Three-time GRAMMY® award winner Lucy Dacus is a musician, performer, storyteller, and widely regarded as “one of the best songwriters of her generation” (Rolling Stone). She has released three full-length albums under her name: 2016’s No Burden, 2018’s Historian, and 2021’s Home Video. This year she’s back with her fourth studio album Forever Is A Feeling after a career-defining year with boygenius, her band with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. boygenius' the record landed #1 on the UK, Irish and Dutch album charts, #1 on Billboard’s Vinyl Album chart, and #4 on Billboard 200 and was named a top 10 album of 2023 by Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Billboard, Variety, and many more. Dacus has performed on Saturday Night Live, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and CBS This Morning. 2025’s Forever Is A Feeling will be released via Geffen/Interscope on 3/28.

American indie luminary Clairo has spearheaded new pop conventions and upended them all the same. Her soft rock intimations, interwoven with tendrils of ‘70s soul and lush R&B, have spellbound listeners of all ages, and landed her on the stages of Coachella, the Newport Folk Festival and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Born Claire Cottrill in Atlanta, GA, the artist began self-recording songs and music videos at the age of 13, which amassed a huge fanbase on YouTube. Released in 2017, her lo-fi pop confessional “Pretty Girl” went viral, earning her a joint record deal with Fader Label. Since then, her albums Immunity (2019) and Sling (2021) have traversed the Billboard charts and garnered critical acclaim from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, the New York Times and more. For each of her full-length projects Clairo collaborated on production with legendary names like Vampire Weekend artist Rostam Batmanglij (Immunity), Jack Antonoff (Sling), and now partners with Leon Michels for her new era. Her soul-baring third studio album, Charm, is out now.

The Backseat Lovers are an indie rock band from Salt Lake City, Utah consisting of Joshua Harmon, Jonas Swanson, KJ Ward, & Juice Welch. Since their formation in 2018, the band has amassed over 800 million combined global streams and sold over 200,000 tickets. Their 2023 World Tour found them playing their largest venues to date across North America, the UK, EU and Australia. The band will be bringing new music to their electric live shows as well as fan favorites off of their sophomore album Waiting to Spill which is the follow-up to the group’s acclaimed 2019 full-length debut, When We Were Friends, featuring the top 20 Alternative hit “Kilby Girl.”

