Jacoozy Album Release Show
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY JACOOZY Jacoozy is a band that thrives on connection, both with their audience and each other. Formed in 2021, the band emerged from the underground house show scene in Boone, North Carolina, blending Southern rock, jam traditions, and modern sensibilities. Their sound is built on live energy, with each performance capturing the raw spirit of their music—no studio tricks or polished layers. Jacoozy’s songwriting is deeply rooted in introspection, capturing moments of time and self-reflection while celebrating their Southern roots and the communities that have shaped them. The band’s approach to music is collaborative, shaped by their basement jams and experimental spirit. With a unique blend of influences and a clear mission to create authentic, live-driven music, Jacoozy’s future looks as promising as the stories they are telling.
Dogpark
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY DOGPARK Dogpark got their start performing at University of Richmond (their alma-mater), before launching into sell-out shows across the country. The band consists of Eamon Moore (lead vocals), Chris Conte (drums), Declan Harris (lead guitar), and Billy Apostolou (bass/guitar)). Infectious stage presence and an homage to the indie-rock of the 90s have kick-started their career from a backyard band to a mainstage group. The band’s EP, ‘Breaking in Brooklyn,’ proves that they are here to make a mark, and with the release of their upcoming second EP, they’re just getting started. LIMITED NUMBER OF ‘DOGPARK’S VIP HANG’ PACKAGES AVAILABLE Includes: One (1) General Admission ticket, Invitation to an intimate pre-show experience with Dogpark, including: Intimate 2-song performance by the band, Q&A session. Commemorative laminate signed by the band, Merchandise shopping opportunity before doors open, Early entry into the venue
Balu Brigada
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY BALU BRIGADA Balu Brigada craft multi-dimensional alternative pop layered with levels of lush live instrumentation, cinematic production, and festival-ready hooks. Henry and Pierre Beasely—the Auckland, NZ-born duo of brothers, co-vocalists, co-writers, and co-producers Balu Brigada—effectively step through a sonic doorway with their music. Since high school, they independently honed their chops for years until landing a deal with Warner Music Australia, Atlantic Music Group and ARRO Records in the United States. The group cultivated their signature sound with the I Should Be Home EP [2022] and Find A Way EP [2023]—highlighted by the fan favorite “Designer” which amassed 26 million Spotify streams and counting. Along the way, they also incited the applause of everyone from Rolling Stone, Coup de Main, i-D, and OnesToWatch to People who christened them “Best New Artist.” Twenty One Pilots even notably selected Balu Brigada as special guests on their massive “Clancy Tour” across North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the UK. The duo reached critical mass with their track “So Cold.” It not only gathered 34 million total streams and counting, but it also notched their very first #1 at radio in the US, claiming the top spot at Alternative. They made their late-night television debut on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel LIVE! with a stunning performance of the song. Plus, it claimed a coveted spot on the FIFA 2025 Official Soundtrack, and SiriusXM spotlighted it as a “Critical Cut.” After piling up hundreds of millions of streams and selling out shows, the band elevate to another stratosphere altogether on their full-length debut album, Portal, introduced by the single “Backseat.”
TOPS: Bury the Key Tour
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY TOPS has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 per ticket goes to Chez Doris and their work supporting and empowering any woman in precarious situations to achieve her full potential. TOPS TOPS — musicians David Carriere, Jane Penny, Marta Cikojevic, and Riley Fleck — write timeless music that reliably threads immediacy and depth. Bury the Key, their first full-length since 2020 and with new label home Ghostly International, is a captivating reintroduction for the Montréal band: ever refined, undoubtedly masters of their melodic craft yet unafraid of evolving and testing themselves against different, at times darker tones. The album faces feelings once locked away, engaging the give-and-take between happiness, hedonism, and self-destruction. While often inhabited by fictional figures, their glowing, grooving, self-produced songs draw from personal observations: intimacy (both inside and outside the band), toxic behavior, drug use, and apocalyptic dread. When recording started, they noticed a shift and leaned in, jokingly dubbed “evil TOPS,” says Penny. “We’re always kind of seen as a soft band or like naive or friendly in a Canadian way, but we made it a challenge to really channel the world around us.” Through the lens of a looming epoch and the clarity that comes with age, TOPS dip into a more sinister disco realm with Bury the Key, giving their soft-focus sophisti-pop a sharpened edge.
Night Tapes
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY NIGHT TAPES Night Tapes’ debut album portals//polarities is a deeply immersive, genre-blurring journey shaped by place and emotion. Created by London trio Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan, and Sam Richards, the album weaves global field recordings—from Estonian swamps to Mexican mountains—into dreamy, electronic soundscapes. Originally recording quietly in a shared house, the group embraced their constraints, crafting music that became time capsules of their surroundings. Their process blends traditional instruments with laptop production, drawing from synth-pop, shoegaze, trip-hop, and ambient music. Songs often shift unpredictably, blurring the line between band and studio project. Much of the album was made on the road, in Airbnbs and hotels between gigs, emphasizing creativity within limitation. Their use of tapes and spontaneous sampling adds raw, human imperfections that digital methods lack. For Vesik, the album explores inner dualities and personal freedom, with emotional depth conveyed more through sound than lyrics. portals//polarities is a bold debut—personal, political, and vibrantly alive. The band’s previous releases have been supported by DIY, Clash, NME, Future Music, Gorilla vs Bear, BBC Radio 1, BBC 6 Music and many more.
GONG
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY GONG KAVUS TORABI vocals, guitar FABIO GOLFETTI guitar IAN EAST sax, flute DAVE STURT bass CHEB NETTLES drums The ever-metamorphosing entity that is GONG launches, as ever, into unknown – and unknowing – territory with new tours destined to be talked about, discussed, and argued over, up and down the land. From its beginnings in a French commune in 1967, through the Virgin Records years, mismanagement, court cases, break-ups and re-joining’s, deaths and rebirths – there has always been a continuous thread of beautiful, dangerous and extraordinary music. The current holders of the flame have come together over the last eight years; sinuous bass player Dave Sturt joined just as the album 2032 was shown to the world; Ian East (Sax, Flute) was the next to blow in through the portal; Fabio Golfetti brought his guitars from Brazil (after working with Daevid Allen for many years); Kavus Torabi (lead vox and guitars) appeared to Daevid in a vision; Cheb Nettles (drums) just sort of turned up. In 2015, Daevid Allen passed away. His influence and legacy were honoured on the band’s subsequent album, Rejoice! I’m Dead! (2016). In recent years GONG has performed with the Steve Hillage Band (himself a former member of the 1970s GONG line-up) and released the critically acclaimed album The Universe Also Collapses (2019) and a stunning new live album Pulsing Signals (2022) captures the band at a creative peak with tracks drawn from their 2019 tour. Their last studio album, Unending Ascending, was released in November 2023, and they are working on a new one to be released in January of 2026. Gong’s musically diverse world includes shades of psychedelia, space rock, jazz, avant-garde, krautrock and surreal soundscapes. GONG has completed a successful East Coast Tour this Fall performing in Allentown PA, Charlottesville VA, Raleigh NC, Grand Rapids MI, Chicago IL, Milwaukee WI, Detroit MI, Cincinnati OH, Indianapolis IN, Cleveland OH, Millersville PA, Rochester NY, Homer NY, Lowell MA, Hamden CT, Northampton MA, Hudson Falls NY, Woodstock NY, Baltimore MD and Rutherford NJ. Shows in Asheville NC and Franklin TN were cancelled due to the hurricane Helene. And the band is touring the West Coast USA in June and Midwest, East Coast and Eastern Canada in the Fall.
Sextile + Automatic
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY SEXTILE Some bands find their groove and stick to it while others choose to reinvent themselves and keep on moving. Sextile can attest to the thrill of an ever-changing road map. The LA duo comprising Melissa Scaduto and Brady Keehn ply their trade with a lust for life and a love of everything from no wave to hardstyle, having merged some of these influences on their striking 2023 debut for Sacred Bones, Push. The group’s new LP, yes, please., fuses anarchic electro fire with raw personal recollections —and enough beefed-up bass to bust a speaker or two. yes, please. is an album of contrasts: a vulnerable record that bares its soul as much as it revels in excess, showing just how far you can push your sound when you shake off your inhibitions. Together, the pair betray a confidence that never wavers, making a bold splash on the speedy intro with a rave siren cut from a ‘00s New York house party. Seemingly by the same token, the unruly spirit of electroclash stalks the yes, please. building, flashing its ID on the cowbell-peppered thunderbolts of “Freak Eyes” and “Rearrange”, and turning in a scuzzy dancefloor bomb with “Women Respond to Bass.” High on endorphins, “Push-ups”—which features vocals from Jehnny Beth—is pure muscle music, fortified by hoover bass and fleshed out by synths that hammer as hard as lumps of hail on a glass roof. AUTOMATIC With their second album ‘Excess’, Automatic — Izzy Glaudini (synths, lead vocals), Lola Dompé (drums, vocals) and Halle Saxon-Gaines (bass) — synthesizes a new strain of retrofuturist motorik pop. It’s often said yesterday’s science fiction reads like today’s grim reality. On their new album ‘Excess,’ Automatic channel both. The LA trio’s second album for Stones Throw rides the imaginary edge where the ‘70s underground met the corporate culture of the ‘80s; or, as the band puts it, “That fleeting moment when what was once cool quickly turned and became mainstream all for the sake of consumerism.” Using this point in time as a lens through which to view the present, Automatic takes aim at corporate culture and extravagance, weaving deadpan critiques into cold wave hooks. The album’s overarching themes of alienation and escapism emerged as Automatic wrote ‘Excess’ together, fleshing out songs before decamping to the studio for sprint recording sessions with producer Joo Joo Ashworth (Sasami, FROTH).On “New Beginning”, they reject the false hope of leaving behind a scorched planet in search of “a better place”, at a moment when the ultra-rich are eyeing manned space travel: “In the service of desire / We will travel far away”. Imagining the “nihilism and loneliness” of attempting to escape the planet once unchecked consumerism has reached its logical conclusion, the song pictures being “stranded in a space-void with no connection to Earth or humanity.”
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR at Hatch Amphitheater
THIS EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE AT HATCH AMPHITHEATER, LOCATED AT 45 SOUTH FRENCH BROAD AVE IN DOWNTOWN ASHEVILLE ALL AGES STANDING ROOM ONLY GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR Godspeed You! Black Emperor released a string of albums from 1997-2002 widely recognized as redefining what protest music can be, where longform instrumental chamber rock compositions of immense feeling and power serve as soundtracks to late capitalist alienation and resistance. The band’s first four releases—especially F#A#∞ (1997) and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000)—are variously regarded as classics of the era and genre. Godspeed’s legendary live performances, featuring multiple 16mm projectors beaming a collage of overlapping analog film loops and reels—along with the distinctive iconography, imagery and tactility of the band’s album artwork and physical LP packages— further defines the sui generis aesthetic substance, ethos and mythos of this group. GY!BE has issued two official band photos in its 25-year existence (the second, left, a 2010 recreation of the first from 1997) and has done a half-dozen collectively-answered written interviews over that same span. The band has never had a website or social media accounts. It has never made a video. Few rock bands in our 21st century have been as steadfast in trying to let the work speak for itself and maintaining simple rules about minimising participation in cultures of personality, exposure, access, commodification or co-optation. Following a seven-year hiatus that began in 2003, Godspeed returned to the stage in December 2010 (curating the UK festival All Tomorrow’s Parties) and the band’s post-reunion period has now lasted over a decade, marked by hundreds of sold-out live shows and four additional albums, all of which have been met with high acclaim. “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” – the band’s fifth post-reunion album (and ninth overall) – was released on October 04, 2024.
