Indie

Todd Rundgren certainly deserves an album guide. After peaking in the early 70s with his pop-rock classic Something/Anything?, he embarked on a journey that involved dozens of albums, side projects, and little of the AM gold clarity that marked his best-known work. Hes had a career similar to Prince -- using increasingly accessible technology and distribution methods to flood the market with product -- but without the Purple Ones killer catalog to sustain popular interest. So thank UK magazine Dummy for creating a sympathetic primer to Rundgrens boundless creativity. Its made in honor of Rundgrens Runddans, a collaboration with Sereena-Maneeshs Emil Nikolaisen and Ibiza disco revivalist Lindstrøm that was released last May.

Cool cant be trained and it cant be manufactured. Guys like Archy Marshall, a.k.a. gutterpunk angel King Krule, are simply born with it. Or in Marshall’s case, born into it: His mom, a screenprinter, outfitted Prince Be of PM Dawn for the “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” video; his uncle played in a ska band called the Top Cats; his godfather was in punk band The Ruts. Marshall grew up a school-ditching, music-loving rabble-rouser, immersed in London’s wildly progressive art world. No wonder then that he began writing songs and making beats as a teenager.Now 23, Marshall has applied his inherent cool to two King Krule LPs, both of which feature an inimitable postmodern pastiche of blues, dub, lounge, hip-hop, jazz, downtempo, and experimental noir. His latest, The OOZ, is an itchy, bleary smear of atmosphere and attitude, swinging on saxophone and laden with songs about marginalized Bohemian existence, sung in Marshalls tongue-swallowing Cockney twang.Before he anointed himself streetwise royalty, Marshall ran under a slew of other names, some of which he still adopts depending on his mood, including Zoo Kid, DJ JD Sports, Pimp Shrimp, and Edgar the Beatmaker. He’s collaborated with now-disbanded Manhattan rap crew RATKING and London soundscapers Mount Kimbie. He even recorded an album under his own birth name.Given his lifelong exposure to off-the-radar music, it’s no surprise that Marshall’s stated influences—and the less obvious ones—comprise a sonic roadmap through the global underground. From ’80s New York no wave to golden-era hip-hop to mid-century country crooners to Jamaican classics to of-the-moment indie agitators, King Krule has swallowed it all and spit out something wholly unique and utterly captivating. Here’s your tour through the Kingdom of Krule.

Power pop could be perhaps the most ironically named of rock subgenres. Sure, as a purely sonic descriptor, it makes sense: Take the pristine jangle of ‘60s melody makers like The Byrds and Love and add some Marshall-stack muscle. But historically speaking, power pop has been the playground of the powerless: the aspiring Anglophiles who dreamed of being as big as The Beatles only to get crushed by an indifferent music industry (Big Star, Flamin’ Groovies); the eccentrics whose expertise with a hook belied their peculiar personalities (Todd Rundgren, Cheap Trick); the down ‘n’ out misfits for whom the ringing chords of a Rickenbacker are the only salve for a world of pain (The La’s Ted Leo).For enthusiasts, power pop represents rock ‘n’ roll in its most immaculate state—the perfect synthesis of melody, harmony, and riffed-up swagger. But at its most potent——be it Badfinger’s swooning “No Matter What” or Sheer Mag’s aching “Just Can’t Get Enough”——it’s also the frozen-in-amber sound of dreams unfulfilled, love unrequited, and halcyon days that can never be relived. Even as its gamely adapted to every rock trend of the past 40 years (punk, indie rock, lo-fi, grunge), power pop’s essential chemistry remains the same: It’s the sugar rush and the bitter pill all in one.

The loss of Leonard Cohen is an incalculable one. But part of the reason he’ll be missed so much is also one of the reasons the world without him might be a bit less bleak than we expect. The power of his poetic vision was so strong that he ended up deeply influencing generation after generation of artists operating in every stylistic sector, from folk rock to post-punk. Countless singers have covered Cohen’s songs over the years (including some of the artists you’ll encounter here), but these are the people whose own work has been irrevocably imprinted with the inspiration of the man from Montreal. It might not always be immediately obvious, but it’s undeniably there, whether it’s in the devilish alt-rock antics of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the moody singer/songwriter style of Suzanne Vega, or even the grunge-era growl of Afghan Whigs and Nirvana (whose longing for “a Leonard Cohen afterlife” in “Pennyroyal Tea” takes on a whole new resonance in this context).

Surveying any “story of punk” is going to be a fraught endeavor, the limits of what constitutes the genre—indeed, can punk truly be considered a genre? An attitude? A movement?—proving far-reaching and objectively elusive. Which makes Pitchforks Story of Feminist Punk playlist, curated by Vivien Goldman, even more daring and triumphant. This isnt just a list of women who make punk; rather, its a treatise on the protest song, as told by Crass, Bikini Kill, Kleenex, White Lung and a smorgasbord of feminist classmates. Working chronologically—and without the flabby context of other era-hits—Goldman teases out a defiant lineage of feminist thought, like a thread running through a woolen sweater, stretching from Patti Smith (“Land”) and the Bush Tetras (“Too Many Creeps”) to Priests (“And Breeding”) and Sleater-Kinney (“#1 Must Have”). Its a brazen collection of pitch-perfect choices, an unapologetic fuck-you to the male-dominated annals of punks past and present, a statement of intent, and, without doubt, a rallying call to arms.

Psychedelic music emerged in the mid-60s as a mutant offspring of the British Invasion and American garage rock, but has since morphed into so many different forms that it is more accurate to describe it as a feeling than a sound. Be it the the brain-melting feedback of Jimi Hendrix or Ty Segall, the dreamy reveries of Spiritualized and Tame Impala, or the heady, head-nodding beats of Flying Lotus and J Dilla, psychedelica is hard to pin down—but you’ll know you’re hearing it when you feel your mind altering. Heres our curated guide to the best head music to help you chase the rush, including our genre-spanning psych playlist (at right) and links to past Dowsers mixes for even deeper trips.

PSYCH ROCKWhen rock first got psychedelic in the 60s, the most obvious proponents were self-professed freaks like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. But nearly everywhere you looked, you could find someone trying to access their inner mind via some radical noise, from cult acts like Love and The Fugs to icons like The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Since then, every generation since has found their own way to look inside, from the Dream Syndicate in the ’80s, to Slowdive in the ’90s, to My Morning Jacket in the 21st century.Recommended Listening:Bad Trips: The Dark Side of the ‘60sSpace Rock: A Cosmic JourneyHow Psychedelia Reclaimed Modern Rock

PSYCH FOLKIn the beginning, psychedelic music was associated with guitar gods like Jimi Hendrix and waves of feedback. But that big bang was soon followed by generations of artists—from 60s Greenwich Village folkie Karen Dalton to Bert Jansch and his 70s British folk group Pentangle to modern dreamweavers like Devendra Banhart— who used acoustic guitars, pared-down arrangements, and dexterously plucked melodies to pull the listener into their headspace without the need for amplification.Recommended Listening:Way Past Pleasant: A Guide to Psychedelic FolkReligion, Rock, and LSD: A Brief History of Jesus Freaks

PSYCH FUNKPsychedelic music has traditionally been used as a way to explore the inner workings of your mind. But if you take off the headphones, its also a great way to explore your body on the dance floor. Soul, funk and R&B have a long tradition of making music that rocks the hips and the third eye at the same time, from Eddie Hazels righteous riffing on Funkadelic’s Cosmic Slop to Dâm-Funks alien synth-funk bangers.Recommended Listening:A Deeper Shade of Psych SoulThe Afrofuturist Impulse in MusicInto the Nite: Synth-Funk Fantasias

PSYCH JAZZAt its mid-’60s moment of origin, psychedelia immediately found a natural host in jazz. After all, both are concerned with evoking a feeling and a mood, and following inspiration wherever it leads—from the spiritually searching compositions of Alice Coltrane to Mulatu Astatke’ slippery Latin-flavored explorations to Flying Lotus dedication to feeding brains with jazz-damaged trance whispers.Recommended Listening:The Black Experimental Music MixtapeChampions of Ethiopian GrooveThe Best of Brainfeeder

PSYCH PUNKThe common myth about punk is that it formed in opposition to bloated 70s rock, and rejected Pink Floyd and anything associated with psychedelia. But the truth is that plenty of punks, such as restless hardcore purveyors Black Flag and volatile noiseniks the Butthole Surfers, not to mention punk-adjacent acts like the Jesus & Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr., looked back to the ‘60s when deciding how to expand their sound and beguile their fans.Recommended Listening:When Punk Got WeirdPsychedelia in the ‘80sThe 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time

PSYCH RAPPsychedelic music has drifted into every form of music, and since any worthwhile hip-hop producer keeps their ears open, its only natural that it’s became part of the mix. Revered producers J Dilla and Madlib have made hip-hop tracks that oozed with so much mood and shimmer that they didnt even need MCs to rewire the listeners brain, while the genre’s heady offshoot, trip-hop, has been obliterating genre lines and listeners’ minds for more than two decades.Recommended Listening:Great (Post-Donuts) Instrumental Hip-Hop TracksBehind the Beats: Madlib and DillaBest Trip-Hop Tracks

PSYCH-TRONICAWhy settle for rocking minds and rocking bodies when you can do both at once? From the Chemical Brothers to Neon Indian to Boards of Canada, many of the most cutting-edge electronic-music producers spend equal amounts of time focussing on booming beats as well as keyboard lines, sine moans, and digital gurgles designed to tickle the mind. And if you need to rest after a night out, theres plenty of trippy ambient chillout tracks for that as well.Recommended Listening:Essential Acid House TraxThe Art of Psychedelic Disco-RockThe Best Electronic Shoegaze

INDIE PSYCHPsychedelia never dies, it just keeps getting weirder. Animal Collective threw down the gauntlet with 2004’s Sung Tongs, their childlike, free-spirited update of psych rock, and a generation of indie artists have taken up the challenge. From Deerhunters fearsome ambient punk to Zombys scrambled dubstep to Ariel Pinks wounded daydreams, the youngest generation continues to push music inward.Recommended Listening:Animal Collective’s Outer LimitsDreamy Noise Sounds: The Best of Kranky RecordsNew Tropics: The Modern Los Angeles Underground

The most striking vocalists have always had an otherworldly quality about them, from D’Angelo’s subverbal warble to angelic high tenor of Smokey Robinson. Thom Yorke is no different, and, like those other singers, he’s able to convey something deeply humanistic in his otherness. Stripped from the context of Radiohead’s heavily textured sonic experimentation, the beauty of Yorke’s voice is arguably more evident here. It’s also interesting how you can track the progression of modern alternative music through this playlist, how it evolves from the sadsack balladry of the late 90s and early naughts to the IDM-informed formalistic experimentation of the past few years.

Since 1999, Carpark Records has been at the forefront of indie rock’s 21st-century evolution, releasing foundational early records from the likes of Beach House, Toro y Moi, Cloud Nothings, Dan Deacon, Speedy Ortiz, and many more. But this month, the label is looking back, by shining a light on two forgotten contenders in the early-’90s Chicago scene: Wendyfix and Remy (pictured above), both of whom featured Hyman himself on drums. With reissues of Wendyfix’s We Have the Cracks and Remy’s self-titled EP hitting stores this week, we asked Hyman to create a playlist that charts his transformation from aspiring 1990s indie rocker to founder of one of the most vanguard record labels of the 21st-century. I’ve been asked to chronicle my music listening habits from the early ’90s to the founding of Carpark in the late ’90s. I feel like I had three eras of music listening during this time.

1. COLLEGE

In the fall of 1991, I moved to Chicago to go to college at Northwestern University. I was super-stoked to start DJing at their college-radio station, WNUR. The first week I got there, my friend Jon Solomon (who was also in wendyfix with me) told me we should get tickets to this Nirvana show. I’d never heard of them. But our radio station was playing the first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a lot.

Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

It was the first show I went to at college and, to this day, is still the craziest. It was at the Metro. Good thing we bought our tickets a week or so in advance, because there was a line all the way down Clark Street to Addison of people wanting to get in. There were so many people crammed in there that, when people were jumping, my body was literally lifted off the ground with them. I had to go to the back towards the end because I felt like there was not enough air to breathe. The show was a couple weeks before Nevermind came out. Soon after, our college-radio music director pulled the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” CD single from our library because it was getting too popular.

Aphex Twin, “Pulse Width”

I was also a big Anglophile at the time and would pick up a copy of the NME or Melody Maker just about every week from our student book store. There was a pretty interesting feature about an artist called Aphex Twin that fall. I decided I wanted to hear what it sounded like. I went to Reckless and Dr. Wax but no one had it. Finally, I had to take the El all the way down to Lincoln Park to visit the Tower Records at Clark and Fullerton. They had the biggest “import” section in town then. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was mine!

Stereolab, “Peng! 33”

Towards the end of my freshman year, I remember reading a really interesting feature review in the NME about a new band called Stereolab. I still remember buying their debut full-length, Peng, at Reckless on Broadway right before I went home for the summer.

Polvo, “Can I Ride”

In my freshman year, I was keen to get involved as much as I could with independent music. I interned at Touch and Go Records most of that school year. By the time I took the El down to Sheridan and transferred to a bus that went down Irving Park past Western, it took almost an hour and a half to get there from Evanston. The office at that time was in an old industrial space, I believe. Dave Yow (The Jesus Lizard) and Britt Walford (Slint) seemed to be doing a lot of carpentry work there. I remember those dudes being really funny. One of the perks of interning was that I got free music. One day I was given an advance promo “cassette” of Polvo’s Cor-Crane Secret. It was a clear cassette with no paper art in a plastic case. Still have it somewhere….

Wendyfix, “Ridge”

In my sophomore year, I started playing drums in a band with my friends Jon Solomon and Ted Pauly from WNUR. We were named Wendyfix after a local high-school tennis star. Jon was away most of my junior year, so we brought on Brian McGrath to take his place. There weren’t too many indie bands in Chicago doing the quiet/loud moody guitar thing then. I recently decided to digitally release all the tracks we ever recorded. “Ridge” was always one of my favorites.

Remy, “Coco Pebbles”

In my junior year, I started playing drums in another band with more WNUR friends, Peter Schaefer and Matt Walters. Remy was more on the Pavement/Polvo/Archers of Loaf tip. “Coco Pebbles” was one of the few jams we recorded before I graduated and moved away.Here are some other tunes that played a big part in my collegiate life:Unrest, “Cherry Cream On”Spacemen 3, “Come Down Softly to My Soul” *Slint, “Washer”Faust, The Faust Tapes *Bedhead, “Bedside Table”The Incredible String Band, “You Get Brighter”Seefeel, “Imperial”Big Flame, “Every Conversation” *Boredoms, “Hey Bore Hey” ** = not available on Spotify

2. NEW YORK CITY/CHICAGO/GLASGOW

I graduated college in 1995 and moved to New York. One of the things I ended up doing there was working as the indie music buyer for Kim’s West, which was a record store/video rental place at Bleeker and West 10th street in the West Village.I wouldn’t have had this job had Other Music not opened that same year. I started at Kim’s West working as a video-rental person. But the music buyers at Kim’s Underground (also on Bleeker) opened Other Music and suddenly Kim’s Underground was in need of music buyers. So the music folks at Kim’s West went over to Kim’s Underground to get things organized. And I ended up filling in the indie-music buyer spot at Kim’s West.I listened to a bunch of dub, French ye-ye, drum ‘n’ bass, MPB, ’60s/’70s easy listening, and IDM during this time.I moved back to Chicago for a year from 1996 to 1997. I worked briefly at Reckless Records and spent a lot of time at Dusty Groove. After Chicago, I went to Glasgow, Scotland for a 12-month graduat- school program for Popular Music Studies.I slowly stopped listening to indie rock around this time. I thought it was a dying genre. All the new music I was consuming was slowly transitioning over to digital and electronic music. I had burnt out on indie rock.Prince Far I, “Plant Up”Autechre, “Clipper”Maurizio, “M07A”Alec Empire, “Bang Your Head”Caetano Veloso, “Tropicalia”The Congos, “Fisherman”France Gall, “Mes Premieres Varies Vacances” *Marcos Valle, “Mentira”Plug, “Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa” *Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends, “Love So Fine” *Rotary Connection, “If I sing My Song” *µ-Ziq, “Brace Yourself Jason* = not available on Spotify

3. BACK TO NEW YORK CITY

I moved back to NYC at the end of 1998 and ended up working at my friend Rich’s record store Etherea in the East Village. All us record clerks there were pretty tight. Dance-music culture was our thing. Indie rock seemed passé. We had a weekly DJ/electronic music night and spent a lot of time listening to 12 inches at dance-music shop Temple Records a block away on Avenue B.Here’s some tunes I spun a lot during this era:Dopplereffekt, “Speak ‘n’ Spell” *Aril Brikha, “Groove la Chord”Giorgio Moroder, “From Here to Eternity”Eddy Grant, “Time Warp” *Frankie Knuckles, “Baby Wants to Ride”GAS, “Eins” *Jorge Ben, “Hermes Trimegisto Escreveu”Isan, “Clipper”Casino Versus Japan, “It’s Very Sunny”Lime, ”Angel Eyes”Moodymann, “Misled”Pepe Bradock, “The Charter” *Sparks, “Beat the Clock”Thomas Bangalter, “Turbo” *Throbbing Gristle, “Hot on the Heels of Love”Tones on Tail, “Lions”Tuxedomoon, “No Tears”Closer Musik, “One Two Three (No Gravity)”I was mostly buying techno, house, and electro 12 inches at this time. I was DJing a lot. Our night, Invisible Cities, put me in touch with a lot of the electronic artists that initially released music with us. Carpark was born! That means the end of this playlist. How Carpark moved away from exclusively electronic is a playlist for another time.* = not available on Spotify

Note: This playlist follows a loose chronological structure reflecting when these songs were released during 2017—which I like to think provides a more accurate snapshot of the year as it was lived, as opposed to a ranked list based on totally unquantifiable criteria. The cruel irony of being a music critic in 2017 is that the very thing that makes the gig easier—i.e., plentiful, push-button access to practically the entire history of recorded sound—is also the very thing that threatens one’s sense of expertise. The truth is, the two cornerstones of the job description—a) being an authority in your field and b) staying current—are becoming mutually exclusive ideals, as your listening queue perpetually extends like an unchecked email account. Spending quality time with a given record means missing out on another 50 probably-amazing albums that came out this week. I’m at the point now where artists whose work I’ve loved for years, or even decades, will release a new record, and it takes me months to get around to giving it a cursory listen, if I don’t outright forget that it even exists. (Sorry, Liars!) These days, music writers essentially play the role of sommelier, giving records a momentary swish before spewing ’em out and moving onto the next one.It’s an especially pervasive condition in the perennially over-populated field we call indie rock—a term that now encompasses everyone from aspiring Bandcamp chancers to Grammy-winning arena acts. And in between those goalposts you have annual bumper crops of hotly tipped breakout artists, modestly successful mid-career acts still slogging it out, solo albums, side projects, and ‘90s veterans who decide to take a crack at the reunion circuit. And this is to say nothing of the stylistic variation that field covers. Forty years ago, you wouldnt deign to lump Bruce Springsteen, The Fall, William Onyeabor, Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, and Hawkwind into the same genre category. Yet when you consider those artists contemporary spiritual offspring—Japandroids, Sleaford Mods, Pierre Kwenders, The Weather Station, Moses Sumney, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard—theyre all huddled under the umbrella of indie.As such, there is no narrative through-line or overarching theme that could possibly connect the songs on this collection of my favorite indie-rock songs of 2017. (Well, other than it was an exceptionally good year for Australia!) Certainly, in this never-ending shit-show of a year, there was a need for music that could help us navigate these tumultuous times, be it Priests emotionally fraught dream-punk (“Nothing Feels Natural”), Algiers palace-storming soul stomps (“The Underside of Power”), or Weaves freak-flag rallying cries (“Scream”). But then, 2017 was so fucked up and draining on so many levels, you could forgive America’s fiercest rabble-rousers—Philly DIY heroes Sheer Mag, pictured above—for wanting to take a momentary break from the brick-tossing and seek solace in the discotheque (“Need to Feel Your Love”).At a time when the very fate of humanity felt more perilous and unknowable than at any point in our lifetime, you take comfort in the little things. Sometimes all I wanted was to escape into a fully realized fantasy of Stevie Nicks making a Cure album (Louise Burns’ “Storms”) or King Krule going Krautrock (via Mount Kimbie’s “Blue Train Lines”) or The Go-Betweens being brought back to life (Rolling Blackouts C.F.’s “The French Press”). In some instances, it was an especially outrageous lyric that provided levity (from Alex Cameron and Angel Olsen’s misfit-romance anthem “Stranger’s Kiss”: “I got shat on by an eagle, baby/ now I’m king of the neighbourhod/ and I guess that I could/ just tear the gym pants off a single mother”); in others, I was transfixed by an extended instrumental build-up (Thurston Moore’s gong-crashing “Exalted”) or a perfectly messy guitar solo (The National’s “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” The War on Drugs’ “Up All Night”). It was a year of being taken by surprise by bands I had taken for granted (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “Ambulance Chaser,” Guided by Voices’ “Nothing Gets You Real”), awestruck by long-dormant artists who seemingly reemerged from out of nowhere (be it Land of Talk with the intensely aching “Heartcore” or former Only Ones frontman Peter Perrett’s winsome “Troika”), and blindsided by artists I had never heard before (noise-punk powerhouse Dasher’s “Go Rambo,” Montreal sound collagist Joni Void’s “Cinema Without People,” art-pop phenom Jay Som’s magisterial “For Light”).Of course, there is also a regional bias at play here. Even as it’s become the province of national late-night talk shows and destination mega-festivals, indie rock is still nothing without its local scenes, and this playlist inevitably reflects my roots in the Southern Ontario corridor. This year, several under-the-radar acts I’ve been fortunate enough to see come into their own over the past few years—stoner-prog titans Biblical, avant-pop activist Petra Glynt, the Slim Twig/U.S. Girls-led fuzz-boogie supergroup Darlene Shrugg, industrial-electro trio Odonis Odonis—all released excellent albums that effectively bottled up their onstage energy for the world to see.But mostly what you get on this playlist is a lot of great, seasoned, chronically under-appreciated artists doing what they do and continuing to do it very well, from Chain and the Gang’s anti-capitalist garage-punk manifesto “Devitalize” to British Sea Power’s crestfallen “Don’t Let the Sun Get in the Way” to The Dears’ triumphant “1998” to Pavement co-founder Spiral Stairs’ sweetly slack “Angel Eyes” (a touching tribute to his late drummer, Darius Minwalla). There are few rewards for consistency in life, and especially not in the incessant, feed-refreshing world of indie rock. But in a time of insatiable suck-it-up-and-spit-it-out musical consumption, these songs handily passed the swish test, and demanded to be savored.P.S.: Ty Segall’s Drag City catalog isn’t available on Spotify, otherwise I would’ve included his gonzo 10-minute "Cant You Hear Me Knocking"-scaled tour de force, “Freedom (Warm Hands).” Ditto for Boss Hog’s ace comeback album, Brood X, which just goes to show that getting featured in Baby Driver wasn’t the only great thing to happen to Jon Spencer this year.