Hippo Campus were sitting in the green room of a sold-out amphitheater show at the start of the Summer of 2023 when they realized they had a major problem. Their fourth LP simply wasn't good enough. Singer Jake Luppen had been listening to the band's work as they rolled around the country, trying to tease out how much work remained. All of it, he soon decided. The soul wasn't there, obfuscated by the need to sound sophisticated and the overwhelming ambition to make the best Hippo Campus LP ever, a deeper and more profound record that reflected how their lives were changing. They'd committed to that vow with longtime producer and collaborator Caleb Wright a little more than a year earlier, soon after a party where they celebrated the release of LP3. That very night, the call came that a longtime friend had unexpectedly died. They started this band as kids and enjoyed quick momentum, their thrill-a minute live shows and charismatically experimental pop albums creating almost-instant, avid attention. But this was Hippo Campus' first close brush with death; as adulthood encroached, the actual call of mortality reminded them of the stakes of art, friendship, and life. So they committed to doing something major, even if it meant taking five years to do it. They took the task seriously, too: getting sober for an entirely improvisational session at North Carolina's Drop of Sun months later, regularly attending therapy as a full band, writing more than 100 songs in only a year. That was all well and good, until Luppen and, really, all of Hippo Campus decided they didn't actually like what they were making. Life and work had been dark in their orbit for a second -- death and dejection, addiction and anxiety. This uneasy epiphany wasn't helping. So that night, in the dressing room, they called an audible. They were going to start over. Three months later, the four-member core of Hippo Campus rendezvoused with Wright and producer Brad Cook at Sonic Ranch, a playground-like studio complex on the Texas border. They gave themselves 10 days to cut the tracks they liked best, to make something to which they could commit at last. And Cook, in turn, gave them an edict of no second guessing or listening back, only forward momentum. Less than two weeks later, they emerged with what they'd given themselves half a decade to make -- Flood, or the best album Hippo Campus has ever made. You can immediately hear as much in a pair of wondrous songs toward the end, when the love-lost-and-found sing-along "Forget It" fades into the bittersweet and beautiful ache of "Closer," a gem about trying and maybe failing to surrender your trust to someone else. This is a band that has learned to grow up by learning to let go. When Hippo Campus finally stopped trying to force the issue of making a masterpiece, they tapped intersecting veins of vulnerability and urgency, walking away with 13 tracks that reckon with their uncanny lives through at least that many totally absorbing hooks. During the last several years, Hippo Campus has had to navigate the tougher wages of success. They are, of course, grateful that a pop band they named on the lark of some psychology lesson blew up, but it certainly eliminated the segue from adolescence to adulthood that most of us enjoy in relative privacy. How could they survive inside and alongside this thing they had created and had outgrown them? And what's more, how could they endure the vagaries of the music industry, so that they didn't let a disappointing tour or disspiriting release demoralize them? Or, to ask the cumulative question, how do four people connected so intimately for so long grow as individuals while preserving the bond that makes what they do so special? Or is that actually too much to ask? For a minute there, the answer seemed possibly like yes. But soon after that improvisational session, the band returned to its own Minneapolis studio and dug in. They stumbled upon "Everything at Once," with Nathan Stocker's tricky little guitar lope becoming the basis for the slowly rising rhythm of drummer Whistler Allen and bassist ZachSutton. Stepping outside for some space, Luppen quickly penned a thesis of self-criticism and self-forgiveness. Being less than the expectations of an industry, a family, or a faith are totally normal, he suggests in an anthem of empowerment that is almost casual. He gives himself the grace of being human: "You gotta lay down sometimes, be patient sometimes," Luppen sings, layers of lean vocals crisscrossing one another like light beams."And feel everything at once." That is precisely what Hippo Campus do best on Flood -- feel everything and transmute it all into songs that are inescapable. Take "Brand New," three minutes of brilliantly coiled pop, its spring-loaded rhythm lifting a guitar line built from pin pricks skyward. It's about being ruined by the letdown of a failed relationship and then finding a way forward, toward something so good you haven't even imagined it yet. It sounds that way, too. There's the completely compulsive "Tooth Fairy," a quick-moving meditation on the confusion of interpersonal dynamics. Hippo Campus smear bits of gentle psychedelia around a rhythm, riff, and hook that have the sleek lines of a sports car; the result is a dynamic wonder, a song that feels emphatic at the start but reaches full triumph by the end. Inspired by staring down cycles of addiction too long without taking steps to break them, "Corduroy" finds the space between a bummer country blues and a sweetly devotional waltz. Its vows of love, trust, and doubt are buoyed and also undercut by its slow rises and falls, a musical portrait of trying to take that difficult next step. The sentiments on Flood are raw, real, and unguarded, a testament to Hippo Campus dropping preconceptions of how they had to sound after so many failed attempts to re-record these songs. They wiped the slate clean, starting over without beliefs about what Hippo Campus or this record needed to be. Still, sophistication lurks in subtle key and tempo changes, in the almost innate shifts that a band of longtime best friends can tap after so much time spent helping to shape one another's musical language. Flood doesn't need to tell you it's important or interesting; it simply is, just by virtue of how it's written, built, and rendered, a map of what it's like to feel everything at once. This rebirth is accompanied by a crucial career shift for Hippo Campus, too, as they exit the traditional label system to issue LP4 via Psychic Hotline, a truly independent imprint run by peers and pals. If you're working to let go of expectations, why not jettison them all? There's a bravery to that, and you can hear its revivifying spirit in every second of LP4. Early into the endlessly propulsive "Paranoid," where stunted acoustic strums undergird an inescapable jangle, Luppen asks an existential question: "Is there something waiting out there for us at the finish line?" For the next three minutes, the band cycles with him through his woes, from the title's overwhelming worry to notions of dislocation and loneliness. (Also, is there any other refrain ever that manages to make the phrase "so god-damned fucking" sound so catchy and natural?) But in the final verse, with his voice breaking through a scrim of distortion, he stumbles upon a new credo: "Wait, I wanna give this life all that I have in me." That is precisely what Hippo Campus have done with Flood after realizing it doesn't take a lifetime -- or, well, five years -- to do just that.

