Band To Watch Archives - Stereogum

Band To Watch: Suitor

Lizzie Manno — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:00:29 +0000

It’s a wintery Thursday night in Cleveland, Ohio — cold enough that I can see my breath, but not so cold that my nosehairs have stiffened and merged into one. We’re huddled inside a crowded Superelectric Pinball Parlor in Gordon Square. The walls are plastered with local sports pennants and kitschy knickknacks, and someone’s blowing…

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Band To Watch: Cardinals

Margaret Farrell — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:17:05 +0000

Cardinals speak about their songs as if they have a life force. For this band, though it can come off as evasive, creative ambiguity is a kind of protection for artist and listener alike. Vocalist-lyricist Euan Manning explains: "We like the ambiguity. If someone read there was a certain meaning that—" "You have to interpret it this way," his brother and the band’s accordionist Finn Manning interjects. Euan carries on: "Not even that you have to, but someone would think that they would have to, if the artist said that was what the song was about. I think that that harms the song. It harms the listener’s relationship with the song." For the Irish quintet, meaning isn’t something to dissect, it's something to conserve.

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Band To Watch: Racing Mount Pleasant

Margaret Farrell — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 13:11:21 +0000

Speaking things into existence is a powerful tool, even if it’s just a casual comment to then-strangers on your first day at college orientation. It might initially seem insignificant, but when that comment becomes real years later, it feels like time folding in on itself – your future self catching up with your past self…

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Artist To Watch: Asher White

Caleb Campbell — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:03:02 +0000

Asher White thrives in contradictions. The Brooklyn-based artist’s music clearly draws on the pop canon, but her songs rarely unfurl with the expected linearity or instant accessibility associated with pop music. She has an affection for solitary home recording, clashing instrumental assemblage, and outré sonic experimentation, but she’s also able to tap into a reservoir…

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Band To Watch: Humour

Margaret Farrell — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:17:09 +0000

A man is convinced a gang of mischievous creatures is psychologically torturing him — messing with the temperature of his apartment, cooking food and playing vinyl, ransacking the pantry. But he’s gonna beat the little fuckers at their own game. He slips on his Crocs and, over a flurry of discordant guitars and bludgeoning drums,…

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Band To Watch: Golomb

Chris DeVille — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:30:20 +0000

Some things about Golomb feel preordained — as if their backstory was dictated by fate, as if their music has always existed. Not that they stumbled into their current upward trajectory. The Columbus power trio, who’ll make their debut on Philly’s esteemed No Quarter Records next month with sophomore album The Beat Goes On, have…

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Band To Watch: Um, Jennifer?

Grace Robins-Somerville — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:22:24 +0000

"She's one of those uniquely beautiful people—" Eli Scarpati starts to explain, before correcting himself. "Well, not people, because She's not a person. She's similar to one of those uniquely beautiful people, where anyone who meets Her is immediately in love and also completely terrified and viscerally, physically uncomfortable around Her, but when She leaves you're missing Her and you're like, 'Aww, let's bring Her around again!'"

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Artist To Watch: Mei Semones

Patrick Lyons — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:00:28 +0000

The first time you hear Mei Semones, you’re likely to contort yourself into some weird shapes in an attempt to describe her music. My first pass, “Pat Metheny and Gilberto Gil start a Midwest emo band with a folk singer who’s fluent in English and Japanese,” nearly tore my hamstrings. That was in reference to…

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Band To Watch: Glixen

Eli Enis — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 18:45:23 +0000

As recently as three years ago, the prospect of being a shoegaze rockstar would’ve been seen as laughably ridiculous. In 2025, who the fuck knows what’s possible. This year, TikTok shoegaze breakout Wisp will tour with System Of A Down and Deftones, two of the biggest rock bands in the world. Novulent and Julie, other…

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Band To Watch: Prostitute

Devon Chodzin — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 20:21:50 +0000

Immediately due west of Detroit sits the USA's first Arab-majority city. Dearborn, Michigan is home to over 100,000 residents, a University of Michigan campus, and the continent's largest mosque. Its wide roads are lined with strip malls and gas stations; the spectre of a desiccated auto industry looms large above the whole region. It's in this environment that vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Moe Kazra and drummer Andrew Kaster became fast friends in their youth, evolving into a brotherhood while working the same job and forming their band, Prostitute. This past fall, Prostitute dropped their dizzying debut album, Attempted Martyr, after furiously debating every line, every drum hit, every riff. Their passionate attention to every last detail paid off: Attempted Martyr has broken containment, with audiences worldwide taking in their theatrical noise rock with flashes of Arab, West African, and East Asian influences.

