent Albums” chart amidst unprecedented worldwide acclaim, and later, a prestigious GRAMMY® Award for “Best Folk Album.” Griffin’s new album, CROWN OF ROSES, is a deeply personal and introspective work that explores themes of identity, nature, family, and womanhood. Emerging from a creative drought during the pandemic, Griffin found herself re-evaluating the stories she’d long told herself. The result is an eight-track collection that is both sparse and emotionally rich, blending folk, Americana, and blues. With CROWN OF ROSES, Griffin offers a record that’s both grounded and transcendent — one that invites listeners to release old narratives, embrace new truths, and stay truly alive while they’re here. Having crafted a rich catalog that chronicles love and death, heartache and joy, connection and detachment, Patty Griffin continues to push her art forward, as always imbuing every effort with compassion and craft, uncanny perception, and ever-increasing ingenuity. Website | Facebook | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube Rickie Lee Jones is an American musician and storyteller who has been inspiring pop culture for decades, beginning with her first two seminal albums, Rickie Lee Jones and Pirates. Named the “premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation” (New Yorker), the two-time Grammy winner will release her first all jazz album in April 2023, produced by Russ Titelman. In 2021, Jones released her celebrated memoir Last Chance Texaco, named Book of the Year by MOJO and a Best Book of the Year at Pitchfork and NPR. The Independent writes, “There has always been something defiant about Rickie Lee Jones . . . a voice from a dream, elusive yet familiar, transcendent, a messenger from another place.” Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify
Trash Panda
Trash Panda began in 2015 as the pet recording project of songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist Patrick Taylor, expanding into a duo then a trio in 2016. Pulling from influences as wide as neopsychedelia, soul, indie rock and pop music, the band considers themselves somewhat post-genre. Darlings of the indie scene, Trash Panda tapped into both the perils of modern dating and the existential questions of dark nights of the soul. Their 2016 EP Off features crowd-favorites “Aging Out of the 20th Century,” “Off,” and “Check Please.” Trash Panda’s 2018 album The Starclimber made a splash with tongue-in-cheek banger “Atlanta Girls” and the psychedelic groove of “Heartbreak Pulsar.” After the album the band went on hiatus and pursued other projects, emerging four years later in 2022 with several new members, releasing two singles “Things Will Never Change” and “Doin’ Fine Today” which are quickly gaining attention, featured in their first weeks on more than 10 of Spotify’s editorial playlists. In its first wave, only two years of frenzied creativity, the band made a regional splash touring small and mid-sized venues and during its four year hiatus reached a certain level of global cult status, with passionate fans spanning the globe. Autumn of 2022 brought the band their first nationwide tour as support for Ceramic Animal. Trash Panda plans to release their second full length album in 2023 coinciding with an extensive album support tour in the spring and summer. Website | Instagram | YouTube
Molly Tuttle – The Highway Knows Tour
On the heels of two Grammy-winning albums in succession, with her band Golden Highway—2022’s Crooked Tree and 2023’s City of Gold—plus a nomination for Best New Artist, Molly Tuttle returns with a solo album that’s her most dazzling to date: So Long Little Miss Sunshine. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson, Eric Church, Cage the Elephant), the fifth full album from the California-born, Nashville-based singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist features twelve new songs—eleven originals and one highly unexpected cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.” Tuttle’s career, which began at age fifteen, has charted a course between honoring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. On this album—a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus one murder ballad—she goes to a whole new place. Her stunning guitar work is more up-front on this album than ever before. (One of the most decorated female guitarist alive, Tuttle was the first woman to win the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Award’s Guitar Player of the Year in 2017, at age twenty-four, and won again the following year, with nominations nearly every year since; she has also won Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award.) So Long Little Miss Sunshine also features Tuttle playing banjo, something she’s never done on one of her albums before. “I like to be a bit of a chameleon with my music,” she says. “Keep people guessing and keep it full of surprises.” Tuttle has been slowly building this collection of songs over the last five years, while also writing and releasing two hugely successful albums and a six-song EP (last year’s Into the Wild) and playing more than 100 shows each year with Golden Highway. Along the way she’d send songs to Joyce, who she first started talking to about collaborating on the album a few years ago. “I’ve been wanting to make this record for such a long time. Part of me was scared to do such a big departure, and that went into the album title So Long Little Miss Sunshine. It’s like, ‘You know what? I’m just not going to care what people think. I’m going to do what I want.’” The album was recorded with a group of musicians that includes drummer/percussionists Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham, bassist Byron House, and Joyce on multiple instruments. Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) also plays banjo, fiddle, and harmonica, as well as singing harmony. Tuttle also conceived the artwork for So Long Little Miss Sunshine, which features multiple Mollys, each wearing a different wig except for one with nothing on her head at all. (“I probably own as many wigs as I own guitars,” she says.) Tuttle has been bald since she was three years old due to the autoimmune condition alopecia areata; she acts as a spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation. Website | Instagram | TikTok | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify
Glare
When you hear music like this — the wild, loose and woozy drags of guitar; the impossible beauty of it all — what kind of landscape presents itself in your mind? Vistas big enough to be forgotten in. Deserts which stretch back to the beginning of time. Infinite horizons melting into pink bokehs. It’s Texas, isn’t it? Formed in 2017 in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Glare aren’t so much genre traditionalists as they are painters of wide realms and intense moods. The four-piece band has already accumulated a large audience, both in the flesh with their reputation for sell-out shows, and on the internet, a place where people go to short-circuit feelings through their screens. Sunset Funeral, the band’s debut LP, is a fog of dreamy grief, where feeling supersedes language. It’s music, as guitarist Toni Ordaz puts it, “for people who don’t know how to talk about how they feel.” An album that’s been years in the making, Sunset Funeral is a document of unspeakable grief, charting the process of mourning and how it travels through our subconscious and dreams. One of the great charms of Sunset Funeral, and of Glare overall, is how they approach such a large, celestial sound with humble materials. Among the shoegaze revivalists, Glare come to the canvas with a more resourceful, DIY perspective than many of their peers. Glare’s music is too sublime, too huge to sound like it came from any kind of manmade instrument, tiny amp box or otherwise. On first listen, Sunset Funeral — which scans as vast as desert sand — may overwhelm the senses. But look closer, and you’ll find a multiplicity of heavily crushed textures, treasures. ‘Guts,’ with its sweetly chugging guitar line, dissolves the borders between bliss and despair. ‘2 Soon 2 Tell,’ one of the album’s most gauzily romantic tracks, is both tense and transcendent. Nü Burn, a crunchy and lilting number, harkens back to the band’s grittier hardcore roots. But even when they deign to go hard, you can hear a softening in Glare’s sound compared to any of their previous releases, as well as an attempt to lean into more traditional pop song structures. The music drifts heavenward, to be sure, though it’s still tethered down by steady foundations. It’s beautiful. It’s humid. It’s delirious. It’s music made by people whose feelings speak louder than their words. Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify
