A Deeper Listen

Two composers walk into a room (actually, they walk into different rooms) and record an album focused on the serendipity of live performance. Fittingly, it’s titled Different Rooms.

The composers in …

Before this year, Ivy last released new music in 2011 with the album All Hours. Now, 14 years later, Ivy has reassembled to share Traces of You, which came out September 5 on Bar/None Records.

What m…

Jesse Beaman, an ambient composer based in Mexico City, joins a growing number of artists who are no longer making their music available on Spotify. He cites the platform’s requirement for musicians …

Will Toledo, vocalist for Seattle-based Car Seat Headrest, wanted the band’s latest release to be a concept album in the tradition of a rock opera. The Scholars delivers just that: strong storytellin…

Seiji Oda pays respect to his Oakland roots in his 2025 album HUMAN + NATURE. He not only samples Bay Area titans like Mac Dre and Trunk Boiz — the record also features numerous collaborations with l…

Open Mike Eagle’s tenth studio album, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, continues the rap legacy that he started in the late 2000s when he cofounded the trio Thirsty Fish. From there, he made a bigger nam…

When Kay Redden moved to Seattle from Garland, Texas, she made it her mission to connect with her newly adopted home through music. So, in searching for meaning after mother’s death in April 2015, sh…

Michael Imperioli, the actor known for his roles in The Sopranos and The White Lotus, is also the guitarist of a three-piece indie band called Zopa. Their latest album, Diamond Vehicle, came out in e…

July 18, 2025 was the last day of Wu-Tang Clan’s farewell concert tour, The Final Chamber. One of their stops was at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena, where KEXP’s Dusty Henry, Martin Douglas, and Larr…

Marlon Williams, singer-songwriter from New Zealand, uses his deep vibrato on more than a dozen new original songs written entirely in the Indigenous language Te Reo Maori. It was a years-long endeav…

Cincinnati-based trio Artificial Go released their sophomore album, Musical Chairs, in May 2025. Their blend of post-punk riffs, danceable rhythms, and faux British accents has made them one of the m…

Music journalist Jeff Weiss recently wrote a book titled Waiting for Britney Spears, documenting the pop stars rise and fall from the public eye. But the book isn’t a historical account, it’s an “all…

Natalie Lew, also known as Sea Lemon, released her debut album Diving for a Prize in June 2025 on Luminelle Recordings. Across 12 songs, reverb-heavy guitars wash underneath vocals that allude to mad…

Max Perla and Vincent John make up Eraserhood Sound, the duo that scores the animated PBS Kids series Carl the Collector. In the spirit of Vince Guaraldi’s signature sound in Peanuts cartoons, show c…

Sharp Pins is the solo project of 20-year-old Kai Slater, who also runs a zine called Hallogallo. Based in Chicago, he started the zine during the height of the coronavirus pandemic as a teenager, ov…

The Kronos Quartet — founded in Seattle, now based in San Francisco — has shaped modern classical music for more than 50 years. Their 2024 album Outer Spaceways Incorporated reimagines the work of th…

Owain Davies received a message from a stranger in 2020 asking if he might have been the singer of a band called Panchiko more than two decades ago. As it turns out, he was — but they never put their…

Merrill Garbus says the lyrics simply poured out of her mouth on several tracks for the new Tune-Yards album, Better Dreaming. This time, she and her partner Nate Brenner trusted their gut more in th…

Hiro Ama, born in Japan and based in London, plays drums in the indie pop band Teleman. In late 2024, he released his debut solo album, Music for Peace and Harmony, which leans heavily into the sound…

In this bonus episode, we hear from Martin Oldgoth, cofounder of World Goth Day, in conversation with Sharlese, host of Mechanical Breakdown, about the holiday’s origin in 2009. What started as a sor…