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Band To Watch: Vacuous

Brad Sanders — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 16:07:16 +0000

Death metal often seems to belong to a bygone time, whether that’s the white-sneakered ’80s that birthed the genre or much, much further back. Simple power chord progressions get called “caveman riffs” when they’re tuned down a step and run through an HM-2 pedal, and there was once a whole-ass subgenre called “caverncore.” London’s Vacuous…

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Band To Watch: High.

John Norris — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:49:03 +0000

While not as flogged into near-meaninglessness as those ubiquitous descriptors “punk” and “psychedelic,” “shoegaze” is nevertheless hella overused. While it still evokes something broadly knowable in most minds, it’s spawned multiple subgenres: “dreamgaze,” “Nu gaze,” “hazegaze.” I still own an old “Genre” T-shirt by Hipster Runoff’s king of the droll, Carles, that includes the absurd…

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Band To Watch: DITZ

Margaret Farrell — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:30:52 +0000

There is a poltergeist lurking within the Brighton quintet DITZ’s music. At first, it’s a creeping unease: guitars that panic like an unscheduled alarm, bass that feels like unseen eyes stalking you. Then it evolves into annihilating chaos: vocals teetering on sociopathy and drums as relentless as landmines. Since forming in 2015, DITZ have honed…

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Band To Watch: Junior Varsity

Tess Growney — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 14:10:06 +0000

Junior Varsity have built their reputation on doing the unexpected.

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Band To Watch: Man/Woman/Chainsaw

Chris DeVille — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 18:21:08 +0000

There is a phase in a young band’s development when they’re starting to find their form, understanding how to harness their collective power, but vestiges of their primordial freeform lunging remain. That’s where we now find Man/Woman/Chainsaw on the rising buzz band timeline. It’s a tantalizing moment for a listener, a window into chaos being…

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Band To Watch: Clinic Stars

Arielle Gordon — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:20:37 +0000

The Marathon Petroleum refinery looms over the Boynton neighborhood of Detroit, MI like massive drill bits that cored through the center of the Earth. At night, when the lights on its dozens of towers light up, it resembles an alien electric grid, its red, blue, and white bulbs imprisoned like trapped Tinkerbells within steel beams. A few years ago, the plant was forced to pay an $80,000 fine, plus almost $300,000 in "community investments," after a broken pipe leaked toxic gas into the lungs and waterways of local residents.

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Band To Watch: Fashion Club

Hannah Jocelyn — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 14:07:26 +0000

A Love You Cannot Shake, the sophomore album from Fashion Club, starts with a lumbering, stuttering synth impossible to place. Pascal Stevenson tells me the synth is a vocoded, time-stretched kick drum, manipulated and looped in Ableton. That’s just one of many instances I could ask about. Not a moment goes by without something distorted…

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Band To Watch: knitting

Devon Chodzin — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 13:15:54 +0000

How did you spend your evenings during lockdown? Some people took up prodigious amounts of baking. Others caught up on TV shows they'd neglected or movies they'd missed. I trolled Bandcamp, doing everything I could to fill the void of nighttime DIY shows with discovery of new band after new band. I had a network of friends who did the same, and we'd exchange links to new favorites like hunting trophies.

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Band To Watch: Callahan & Witscher

Lizzie Manno — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 13:11:15 +0000

Is playing a show to 13 people in a laundromat worth it? Do Mr. Krabs and Peter Griffin have more musical hot takes? Has the American contemporary experimental music scene lost its edge? Are glitchy hyperpop production, ubiquitous samples, and goofy ’90s pop-rock effective devices for rigorous, high-concept art, or do tongue-in-cheek, doomscroll-evoking sound collages…

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Artist To Watch: Merce Lemon

Danielle Chelosky — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:00:12 +0000

Twangy indie rock is in full swing this year. Waxahatchee returned with her new album Tigers Blood in March; next month sees the release of Allegra Krieger’s Art Of The Unseen Infinity Machine and MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. Enter Merce Lemon, a Pittsburgh native whose third LP Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild also arrives…

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Artist To Watch: Flower Face

Danielle Chelosky — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 14:55:05 +0000

Flower Face is more than just a musician. Montreal’s Ruby McKinnon has been building up the mythology around her upcoming album with Polaroids, drink recipes, a loveline, and poems. Girl Prometheus, the follow-up to her 2022 breakthrough The Shark In Your Water, is as intense and magical as its name suggests, containing 10 dynamic songs…

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Band To Watch: Combat

Ian Cohen — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 13:45:12 +0000

“Jesus Christ, I’m 26,” Dan Campbell screamed on the Wonder Years’ “Passing Through A Screen Door,” perhaps the earliest onset of midlife crisis ever captured in pop music. Dedicating one’s life to any kind of band certainly magnifies a sense of arrested development when friends are getting married, having kids, and owning homes, exponentially so…