First off, what the hell is The Triangle? Technically speaking, it’s shorthand for Research Triangle Park, a massive slab of subtly rolling hills in the center of North Carolina that’s home to a whole mess of tech companies. Informally, however, it refers to the cities and college towns surrounding the RTP, namely Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. Most fans of indie music are well aware of the area’s bona fides: It is (or at one time was) the home of Superchunk and the Merge Records empire, a young Ben Folds Five, cult faves Archers of Loaf, and John Darnielle, the super-learned tunesmith behind The Mountain Goats, who just dropped their latest album, the wonderfully idiosyncratic Goths.So yeah, The Triangle is highly respected as a place where important music is created. At the same time, the region is underrated because it doesn’t quite strike the same level of reverence and cool as the similarly sized Seattle, Austin, or Portland. Perhaps its greatest quality is the sheer breadth of music it has churned out: In addition to all that legendary indie music, it has been a home for genre-defining thrash (Corrosion of Conformity), punk blues (Flat Duo Jets), swing revivalism (Squirrel Nut Zippers), hip-hop (Lords of the Underground), electro-pop (Sylvan Esso), and experimental noise (Secret Boyfriend).Now, a good deal of this music exists because The Triangle overflows with creative kids and arty weirdos attending one of its gazillion universities. But that’s only half the story, amazingly enough: It’s also served as a major hub for Southern vernacular music, like blues, country, and folk, since the early 20th century. Indeed, these artists may actually outnumber the many indie and alternative bands in the area. In addition to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, one of the most lauded old-time revival outfits in the United States, there’s campfire folk troubadour Hiss Golden Messenger, absurdly soulful singer/songwriter Tift Merritt, and American Primitive banjoist Nathan Bowles.Outside of Austin, or perhaps Memphis, what other scene in the U.S. boasts such an amazing balance between the modern and cutting edge and the folksy and down-home? The Dowsers guarantee that this will be the only playlist you’ll hear all week with synths, atonal guitars, and banjos.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.