When it comes to chasing your musical aspirations, you can never be too settled down to drop your dreams. That clearly rings true for New York-born singer-multi-instrumentalist Geoff Bradford, who, after sating his international wanderlust, starting a family in Pennsylvania, and having his kids grow up, moved down to Austin. Bradford began performing on bass for a couple local outfits but soon a long-burning desire to write his own songs overtook him, eventually leading to his five-song debut EP, Texas Psychedelic, released in mid-February.

Faithful to its name, Texas Psychedelic totes the pop idiosyncrasies of the Lone Star State while dipping listeners into acid-soaked aesthetics, perhaps best heard on the album’s yacht-rock-adjacent title track!

In the realms of both hip-hop and electronic, there’s always strength in numbers, even when that number is a mere two. Enter Angola new wave producer Batida and Angola rapper/activist Ikonoklasta, whose shared offbeat, on-tempo energy has made their duo IKOQWE a powerhouse.

Inspired equally by Angolan traditional music as by golden age hip-hop, IKOQWE dropped their debut LP, The Beginning, The Medium, The End and The Infinite, last Friday, combining retro drum programming with striking new sounds, all meshed together across a handful of languages and daring messages. This record is weird as heck but a lot of fun and frankly, just really good; hear for yourself on The Beginning‘s sophomore song, “Bulubulu”!

Happy International Women’s Day! To celebrate, we’ve got a voracious producer-vocalist to keep on your radar. Melbourne’s Kate Durman just premiered her musical persona Purient, doing so with high ambitions and a killer sense of balance. Purient’s found a middle ground between soft pop vocals and abrasive electronic soundscapes, and she’s set to share it on her upcoming debut EP, Memories.

Featuring three originals and a couple remixes from international artists, Memories is sure to stick in your head well after it drops on March 26th, and to get those mnemonic wheels turning, turn up the bass on the record’s title track (and music video)!

It’s been a whopping five years since Austin songwriter Graham Wilkinson‘s last album, #BecauseOfYou. But instead of letting talent slip away in that half decade out of the studio, Wilkinson’s expanded on his own abilities, taken the rough arrangements and polished them into nearly a dozen fully-fleshed out tracks.

The result is Cuts So Deep, released today and marking a major milestone for Wilkinson’s musicianship. Wilkinson commemorates Cuts So Deep at 8pm tonight via Facebook livestream and performs in-person for a socially-distanced album release show Saturday afternoon at Far Out Lounge. Needless to say the horizon’s looking pretty bright for Wilkinson right now, so let his radiance guide you into the weekend with one of Cuts So Deep‘s strongest singles (and one of several music videos), “Rainbow”!

Just one year after appearing on American Idol (and earning high praise from Keith Urban and Jennifer Lopez), Houston-born songwriter Zach Person made the move to Austin, but in those short four years he’s become a must-hear contributor to the Live Music Capital. Person’s chord skills, both on the six-string and with his voice box, are already bold beyond belief, but we have a feeling this is just the beginning for this budding artist, who’s effortlessly able to navigate between all the alcoves of rock, from indie to blues.

Person shared his self-titled EP last year and follows it up with his eponymous full-length in just under a month. Zach Person drops on April 2nd, coinciding with a socially-distanced release show at Empire Control Room so the momentum’s only going to mount until then. Fortunately for us, Person’s got plenty of goodies to tide us over in the meantime, most recently with the BlackDenim Sessions music video for Zach’s latest track, “Can’t Stop Running”!

For many musicians natural, acoustic, and/or analog is the sole way to go. But Austin songwriter-producer Chad Doriocourt couldn’t feel more at home in a room filled with electronic instruments, all with somewhat pre-programmed minds of their own.

Last year Doriocourt made his studio debut under the abbreviated mononym Dorio with Yesterday The Sky Was Blue, and today, almost exactly one year later, his sophomore installation under the abbreviated mononym is finally out! The four tracks on Dorio’s Robot Friends work together like cogs, giving the EP a nice sense of pacing, but there’s no denying that the standout single is the indie-psych-pop album opener and (near) title track, “Robot Friends”!

Dating back to 1997’s The Ewe and the Eye, L.A. songwriter Mia Doi Todd has permeated an evolving world of parallels; a personality that’s sensuous but stern, curt but existential, and packing a philosophy based on her experiences that still manages universal appropriateness.

Mia Doi Todd’s been challenging the bards of antiquity with her own modern mythologies ever since, and expanded on her jazz-folk sound last week with Music Life. Pairing originals with covers of classics, Music Life breathes effortlessly with Mia Doi Todd’s airy aesthetic, especially on her acoustic rendition of Gregory Isaacs’ “If I Don’t Have You”!

L.A. multi-instrumentalist Chris Pierce began losing his hearing at the formative age of fifteen. But instead of hindering his progress, Pierce let it push him to new levels of awareness and musicianship. Fast forward to 2021, where Pierce’s performance passport has grown to include supporting spots for the likes of Aaron Neville, B.B. King, Seal, Al Green, Blind Boys of Alabama and more.

The latest expansion on Pierce’s folksy brand of acoustic soul came with last Friday’s American Silence LP, ten tracks of poignant political observations and reactions drawn together by Pierce’s guitar, harmonica, and vocals. It’s a powerful full-length to say the least, and has all the elements of prime-era Bob Dylan and Richie Havens, especially on “It’s Been Burning for a While”!

For the past few weeks we’ve familiarized you with our February 2021 Artist of the Month, Wes Denzel. This retro-minded hip-hop/R&B blender’s blown us away with his creativity on each new release and just because Denzel’s featured on the shortest month, he’s built up high expectations for the future.

Made clear by his My KUTX playlist and the ’80s flashback that is his “Don’t Change” music video, Denzel’s got a soft spot for the early-mid-’00s style of production. But as heard in our exclusive live performance, Wes Denzel sure as heck doesn’t need all the in-studio accoutrements to give a killer performance!

In the “before times” of live music, it was pretty hard to miss common collaborators across various groups. And perhaps the most “traded” player of all (at least in recent years) has been drummer Josh Halpern. Stellar percussion skills aside, this Native Austinite is also quite the competent composer, as evidenced by his solo project J Halp.

J Halp made his debut last June with his first single, revealing more of Halpern’s vocal abilities that’d been historically masked by frontmen, not to mention an impressive sense of compactness, arrangement, and production across July’s Ahlen EP. On Valentine’s Day J Halp continued his saga of solo songwriting with a new standalone single, one that cradles between psychedelia, breakbeats, and lighthearted pop, “I Can’t Live Without You”!