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Band To Watch: Font

Grant Sharples — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 17:10:18 +0000

In Cormac McCarthy's 2017 essay "The Kekulé Problem," the late novelist defines the subconscious as "a machine for operating an animal." He goes into detail about the German organic chemist August Kekulé, who was puzzled over the molecular structure for benzene until Kekulé's dreams solved it for him. In his sleep, a visual representation materialized: an ouroboros, a snake perpetually feeding on its own tail. According to McCarthy, the scientist awoke with a start, saying to himself: "It's a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring." It leads the author to wonder, "Why is the unconscious so loath to speak to us?" Broken down to its core components, the subconscious is pure impulse with no potential hindrances. It's instinct. A pure gut feeling.

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Band To Watch: Been Stellar

John Norris — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:09:53 +0000

“Could you ever live anywhere but New York?” I am sometimes asked, by people who know that I have spent more than three decades in the city that may occasionally sleep but which never gets less expensive. My response is usually, “Probably, but I could live without a limb or two as well.” Being here…

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Band To Watch: Torture

Eli Enis — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 16:10:00 +0000

To borrow a tired refrain from the early COVID era, we’re now living through ~unprecedented times~. A former US president was convicted of 34 felonies. AI is ruining the internet. And a one-man slam-metal band influenced by avant-garde classical and free jazz, whose War On Terror-themed music has no lyrics and is sung by a drummer strapped with a headset microphone, are now the hottest new band in hardcore.

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Band To Watch: Doubt

Brad Sanders — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 15:55:11 +0000

Baltimore’s hardcore scene, once the precocious little sibling of the one in DC, has become the spiritual capital of the genre in America. Maybe it’s just that punks will always chase cheaper rents, but the Maryland city just north of Minor Threat’s birthplace has produced a disproportionate number of the 21st century’s essential hardcore bands.…

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Artist To Watch: Yhapojj

Jayson Buford — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 17:55:47 +0000

When most 20-year-old kids start making music, they do something that all young men can justifiably understand: They play girls their new songs. Some do it to impress; some do it because they are eager to get a woman's read on things. The Alabama rapper Yhapojj does it because he is in love with someone. He calls her his baby mama, even though they have no children together. And, if you're wondering, she seems to love Yhapojj's stuff as much as the underground does. "She damn near always listening to it," Yhapojj says, smiling. "Everything about her makes me fall in love. It's the connection. We're like twins."

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Band To Watch: Good Looks

Ian Cohen — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 18:06:08 +0000

Tyler Jordan learned a lot of hard lessons from 15 mostly futile years trying to make a go of this indie rock thing, but few were more valuable than "say what you actually mean." "If I'm writing a song to someone or about someone, I'd like them to know that," he explains. And as excited as we are about Lived Here For A While, I can think of a few people who would not call Good Looks' sophomore album "highly anticipated" - Christian fundamentalists, Jordan's ex-girlfriend, his ex-bandmate, and even his own mother are all put on notice, often by name. Yet, when we speak about a month prior to the album's release — it's out this Friday via Keeled Scales — Jordan only regrets his words towards his least sympathetic targets: the joggers and farmers market merchants and tech developers who turned Austin into a place he had to leave after spending nearly half of his 37 years there.

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Band To Watch: GIFT

Grant Sharples — Wed, 29 May 2024 13:45:03 +0000

To echo one of the most contentiously discussed articles on this website, GIFT are a band. But that wasn’t as apparent on the New York outfit’s 2022 record, Momentary Presence, a solid debut that more or less functioned as a solo project for vocalist-guitarist TJ Freda. Not that Freda necessarily wanted to isolate himself to…

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Artist To Watch: Brennan Wedl

Arielle Gordon — Thu, 09 May 2024 14:40:47 +0000

Brennan Wedl can’t stop bowling splits. Time and again, the musician and bowling enthusiast quietly but confidently palms a waxed bowling ball from the shelf, sizes up the alley stretched out before her, and releases in a fluid curved motion before backing away to evaluate her work. The ball travels straight down the center before…

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Band To Watch: fantasy of a broken heart

Devon Chodzin — Wed, 08 May 2024 14:20:37 +0000

When we meet on a Manhattan Saturday, the East Coast is experiencing its first torrential spring downpour, drenching the concrete jungle in a quantity of water that should bring the city to a standstill. New Yorkers, however, don’t stand still. The sidewalks are just as packed with tourists and locals alike, sporting umbrellas in every…

