A very special FREE show at El Cerrito’s Little Hill Lounge with Famous Mammals and Replica Watch.

Don’t miss the Bay Area debut of Cool Whip (NYC), the new rocknroll garage psych band from NYC with members of Psychic Ills, Kill Me Tomorrow, and Growing.

On Michael Beach’s new Goner Records album, Big Black Plume, you’ll find crunchy riffs dissolving into brainy experimental passages, blousy love songs brushed with resonant electronic elements, spare piano melodies undercut with thin currents of drone, and rousing hard rock ballads with a zillion guitar overdubs melting into shimmering puddles of sun-baked psychedelia. Tune in, turn on, turn it up.” - Bandcamp Cool Band Alert July 2025

Angoisse Magazine is a three-piece instrumental group based out of Paris. Noise and velvet grooves, somewhere between psychedelia and surrealism, Angoisse Magazine creates images of high-speed chases or a slow free falls. Resolutely minimalist, one could best describe their music as an original soundtrack to a blurry film, forgotten in a closet, eaten away by time and mites. Angoisse Magazine works with sound like a joyous, unstable object. A worrying superposition of viscous textures, dirty samples, a dry and precise rhythmic flow and melodies melted in space.

Orcutt Shelley Miller is an avant-rock trio comprised of three highly celebrated figures of experimental music: Bill Orcutt (Harry Pussy), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth) and Ethan Miller (Howlin Rain, Comets On Fire). 

Following in the footsteps of the high-firing free jazz and European outer-rock bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the Pacific Rim’s subterranean reimagining of “rock” form in the 90s, Orcutt Shelley Miller utilize explosive group chemistry, focused intention and chance to pursue the creation of song in its rawest, purest form.

This trio’s electrifying live experience merges their distinct musical legacies into a cohesive and innovative performance. 

"Total Shutdown and their album are amazing post-everything-core. Sounds like the best moments of the Boredoms, Harry Pussy, and the Flying Luttenbachers mashed into one. Or how about "If Beefheart's Magic Band played grindcore." Recommended if you like the sound of music being destroyed!” - 5 Star review on Amazon.com

"Cuneiform Tabs channel both the outer edge psych meanderings of Bay Area indiepop and the very British bedroom-dwelling post-punk experimentalism of Jane From Occupied Europe-era Swell Maps. It's a thrilling union, wrapped up in tape-hiss fog and white noise static, songs emerging in-and-out of the ether, like a sliding radio dial occasionally hitting a golden oldie frequency. The aesthetic is a little different, but it does bear some resemblance to Cindy Lee's Olde Worlde romanticism (maybe this is why W.25th tuned in?), the sense of another world sitting somewhere out there in the subspace." - World of Echo

Total Hell: NWOSHM (new wave of shitty heavy metal) titans from New Orleans!!!

For a band that seems to thrive on collapse, it’s simply amazing that this US/Japanese quartet is now celebrating their 31st year. Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t seen them live—the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. Each one discovers some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humor.

For a band that seems to thrive on collapse, it’s simply amazing that this US/Japanese quartet is now celebrating their 31st year. Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t seen them live—the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. Each one discovers some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humor.

Juanita and Juan is a dynamic musical duo formed by Alice Bag (The Bags) and Kid Congo Powers (Gun Club, The Cramps), two influential figures in the punk and alternative music scenes who first crossed paths in 1977 during the early days of the Hollywood punk movement. Their friendship, rooted in a shared passion for raw, boundary-pushing music, has led to a new creative partnership that transcends genres and defies labels, although the two refer to their sound as “Loud Lounge.”

A song is a song until it isn’t, until it’s pushed to its limits and beyond to become harder, faster and more dissonant. The music on Oneida’s 17thfull-length album, Expensive Air, all started as tightly structured, melodic rock songs then broke open these structures through the instinctual, improvisatory interplay, honed to razor sharpness in two years of live performance. “Successis like laughing in a car gunning carelessly through an ice storm,” says Bobby Matador, “and Expensive Airis how you laugh at yourself as the car spins into the ditch, or a tree. Same trip, but a little closer to the bone.”

Brontez Purnell has been making music since the ‘90s. He started in The Social Lies, a hardcore Afro-punk duo in Alabama in his teens, and later Gravy Train!!! He then went on to lead his long-running project, The Younger Lovers. He is also a dancer, filmmaker, choreographer (The Brontez Purnell Dance Company), the author of eight books, and now a Sub Pop recording artist.

This fall, Brooklyn NY's, The Ladybug Transistor, will embark on a tour in celebration of the 25th anniversary of The Albemarle Sound. Originally released in 1999 on Merge Records, the band's third full-length LP exists just outside its fixed point in time and space. Perhaps the last great pop album of the 20th century, The Albemarle Sound is like few records from the turn of the millennium, its attention turned to the intricate arrangements of late 1960s pop and the strange and familiar environs of home. 

