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.
Hudson Powder Company
Hudson Powder Company was formed in 2023, when our frontman Cooper Lowry returned home to the Treasure Valley after an extended period of time “roughing it” in Western Montana. Searching for a backing band, Mr. Lowry wisely recruited Alexis Galvan (drums; percussion), Ricky Jones (bass guitar; backing vocals), and Doug Rudeen (guitar). What do we sound like? Well imagine a goth rock band or a post-rock band had …carnal relations…with a country/americana/”red dirt” band, and their offspring somehow managed to create music that was actually ✨good✨. You might not expect this to happen in real life (that would be a reasonable expectation). However, this is the essence of what Hudson Powder Company is. I guess what we’re really trying to do is create a sort of sound that’s somehow uniquely Idahoan or unique to the Inland Northwest. We feel that there isn’t really a genre of music that’s endemic to this area and we’d like to try and change that in some way. Whether we do that or not doesn’t really matter, it’s interesting to try.