Just before Thanksgiving proves to be one of the most dynamic parts of the music season.
Some of the year’s finest records (from the Bay too) get early recognition and we receive an advanced look at what the best local music festivals have in store for our ears and eyes in 2025.
It’s Under The Stars people, spend some time with us.
NOISE POP FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES 2025 MUSIC LINEUP: PHASE ONE
Noise Pop’s lineup dropped for its 2025 Festival (February 20-March 2), which includes indie rock singer-songwriter Soccer Mommy from Nashville, Tennessee, and the Midwest emo greats American Football. It’s all the in-betweens, off-the-beaten-track shows, local bands on stage, and crowds at quirky funky dives with pickle-back shots, though, that make the 32-year-old festival pop.
What’s this fully realized Noise Pop Festival experience?
Being scrunched by numerous plushies at a sold-out No Vacation performance at The Chapel to kick off the week’s festivities. Getting into Bender’s joyful hellacious happy hour show where it’s not legit until food, beer, and lead singers are crowd surfing, independent of each other or together. Checking into Grey Area for a concert hall experience delivered by the ever-stylish Arooj Aftab as she delivers somber avant-garde sketches while poking fun at her clothing, and then closing out the week with some burning Ethio-jazz from a spry and sneaky newly rediscovered upper septuagenarian keyboard time bender, who can’t help but serve up heat rocks all night.
That’s what magic can happen across this multi-venue music festival. Peep the Spotify playlist to follow along here.
With the experimental psych-pop outfit Mercury Rev, whose Born Horses release is already making the Best of 2024 album rounds, UK out-of-this-world ’70s British funk Gawds Cymande (pronounced Ceemande) gearing up to release their first album in 10 years this January, and San Francisco’s very own Geographer returning home to the Bay, headlining August Hall in celebration of the 15th anniversary of their prized EP “Animal Shapes,” these first phase reveals bear that standard, a little bit of everything scattered about.
Now we eagerly wait for the connective tissue in the ensuing line-up drops.
Grab more info here.
NIGHT TAPES
Stumbling upon the South London trio Night Tapes a couple of years back, I felt a rush of excitement. Here was a band creating dream pop infused with a heavenly dose yet psychedelic quality that blended seamlessly into their shoegaze treatment. Music with an authentic, not performative, rawness. As if someone were sitting on their porch, or trolling around those South London skreets at the cockcrow hour, recording unfiltered moments and sliding them in with naked studio jams.
Welp, the truffle mushroom vibes, those slo-mo cooked frequencies that beckon for the golden hour wherever you happen to be on this earth, have been polished up on their recent release. Assisted Memories focuses on some top-notch, studio-savvy, upbeat disco-tempo ear-podding jams that speak to hips moving as much as heads tripping. Growth is a good thing, especially for Night Tapes, whom we missed playing Popscene here in the Bay a few weeks ago.
Now that’s a bummer.
With subtle maturity sneaking into these jams, I’m sure they will be back in the summer.
While we wait for the future to return, purchase a listen here.
NAKED ROOMMATE AT THE CHAPEL, DECEMBER 30
Do you know what time of the year I detest to waste time around? New Year’s Eve.
I need a plan. Stat.
Not a so-and-so I think is having a party? NAH. I need a concrete mission, or at least the impression of one, because, come on, New Year’s Eve comes with its inherent issues, whether you can see them or not; at least cling on to some type of dream of order. So along with that plan, I want some boom boom boom, some click click click, some idiom of electronic music or electro-biz all up in the buttermilk to make the evening, once again, have the appearance of just floating by.
Avoid all the amateur drama of actual New Year’s Eve and slip into something with ’80s ease, some electronic-adjacent accessibility with a frisson of political resistance, on the night before New Year’s Eve. That’s when Oakland’s Naked Roommate will be playing on December 30, supporting Dengue Fever on a special Monday New Year’s Eve Eve show.
Plus The Chapel, for me, always feels home.
Expect to hear fun, silly, but still serious post-punk observations about our SF class struggle. Naked Roommate fashions weird jams that move along with spongy verve. Thrift store electronic gizmo capriciousness. Off-the-charts arrangements of horn lines and locked grooves of instrumental cool jams that speak to new wave or intro to boogie. The vibe represents all the inherent points of trying to make a Clipper card last forever like a veggie burrito. You get it, people. Living in the Bay is hard; Naked Roommate is here to make you bump all that shit away.
The daily hustle of surviving “the failures of disaster capitalism” is gon’ be a muther for the next 4 years, so make your New Year’s a gift of self-love and swing through.
Grab tickets here.
MOSSWOOD MELTDOWN AT MOSSWOOD PARK, JULY 19–20, 2025
It’s the freakin’ Nerds, of all Nerds, that’s right. MF’ing Devo has been booked to headline Mosswood Meltdown when the festival gears up at Oakland’s Mosswood Park, July 19–20, 2025. From the cold grooves all over their manifesto of nerd-geek futurism on New Traditionalists, a cassette that put such a hurtin’ on my childhood boombox, those keyboard progressions delivered a new world, a nebula that did not exist before. Devo’s music has always celebrated being non-members, approaching topics from the geek-rebel perspective, allowing synths to pave “new ideas, stupid moves” through bizarre tales. (Devo last headlined back in 2018, when the joint was still called Burger Boogaloo.)
And it gets better.
As if noticing some type of connection among the generations, I believe the term is called curating, bookers have also scheduled Osees, John Dwyer’s beautifully scuzzy, never-ever-staying-in-one-place garage outfit, to play at the same gig. They should be applauded for that one due to SORC 80, Osees’ most recent release, which sports not one guitar at all, sounding like Devo transformed into a street gang. That alone makes this cross-generational conversation on the same bill is worth the price of admission.
But… Oakland’s own Kreayshawn makes the batter better, performing live in her hometown for the first time in a decade, and as always, the event will be hosted by the cantankerous and always on-point John Waters
With more acts to come grab early bird tickets here.
KELLY FINNIGAN, A LOVER WAS BORN (COLEMINE RECORDS)
“You’ve got to be your own shelter” sounds like a mantra for surviving life day after day, disappointment after disappointment, but in retro-soul stalwart Kelly Finnigan’s universe, it also beckons memories of dusty 45s dance parties like Primo’s Sad Soul Nite at The Makeout some years ago. The two-stepped refrain-chorus is from “Be Your Own Shelter,” the lead single from Finnigan’s sophomore release, A Lover Was Born, which was recently listed as number 70 on Mojo’s The Best of 2024 list. The Monophonics frontman and his show-stopping falsetto adds that “woe so good” energy to it, which is in lockstep with the way Finnigan styles his productions.
Buy it here.