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Band To Watch: Deerlady

Brad Sanders — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 17:00:17 +0000

Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego sound almost relieved to be playing in their new band, Deerlady. Though neither is a total stranger to the world of indie rock, they’ve both found success in recent years in other musical milieus. Obomsawin, a Berklee-trained bassist and composer, tours the jazz festival circuit as the leader of the…

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Band To Watch: Lip Critic

Margaret Farrell — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 13:55:15 +0000

Lip Critic understand the power of Wawa. Seated in a Park Slope bar a couple blocks away from their rehearsal space, the four-piece explain the magic of the luxury gas station. The broccoli mac and cheese is exceptional. According to Danny Eberle, one of multiple drummers in the band, the iced tea “is goated” —…

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Band To Watch: Ekko Astral

Margaret Farrell — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:13:08 +0000

Where the fuck did all the heroes go? And when was the last time “the future” was encouraging? These are some of the questions that darted through my head after talking with the Washington, DC-based musician Jael Holzman, who is the lead vocalist and songwriter for the punk group Ekko Astral. The five-piece initially began…

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Band To Watch: Boycomma

Danielle Chelosky — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 17:25:43 +0000

The Southern California emo band Boycomma formed when Brad Warriner approached a mysterious figure nicknamed Jimbo at a skate park to tell him that he looked like Rivers Cuomo from Weezer. After they formed a band, Jimbo had the title of their debut album Use Me tattooed on his chest, then quit around Christmas last year. “No one really knows why,” Warriner explains. “He just quit music.”

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Band To Watch: Courting

Margaret Farrell — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 17:55:29 +0000

Liverpool quartet Courting are following up their 2022 debut album Guitar Music with another debut album. This backwards logic is par for the course for a Charli XCX-covering, hyperpop-loving group trying to prove they're anything but a boring British post-punk band. Their first rejection of such project pigeon-holing was naming their first debut album Guitar Music, inspired by lazy media characterizations of them as a rock group. The eight-song album was a glorious, glitchy, and unexpecting rabbit hole. Alongside corroded guitar melodies and road-raging drums, frontman and self-proclaimed "creative director" Sean Murphy-O'Neill deadpanned reference-heavy lyrics, ranging from David Berman to A.I. influencer Lil Miquela. Behind his sometimes pointed, sometimes silly allusions, Murphy-O'Neill penned sentimental reflections about beauty standards, aging versus growing up, and the relationship between cityscapes and financial division. The, at times outrageous, album was meant to be a bit outrageous by design.

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Artist To Watch: Willi Carlisle

Brad Sanders — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 14:11:32 +0000

If you’re cynical, last summer’s parade of country chart-toppers was just culture-war bullshit, with nothing further to read into it. Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony at least partially scored their hits from an aggrieved conservative impulse to own the libs; to some extent, Morgan Wallen did, too. But something else was happening when Zach Bryan…

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Band To Watch: Wishy

Lizzie Manno — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 15:31:55 +0000

There's nothing wishy-washy about Wishy. Indianapolis singer-songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites are magnets of indelible melodies and purveyors of beatific dream pop — the kind that pairs perfectly with the crackles and pops of a cassette player and implants a desire to briefly shapeshift into a flowy-haired nymph and twirl around. Given their hook-stuffed, pirouette-worthy songcraft, it should come as no surprise that this isn't Krauter and Pitchkites' first rodeo. Krauter has released two breezy soft-rock solo albums on Bayonet Records, in addition to work with Indiana guitar groups Hoops, Matrix, and Sacred Copy, and Pitchkites has made wispy electro-pop under the name Push Pop. Joined together as Wishy, their smudged yet crisp songs emit a balmy glow — one that's led to a record deal with Winspear and sent them on tour with like-minded artist Tanukichan. The band's new Paradise EP, out today, celebrates their bewitching chemistry and sonic versatility — embodying both the sweet scrappiness of Velocity Girl and the towering sheen of '00s and '90s radio pop.

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Band To Watch: Sprints

Spencer Hughes — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 18:06:59 +0000

“Shadow Of A Doubt,” the new song by Sprints out today, was a bold choice for a single: the rawest, most desperate track on the Dublin post-punk band’s debut album Letter To Self. A song about begging for reprieve from all-encompassing mental anguish, it builds slowly from a guitar-picked intro to the powerful end, by…

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Band To Watch: Heriot

Spencer Hughes — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:01:12 +0000

When Heriot put out the EP Profound Morality last year, they went from an anonymous part of the glut of metal bands populating UK scenes like the one in their hometown of Swindon, to one of the country’s most hyped heavy exports. Kerrang! called them the best new metal band in Britain, while NME named…

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