Born in New Jersey, and raised in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, Gigi Perez is a rising alternative singer-songwriter. After a brief stint at the Berklee College of Music, Gigi shared an original track “Sometimes (Backwood)” on social media. The song became an instant success, generating over 18M streams within a month, reaching #1 on Spotify’s U.S. Viral chart, and to date surpassing 200M streams worldwide. She went on to work with music producer Jennifer Decilveo, releasing her debut EP, “How To Catch A Falling Knife” in April 2023. The EP included singles “Sally,” “The Man,” and “Figurines.” Following the EP, Gigi spent the year performing at various festivals and headline shows across the US, UK and EU. After parting ways with Interscope Records in early 2024, Gigi began releasing songs independently, first with “Normalcy,” her first-ever self-produced track “Please Be Rude,” as well as the hit single, “Sailor Song,” that’s amassed over 400M global streams to date. She earned her first ever U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart entry in August 2024, debuting at #98 and climbing to a peak to date at #22.  Most recently, Gigi released self-written and self-produced track, “Fable.” She supported both Richy Mitch and the Coal Miners and girl in red this Fall, in addition to headlining New York, Los Angeles, London and Berlin dates.  Up next for Gigi is new music, and more live shows.

As she watched friends skim stones on Brighton Beach, Paris Paloma felt energy shift. Like heat returning to numb fingertips, life felt like it was taking shape again after a long period of personal trauma. With a diaphanous sheath of lyrics in mind, she went to Bergen, Norway to work on new music. On the three days of the year that it didn’t rain in Europe’s wettest city, among the silvery lakes and mountain peaks, life grew ever brighter. “the warmth” was formed. “I ate up all the light, it shone through my teeth, I tasted sunbeams emanating from me… it can’t hurt me… now the warmth is returning,” she sings in unfurling harmonies, spectral with full-bodied pop, a determined percussive march building like a personal artillery. This emotional arc would be core to Paris Paloma’s debut album, cacophony. The Derbyshire-born musician gave the world “labour” in 2023. It was the first song she’d ever fully recorded in a proper studio – early releases like “narcissus” in 2020, 2021 EP cemeteries and socials, and 2023’s “notre dame” were produced in her own bedroom or others’. But early clips she posted with stolen lyrics of “labour” to TikTok had already garnered a curious audience. Its journal-like lyricism and incisive strain of compelling, dark folk-pop skewered the knots of women’s emotional labour, and it immediately became a rallying cry worldwide upon official release. The Gold-certified track has broken over 450 million streams, cracked the Official UK Singles Chart and US Billboard Chart, and soundtracked tens of thousands of TikToks. It spurred on sold-out shows around the UK, and Paris, armed with a compact slew of songs, travelled to the US and Australia for the festival circuit. “I matured because of ‘labour’,” Paris explains. “As a young artist you’re both protected and limited – you’re putting songs that are so intimate into a void. It’s made me more considerate about how vulnerable these songs are going to be.” Such vulnerability can be difficult to confront, and all the more to articulate as art, “but I feel very held by my listeners,” Paris says. This symbiotic care between artist and listener is innate within Paris’s devoted fanbase. She’s cultivated a community both online and off: on TikTok, her 1.4M followers send her videos (of thoughts, song snippets, and tour moments) into six-figure views. Fan-made art and videos analysing her lyrics span social media. She also crowdsourced the voices of hundreds of fans for a new version of “labour” in “labour (the cacophony)”. These are roots laid deep, as Paris gains wider recognition from British Vogue to NME to Billboard, as YouTube’s Trending Artist on the Rise and a Breakthrough Artist to Watch 2024 by Amazon. She also performed an intimate version of “labour” on Later... with Jools Holland and most recently, a powerful performance on Late Night with Stephen Colbert with backing vocals from The Resistance Revival Chorus and a set inspired by Judy Chicago’s iconic feminist art installation, The Dinner Party (the viral performance is currently at over 14M views on TikTok). A graduate of fine art from Goldsmiths University (her first tattoo was a tribute to female surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun), Paris’s creative mediums have influenced each other since she first started writing songs at age 14. Her early releases’ visual identities are crafted from her own fantasy drawings. Now, cacophony is inspired by the creation that comes out of chaos– in 15 tracks, we’re shown Paris as an evocative lyricist who constellates human experiences of grief, love, patriarchy, and trauma with Greek mythology, fantasy, and the literary gothic. The album name is inspired by Stephen Fry’s Mythos, ruminating on the creation myth. “Fromthis chaotic cosmic yawn, creation sprang forth,” Paris explains, “so this is a collection that makes sense of the overwhelming space of my mind where my anxiety, my OCD, and trauma processing lives.” Songwriting is a catharsis and coping mechanism, which she uses to articulate her struggles