Listen, you can read the room, check the blogs, scan the Substacks, and meander over the Mediums. It all reads sketchy these days. One metric will tell you physical media is coming back (yeah, baby!), and then a very well-curated piece will instruct you that 2026 music is fake (boo). Who should you believe? Yourself.
In sports, there is this thing called the eye test: It’s a method of evaluating an athlete, team, or play through direct personal observation and watching competition rather than relying purely on box scores, analytics, or statistics. Kind of like the way the ENTIRE Bay Area knew the Valkyries were WNBA championship-bound, while the rest of the league went out of their way to describe what our team did not have.
Following the team’s 2026 WNBA championship in just its second season, finals MVP Gabby Williams famously credited its rapid rise to having “good people.” That’s something metrics don’t succeed at: in-the-moment intangible facts.
What the hell does this have to do with gauging music? Everything. As much as we trumpet and chirp about up-and-coming bands and artists, it is not lost on us that seeing a band perform live is the other 50 percent of their aesthetic that a recording, visual, or stream can’t capture.
For example, Oakland-based indie-pop outfit abracadabra played a highly anticipated album release show at Rickshaw Stop in mid-October, and word is their album production gets a better presentation when this group performs with their larger ensemble in a live setting. Smaller, finite intangibles have more of an opportunity to shine. That’s the report from the front line—the eye test in action. But after the performance, it’s up to you. Become an active listener and push along to that dreaded dark corner where the merchandise is sold.
Capitalize on an opportunity to speak with band members, get inside info on future releases, and just get a feel for who these people are. Your instincts are keener than sometimes the best metrics. Because you, the consumer, are not a bot. So get in there and stir up some shit. That’s what great fans do.
But hey?
We are Under The Stars, people. You know the drill, lovers of music and culture. This weekly column stays on message with strong-ass opinions, presenting new music releases and upcoming shows, hustling with the changes, and thinking outside the margins. We break music news every week.
Thanks for choosing to rock with us… Let’s go…
CLAPTON HYMNS VOL. 1: 10 YEARS OF CHURCH OF SOUND (2016-2026) (CHURCH OF SOUND RECORDINGS)
True musical fellowship is the spectral energy that charges each special performance on the Church of Sound 10th-birthday compilation of previously unheard live recordings from its now-legendary event series.
Formed in 2016, Church of Sound is an independently run concert series based at St. James the Great church in Hackney, East London. Over the past 10 years, it has curated and produced events with bonafide legends and exciting up-and-coming artists across a variety of styles and scenes, largely focusing on jazz and the many genres that genre has influenced.
The series is a veritable who’s who. There is a stellar Kaidi Tatham & The First Word All Stars featuring Vanessa Freeman “Do What You Gotta Do” performance on which Alicia Joy and Geogie Sweet happily take backup vocal roles, while Tatham and company roll out a gospel-meets-jazz composition. Then there’s Tony Allen’s last gig, just before lockdown shut everything off and away.
A hymn to the late D’Angelo starts as a mournful swoon and swells into a live realization, with choir in tow, that celebrates the moments we all had with the late musician.
If you love music and the way it can bring an audience into a performance, you need to pick this up. Pre-order here.
JAMILA WOODS AT RICKSHAW STOP, NOV 18
A tour celebrating a young career packed with promise and delivering results comes to town. This is the Woods track that got my attention real quick: “Motherfuckers won’t shut up,” coming in fuzzy over the raw shotgun stink of track “MUDDY.” That’s a direct quote from blues legend Muddy Waters, who cussed it out loud for years, night after night, at his small bar gigs until he finally got electrified, and folks quit talking and started shaking it to his genius.
Woods’ 2019 album LEGACY! LEGACY! wielded scattershot tones and hues that move through hip-hop, neo-soul, house, and rock with a funk lean and touches of trip-hop. Her voice teeters constantly, from downhill ease one minute to seething indignation the next. That album took 12 mavericks of culture—poets, musicians, painters, and novelists, strong-willed folks of color—and focused on their superhero talents and struggles, recasting them through song.
Woods, a Brown University graduate and formidable artist from Chicago, first came into the national spotlight by way of a Chance the Rapper affiliation in 2016, then via her own hype from the impressive debut HEAVN the following year.