Celestial punk guitarist ALAN LICHT (Love Child, Blue Humans, Lee Ranaldo and the Dust) plays a very special solo show at Stork Club in support of his new album on VDSQ, Havens. Experimental electronics artist, Sharkiface, opens the show.

“The sonic fuel of the band is a blend of post punk, punk, funk, blues, psych rock, Afro beat, even bubble gum but the noise you hear is pure Des Demonas.” - Kim Salmon / The Scientists 

"100 Flowers (previously known as the Urinals are a power trio whose sole 1983 album is an enduring document of the Southern California underground. Based in crime-ridden '80s Los Angeles against the backdrop of juvenile hardcore and vapid hard rock, 100 Flowers crafted a sound that rests between the inspired bursts of The Minutemen and the pastoral jangle of The Dream Syndicate with similarities to the equally oblique Monitor and The Gun Club (who even included a Urinals cover in their set).

Currently based in Oakland, CA, Free Salamander Exhibit continues to shed its dead skin cells, casting off an accumulated detritus of metal, prog-rock, and art-rock influences.

"Half a dozen LPs in, the 22-year Czech band, Uz Jsme Doma, is free of its remarkable founding narrative as a band banned by the former Communist Czechoslovakian regime just for existing...What remains is the fierce commitment to the freedom inherent in Western art-damaged music. Uz embody the absolute unpredictability in Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention primarily, but also the multi-influence, anti-pop clatter of the Residents, Captain Beefheart, Pere Ubu, 1977 punk, and...prog. You won't know what they're singing about in Czech, but the limitless hyper-energy and collision of styles piling on each other with remarkable precision, always turns ears....It's glorious..." – Jack Rabid

BASIC is a mind-meld between noted Philadelphia guitarist Chris Forsyth, Douglas  McCombs (Tortoise), and Mikel Patrick Avery (Natural Information Society). "This Is BASIC", their debut album, is a complex and entrancing instrumental LP recasting forgotten scraps of guitar history into a moving mosaic of strings, skins and electronics.

Simply checking the pedigrees (ex-Arab On Radar, Chinese Stars, Some Girls, Doomsday Student, and Hot Nerdz) will only get you so far with Psychic Graveyard. With a manic output of four full-length albums—Loud As Laughter, A Bluebird Vacation, Veins Feel Strange, and now the brilliant Wilting–in nearly as many years, Psychic Graveyard makes consistently thrilling and unsettled sonic artifacts for a world emptied out and flattened by a joyless and sociopathic mediascape.

Formed in 1995 by Makoto Kawabata at the same time as the Acid Mothers Temple Soul
Collective. The group released its debut album in 1997 on PSF Records (Japan), and it was
selected as one of the year's best albums in The Wire magazine (UK). In 1998 the group played their first tours of the US and Europe. Since then the group has released a huge number of albums on labels from many different countries. As of 2017, the group has
released around 80 albums. Every year since 1998, they have toured extensively in the US
and Europe, and more recently have started performing around Asia and in Japan too. The
group has performed in collaboration with many musicians including psychedelic originators Gong and Guru Guru, Simeon (Silver Apples), Nik Turner (Hawkwind), and more.

WOLF EYES is a band from Michigan. Formed in the fall of 1996 by N. Young. They are known for their bizarre and otherworldly approach to music. Creating a sound that is both disturbing and hypnotic. The band has released numerous albums and EPs on various labels. With their intense and bizarre live performances, Wolf Eyes has garnered a reputation as one of the most frightening and weird bands in the world. Wolf Eyes is currently John Olson and Nate Young. They have performed together for over 20 years.

Chloe Troast is the only new SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE cast member to join season 49 and was named a NEW FACE at Just for Laughs 2023. Previously, she landed the Amy Pascal Feature Film GOODRICH starring Michael Keaton and shot a recurring role on Paul Feig's ABC pilot DROP OFF, opposite Ellie Kemper. Chloe can next be seen in HBO Max’s Feature Film SWEETHEARTS, starring Kieran Shipka, and Judd Apatow’s Feature Film, PLEASE DON’T DESTROY: THE TREASURE OF FOGGY MOUNTAIN, opposite Conan O’Brien, Bowen Yang and Megan Stalter.

Non Plus Temps traffick in On-U Sound post-punk dub stylings). The Spatulas (Cambridge MA) proffer uneasy psychedelic jangle pop, Mister Baby dish dreamy bedroom pop.

Talent Moat’s first foray into the 4 Star Theater features a dazzling array of electronic pop, post-punk, no-wave, art-rock, and avant-garde pop courtesy of noted traffickers Naked Roommate, LA’s Harry the Nightgown, and Juicebumps.

Spanning noisy improvisational rock, folky meditations, and more, Magik Markers fold aching ballads, brash guitar pop, and droning experiments into their music.