in real time. The sprawling metaphor of chaos to creation knits the album’s universe together. “As I began to combine songs, I could see my struggles, the fantasy, the ‘hero’s journey’.” Paris found tracks incidentally informing each other, and so the album has been curated rather than conceptualised to find a natural rhythm akin to Greek theatre staging – or “a quest”, as Paris puts it. “I love linear storytelling, following the protagonist inflected by a journey. Looking back, I can track my own wellbeing, my growth.” Album opener “my mind (now)” and closer “yeti” are opposites: “We start with the turmoil, open up the chaos, scramble back to redemption and healing.” She describes her songwriting as undisciplined, but always begins with lyrics – a starting couplet or image to elucidate. Melody follows. “My mind has not been silent since you,” she sings vaporously on “my mind (now)”. A haunting fugue draws you in: “What did I do wrong”, across skittering percussion and a glut of trumpets, lanced by crunching guitars and a piercing feral scream. She flexes her songwriting dichotomy, weaving the personal with haunting symbolism – a striking image of strawberry picking while someone else readies their cruelty. “boys, bugs, and men” draws on men’s sadistic behaviours, using natural world imagery to unspool the banalities of a patriarchy that hurts both genders. “I love the feral, feminine aspects of my music,” says Paris. “Being unapologetically vulnerable feels wild – it's breaking down boundaries, a return to something primal.” “bones on the beach” is a “turning point”. “I wrote it at a time when I was coming out of survival mode,” she explains. “It starts from exhaustion and wanting the world to stop asking things of you. And as it progresses, there’s a realisation – you will find peace in life when you start living and taking care of yourself.” Three album tracks – “escape pod”, “last woman on earth”, “bones on the beach” – are her ‘apocalypse trio’. “When it felt like my world was ending,” she says. “last woman on earth” is an emotive, upward contour, about coping with and confronting the ways her voice has been taken away. She leans on dark metaphors to find light. “Women’s wishes for what happens after they die have been consistently dishonoured: from Anne Boleyn to Marilyn Monroe. It's the ultimate show of disrespect,” she says. “It becomes an uplifting point – it shows my growing belief in my own agency.” “triassic love song” is an aching ode to external love returning to her life, imagery inspired by an archaeological discovery of two fossils of different animal species intertwined. “It’s a tender narrative marker. Love was becoming a healing force, but I was conscious of an end being nigh.” She matches this with expansive productions – dramatic instrumentation, folk sensibilities, pop at its most cavernous. It makes sense for someone who first picked up a guitar at age 13, enamoured by Ed Sheeran, Bon Iver, and the eclectic sounds of her upbringing from the Motown and jazz her mother played. “my mind (now)” was especially fun to build. Parisrecalls: “I didn’t want any structure that could be a ‘life raft’. It has to almost overwhelm you, then pull back. You're a tiny raft in the ocean, you're surely going to go under – but you don't.” After building a song out on vocals and guitar, her notes app and songbook, she makes a playlist to convey the sonic palette. “as good a reason” was inspired by Alt-J and early Hozier; “labour” from Glass Animals and Katarina Gimon’s compositions. “I don't know what genre I am. I don’t give it much thought. The second I do, I'll start limiting myself.” The album spans the breadth of Paris’s vocal range. “my mind (now)” is the first time she’s screamed on record. On “his land” – a melancholic offering about isolation, inspired by the reduction of British public lands – she reaches her lowest tone. In the “last woman on earth” bridge, she belts her highest. “It was really hard to get up there. My songs, age 20, were mumbly and soft. In part it was a tone thing, and in part confidence. Now I write songs and push myself to grow toward it, as opposed to making everything sound the same.” Worldbuilding is cinched by visual aesthetic – Paris gravitates towards the eerie feminine fashion of Bora Aksu and Simone Rocha and is styled for stage by Leith Clark. If each song could have a music video, she would. The striking visual for “my mind (now)”, directed by Matt Grass, is darkly fantastical. “I want everyone to see my musical world as I do,” she says. Live performance is vital to her artistry, and Paris has sold out four headline London shows. At every gig, her lyrics are sung directly back at her. “One of the reasons you write is to feel heard,” she says. “It's an audience that wants to know more.” The intimacy of the music remains steadfast as stages get bigger. Over the last year, she has supported Stevie Nicks in London at BST Hyde Park, embarked on festival season, including shows at Glastonbury and Reading Festival, and sold-out multiple UK, US and European tours. She has just completed a sold-out North American tour and is set to grace stages again this summer for her biggest sold-out UK dates yet. cacophony is “a stage backdrop”, against which all future music will be positioned. “I’ve chronically released singles and been quite nomadic. I’m excited to set the scene for my world.” She’s already working on the threads of her next album, a Paris Paloma tapestry in motion.