After this show has been moved from August Hall to Rickshaw Stop, do not miss its opportunity to catch a pitch-perfect multi-hyphenate, live and in song. As cultural critic Doreen St. Felix put it, “It makes you wish all singers were poets.”
Grab tix here.
SPACETIME CONTINUUM WITH TERENCE MCKENNA, SOLITON (REFLECTIVE RECORDS)
“Fluorescence,” an all-time chill statement from 1993 by the iconic San Francisco Spacetime Continuum (shouts to The Gawd Jonah Sharp), kicked off Peggy Gou’s DJ KICKS mix from 2019. As she is the first South Korean woman to DJ at Berlin’s techno institution Berghain, Gou’s introspective choice—and let’s just call it what it is, a stylistic chess move—surprised me, but what spoke louder was that, well under 30 at the time, Gou and her generation were looking to Sharp’s output for clarity.
Soliton, the archival recording of Spacetime Continuum with Terence McKenna recorded at Great American Music Hall on October 31, 1993, gives San Francisco om 2026 a much-needed history lesson in humanity. While McKenna yammers about his ideas on psychedelic philosophy, a young Jonah Sharp, the Scottish-born electronic musician, producer, and DJ, weaves experimental electronic music with warmth and an inquisitive nature. One assumes that attendees were sipping water and exploring their own neural pathways during the performance. Soliton is the first offering in the Reflective archive series.
Pre-order here.
VINYL WILLIAMS, 2026 (HARMONY RECORDS)
“2026, the Waymos are on fire.”
Preach!
It’s easy, far too lazy, to identify the LA-based psychedelic pop and dream-pop project of Lionel Williams (grandson of film composer John Williams) as just a hazy, floaty, and deeply immersive blend of shoegaze, space pop, and soft-focus psych-rock. But that’s just its surface.
Last time I saw Williams, he was scuttering through the crowd at GAMH, heading toward the stage. Bro was wearing a greenish robe of sorts with that frizzled, untamed hair. Likewise, his sonic presence may be interpreted as this “out there” entity when in actuality, we’re dealing with a singer-songwriter who works with intent. I tried to see if he was coming back around the Bay for the end of 2026 so we could actually hear “2026,” but it’s not in the cards.
So I suggest going to pick up this single, this album, and enjoy one of the most slept-on musicians in the country in your own privacy, so when that big-headed, fuzzy, Afroed-lil dude pops on stage in 2027, you’re ready.
Because he is not playing. Dude gets it. Just listen to “2026.” Pick it up here.
JANE WIEDLIN AT BOOKSMITH, SAT/14
Time, fate, and destiny rarely produce an even playing field. My memories of The Go-Go’s were of the cute, smiling so-called white chicks who popped up on MTV with new albums and interesting visuals—saunas and waterskis—who seemed harmless and borderline kind of lame. Buddy, I wuz wrong.
A Showtime doc from 2020 recast The Go-Go’s as trailblazing female rockers who partied as hard as the boys and worked even harder. Fast forward to right about now, a time when Automatic (one of my fave bands) idolizes the iconic all-female New Wave group as the only woman-fronted outfit to write their songs and play their instruments on a #1 album in the US.
The killer post-punk LA trio (now a duo, unfortunately) were even named after a Go-Go’s song.
The Go-Go’s band are part of a lineage that includes Suzi Quatro’s Pleasure Seekers, who were regional one-hit wonders; Fanny, who entered and left the chat quickly; and Joan Jett’s Runaways, which were unfairly dismissed as a novelty act, but launched Jett into the well-earned and deserved stardom it took 40 freakin’ years to attain. And then there were The Slits, who were too aggressive, and yes, too punk as well, to ever crack the mainstream.
The Go-Go’s made three hit albums, a gaggle of Top 40 singles, and lorded over the charts as a major commercial force until The Bangles posted up, got a tune written by Prince, and said, “Hey, we got it from here.” Expect a festive time and lively chat about her book TMI: Memoirs of a Go-Go at this event from Wielden, who always seems to leave no stone unturned. More info here.