U.S. Girls
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY U.S. GIRLS Originally from Illinois, Meg Remy is established as one of the most acclaimed songwriters and performers to emerge from Toronto’s eclectic underground music scene where she currently lives. As the creative force behind the musical entity U.S. Girls, her celebrated discography spans 15 years from early experimental works released on the Siltbreeze label and includes three Polaris Prize shortlisted albums on 4AD: Half Free (2015), In A Poem Unlimited (2018), and Heavy Light (2020). All three albums also garnered Juno nominations for Best Alternative Album. Remy has toured extensively through Europe and North America, establishing a reputation for politically astute commentary and theatrical performances with her extended U.S. Girls band, leading her to be named the best live act of 2018 by Paste Magazine. During this time, she has maintained a visual arts practice, exhibited collage work and directed several music videos and other video art works including her short film Woman’s Advocate (2014), in which she also performed. Recently, Remy published her first book, a memoir called Begin By Telling (2021), and she also made her first foray into film-scoring this year, having been tapped for filmmaker (and fellow Torontonian) Grace Glowicki’s surreal horror-comedy Dead Lover (which world-premiered at Sundance Film Festival and featured at SXSW). As a platform and persona, U.S. Girls operates on a uniquely out-of-time wavelength, alternately wronged and rueful, classic but contemporary, bruised vignettes of poetic Americana through a feminist lens. Her most recent album, Bless This Mess (2023), marked both a divergence from and deepening of Remy’s songbook, more at peace with her restless truths and moods. New music is set to follow in 2025. FAUN FABLES Troubadours of animist, avant-folk since 1998, FAUN FABLES are known for exquisite, visceral adventures in songwriting, live shows and theater. Their work became internationally widespread by 2004 with their Drag City Records debut ‘FAMILY ALBUM’ (2004). For over two decades, the group has seasonally toured grass roots, night club, theater & festival circuits in the USA and Europe (including stints in the UK & Oceania.) Dawn McCarthy’s voice (which THE NEW YORKER described as “one of the more compelling instruments in contemporary music”) opens hearts and minds from a whisper to a rallying battle cry into her mythical world, animated by the adventurous musicality and vocals of partner Nils Frykdahl (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum). Their new album ‘COUNTERCLOCKWISE’ marks their eighth release with Drag City; the songs and production offer the most encompassing, richly lived-in sonic world of all their releases. Their timeless ‘songtelling’ practice is entwined with a holistic view of a life in music – celebrating the mundane details of home and family, elevated by a mystical and fantastical perspective. Their daughters- growing up alongside the writing, recording and touring since infancy- now join them with vocals, flutes, keyboard, bass, percussion & dance. Guitarist/singer Arild Hammerø joins them from Norway with his elemental guitar work featured on their new album. FAUN FABLES are currently based in Nevada County, California.
Ginger Root
ALL AGESSTANDING ROOM ONLY GINGER ROOT A multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and visual artist from Southern California, Cameron Lew has crafted his Ginger Root project steadily since 2017, inviting a fervent and growing legion of fans into storylines drawn across mediums: captivating albums with accompanying films and globe-spanning tours. The Ginger Root sound — handmade yet immaculately polished synth-pop, alt-disco, boogie, and soul — takes shape through Lew’s lens as an Asian-American growing up enamored by 1970s and ’80s music, specifically the creative and cultural dialogue between Japanese City Pop and its Western counterparts from French Pop to Philly Soul to Ram-era McCartney. SHINBANGUMI, his long-awaited third LP, and Ghostly International debut set for physical release in 2024 with a visual album component, translates roughly to a new season of a show. It finds Lew more poised, idiosyncratic, and intentional than ever in a new chapter of life, unlocking “exactly what Ginger Root should sound and feel like,” he says. “In terms of instrumentation and musicality, it’s the first time that I felt very confident and comfortable with what everything should be comprised of. On the more personal side, I’m coming out of the last four years of writing, touring, and living as a different person; SHINBANGUMI is a platform to showcase my new self.” Since his first release of “aggressive elevator soul” music and dispatch from his beloved weekly YouTube cover series during college, Lew has captained the ship of Ginger Root, able to write, record, and mix the music while creating the art and videos from scratch. What makes Ginger Root special is the project’s ability to weave influence beyond pastiche into a bigger picture, exploring that rarified pop pleasure center where referential meets refreshing. With much of Rikki’s release feeling lost to the moments of that year, Lew decided to take a step back and try to write a succinct project to engage listeners for as long as possible. His redirected energy, paired with the newfound influence of Japanese art and culture from his experience learning to speak the language, yielded City Slicker in 2021. On the strength of breakout songs like “Juban District” and “Loretta,” the project connected with a massive audience on the internet, with his YouTube amassing 160,000 subscribers and his Spotify nearly hitting 1 million monthly listeners. Ginger Root released the Nisemono EP in 2022 and has since played sold-out shows across North America, Europe, and Asia as fans await new music. In 2024, Ginger Root presented SHINBANGUMI across a sequential music video series, resuming the conceptual narrative from his 2022 EP Nisemono, which follows Ginger Root as a newly-fired music supervisor in 1987 starting his own media conglomerate, Ginger Root Productions. “If you watch music videos one through eight, you’ll be presented with a story that’s comparable to a traditional movie; something I’ve always wanted to do.” MINORCAN MINORCAN stands distinct in presence, character, rock ‘n’ roll spirit and creates songs that come from an intimate heart, embracing the world and all within. These are songs bred in the aligning differences of intuition and instinct, music that merges impassioned energy with creative guile.