Barely 20 years old, the Atlanta-based emo-folk duo hey, nothing – Tyler (he) & Harlow (they) – wades through complex emotions with sharp wit and humor. They have sold out runs of headlining shows, garnered notices from the likes of NPR Music, Alternative Press, Pigeons & Planes, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, & more. They hit ~100k total streams per day, with their fanbase on both TikTok and Instagram swiftly approaching the 300k mark each. 2024's Maine EP — written, fittingly, in a small cabin in the middle of Maine — was a major breakthrough moment for the band, incorporating earnest and cutting lyrics that pull directly from their experience of the hardships of growing up too early, too fast. They’ll continue carving a bold path forward with a new EP, 33°, on 2/14; they’ve already been announced as part of the lineups for 2025's Kilby Block Party and Bonnaroo, and they’ll be announcing more 2025 tour dates soon.

The indie songwriter Hazlett was born and raised in Australia and after spending a lot of time living abroad is making a grand return back home in support of David Kushner.

After years of playing in bars in his native Australia, Hazlett’s unique brand of “Indie Ballroom Folk” only became crystallized after a chance encounter during a runaway trip to Sweden. It was there he found the fabled collaborator chemistry in close friend Freddy Alexander. A lot has changed since then and what started as just writing songs to “figure out some things in his head…” has now become a whole world of music and beautiful details to move through. Emphasized by the release of his debut album Bloom Mountain in early 2023.

His propensity for figuring things out himself and turning chaos into some kind of nostalgic lesson hasn’t gone unnoticed either, with The Line of Best Fit noting that "Hazlett is offering up a hazy, textured version of the classic singer-songwriter sound"

Even though the nerves never quite go away, there’s this newfound quiet confidence to the troubadour from the land down under. You may not have met, but sometimes when you’re listening to Hazlett he feels like the only friend you’ve ever had.

Emotions make a mess. It's not the kind of mess you can just shove under the bed either. Carol Ades isn't here to help you scrub out the mess until you can't see it anymore. Instead, she's here to help you celebrate it, learn something from it, and move on confidently because of it. The New Jersey-born and Los Angeles-based artist, singer, and songwriter wants to empower you, but she's going to keep it real too. Carol dedicated her whole life to music and even had a few brushes with major success on stage and behind-the-scenes. Following a bad breakup, she turned inward and wasn't afraid to get raw in 2018. Under the influence of everything from the series Fleabag, Greta Gerwig, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Glennon Doyle to Japanese House, MUNA, and Phoebe Bridgers, she began to write her own "coming of age" story. Ironically, the first song of this phase ended up in the hands of two other artists, becoming "Past Life" for Trevor Daniel and Selena Gomez. With the onset of quarantine, she wrote for herself at a prolific pace, making emotional lyric-driven songs "you can scream to or sob to in your car." You'll find she's a lot like the friend who lets you cry on her shoulder, but still tells it like it is when you need to hear it the most, holding your hand through the mess with timeless music of her own.