Smokey Brights have been steadily growing out of the mossy Pacific Northwest city of Seattle forover a decade. The band, formed by friends working together at a pizza restaurant, has roots inSeattle’s DIY punk, songwriter, and psych scenes. Through the group’s four LP and three EPreleases, you can hear Smokey Brights’ sonic branches stretching through 70’s prog, synthy newwave bops, fuzzy 90’s anthems, and intimate indie storytelling. You can also trace the lives andromance of songwriters Ryan Devlin and Kim West who married a few years after the formationof the band. The couple’s entangled approach to songwriting and melody has yielded aremarkable amount of original, genre bending music. Nick Krivchenia’s steady, stylish drummingis the backbone of the Smokeys’ sound, while bassist Luke Rägnar adds low end bounce as wellas a third harmony to Ryan and Kim’s melodies. The band’s music has been featured in film,television, video games, and podcasts. They’ved toured throughout the US as well as the UK andmainland Europe. Their most recent releases, 2023’sBroken TooEP andLevitatorLP, bothlanded on iconic radio station KEXP’s top 90.3 records of the year.
Balto
California Rock ‘N Roll quartet makes timeless, bone shaking songs – attitude and groove, joy and ferocity. They are the kind of band that is unafraid to bleed for their craft. Card-Carrying cultists of the Great American Song, the Great American Groove, and the Great American Highway.
Young, lifelong working musicians with thousands of shows between them – Sheldon Reed, pounding his drums, face contorting with concentration, occasional Jarrett -like moan escaping into the overhead mics. Mr. Adam Ditt on bass guitar, waist-length hair swaying, fingers skating on the lower frets, sounding like ’s John Entwistle after a decade of peyote-fueled wanderings in the Sonoran Desert. , long limbs askew, infectiously joyous, eminently maximal, jumping between the twin necks of a big SG. Dan Sheron, right hand bleeding on a telecaster, blowing his voice out on one more song before the night is through.
The band has spent the last year recording at the studios of Riley Geare (, ) and Kim Bullard (, ), as well as their home studio. The tracks have been mixed by Sean O’Brien (, ) and mastered by Howie Weinberg (, , ). The upcoming album feels like a culmination of their ambitions as recording artists – Echos of the British Invasion & the American Swamp tangle with touches of Petty, Zevon, & Big Star, exploring the absurdity of living in the decline.
Gipsy Moonrise
A bunch of lost boys playing rock and roll. Trying to change the future and make this world a better place than we leave it.
