Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E25: Kyle Hollingsworth

Kyle Hollingsworth, photo by Tobin Voggesser

Kyle Hollingsworth is perhaps most best known as the keyboard player in The String Cheese Incident, the well known jam/psychedelic rock/progressive bluegrass band that started life in Crested Butte, Colorado but came to prominence when the group re-located to Boulder in 1996. In the wider realm of jam bands, local and otherwise, SCI became one of the most prominent acts across its 30+ year career through the development of its stage show and audience participation elements and fully incorporating its members’ various musical interests outside the band into a cohesive and organic sound without compromising its core sound rooted in a kind of folk Americana with an expanded sonic palette. Hollingsworth brings a warm and subtle coloring to the music that lends it a comforting energy.

For many years Hollingsworth has been releasing music he has largely penned himself with Kyle Hollingsworth Band. It’s a different flavor from String Cheese though not inherently an obviously major departure from his contributions to that project. His latest, 2025’s All We Are (released 8/1/25 via SCI Fidelity Records) is a sonically rich affair that is also a bit of an assessment of his musical career to date—the journey of the creative path he’s undertaken and its impact on his own life and psyche and the artistic explorations he’s ventured along the way. In conveying his own development as a person and as a creative, Hollingsworth obviously writes in a way that has a resonance for listeners who have perhaps looked back on their life trying to sort out where they’ve been in order to have a meaningful road from where they are now. With the new record, as with previous records under his own name, the singer and keyboard player experiments more with sound and style and seems much less steeped in traditional musical ideas and methods.

In 2025 Kyle Hollingsworth Band will once again headline Kyle’s Brew Fest in Longmont, Colorado on September 6 at Wibby Brewing Co that also serves as an album release party. For the event Hollingsowrth collaborated with 4 Hands Brewing Company for a beer pairing to complement the music on hand. Buy tickets here. https://events.sellout.io/Kyle-Hollingsworth-Bocotoberfest-Wibby10year Listen to our interview with Hollingsworth on Bandcamp and follow Hollingsworth at the links below.

kylehollingsworth.com

Kyle Hollingsworth on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E24: Cloakroom

Cloakroom, photo by Vin Romero

Cloakroom is a shoegaze band from Northwest Indiana that got off the ground in 2012. The group’s association with heavy bands since its inception is fitting since it’s own crafting of atmospheric rock has built into it a physicality of tone that is as electrifying as it is weighty. In moments it’s like hearing Holy Mountain-period Sleep working with Fantastic Planet-era Failure in how the sounds can sound like they’re cutting through time and space and immersively transporting at once. This quality was in high form on the 2022 album Dissolution Wave, a concept album about saving the human race from a phenomenon that threatens to wipe out humanity’s art and abstract thought. In 2025 Cloakroom issued its latest album Last Leg of the Human Table, an effort that showcases the band proving itself capable of writing whatever style it wishes without losing its essence of creating entrancing atmospheres. It is also evidence of the band’s gift for pop songcraft and memorable melodies. For years Cloakroom has been one of the bands of choice for connoisseurs of modern shoegaze.

Listen to our interview with bassist Bobby Markos of Cloakroom on Bandcamp and follow the outfit at the links below. Cloakroom performs at the Hi-Dive on Sunday, August 24, 2025 as the headlining act of the final night of Ghost Canyon Fest.

Cloakroom on Instagram

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Cloakroom on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E23: Buildings

Buildings, photo by Bronson Karaff

Buildings is a trio from Minneapolis that spawned in around 2006. Over the next decade the group gained a bit of a cult following in underground circles among those that appreciate the kind of challenging but thrilling noise rock one heard out of labels like Amphetamine Reptile and Touch and Go. Buildings seemed to learn further into the chaos and industrial aspects of that music and by the time of its 2017 album You Are Not One Of Us there was a touch of ambient tonality in the songwriting like a band that wouldn’t have been out of place on the GSL imprint or a more brutal version of a later era Butthole Surfers record. The experimental streak continued with the 2019 album Negative Sound. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic the band drifted apart some and the demands of adulthood meant operating full time as a band wasn’t as possible as previously. Drummer Travis Kuhlman and bassist Mike Baillie formed DUG and have enjoyed some success as darlings of modern noise rock. But in 2024 members of the band including vocalist/guitarist Brian Lake started hanging out again as friends do and Buildings became a going concern again playing its first public show at the Caterwaul festival, the flagship noise rock festival in the country, in 2025.

Listen to our interview with Brian Lake on Bandcamp and follow Buildings at the links below. Buildings performs at Ghost Canyon Fest on Sunday, August 24, 2025.

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Buildings on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E22: Latter

Latter, photo by Vanessa Valadez

Latter is an experimental noise rock band from Chicago with vocalist Meredith Haines and drummer Jon Alvarado at its core. The project came about when Haines moved from Philadelphia to go to graduate school and wanted to start a heavier and more confrontational kind of band and Alvarado, a member of indie pop band Beach Bunny, aimed to join something more aggressive. Originally a four piece before songs cohered the fledgling group shrank to a duo and named itself Latter. The new lineup quickly developed songs and recorded its 2024 debut album the raw and confrontational My Body Is My Sickness, an album that skewers abuse, offers incisive self-examination and exults in bold vulnerability. The album was recently reissued on vinyl following the release of the 2025 EP What Lives Inside Me, a set of songs that sets fire to misogyny and the ways culture and capitalist civilization seems to render everyone disposable in various ways. It’s gloriously ferocious noisy post-hardcore awash in caustic distortion yet not without an undercurrent of melancholic atmosphere in moments. In Spring 2025 Latter went viral when Haines shared a live version of “I Don’t Owe You” on TikTok seeming to tapped in to an experience many have shared in the aftermath of a toxic relationship by articulating those feelings with poetic precision.

Listen to our interview with Meredith Haines and Jon Alvarado of Latter on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below. See Latter at the Ghost Canyon Fest in Denver, Colorado at the Hi-Dive on Saturday, August 23, 2025.

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Latter on Bandcamp

Latter on Instagram

Latter on Facebook

Latter on TikTok

Queen City Sounds Podcase S5E21: Suicide Cages

Suicide Cages, photo by Ethan Cook

Suicide Cages is a band from Denver whose sound draws on various strands of heavy music and punk into a seething maelstrom of channeled outrage and raw emotion. More less a product of the social and civilizational wrecking ball of the COVID-19 pandemic, Suicide Cages came together among friends who knew each other prior and finally came together for a project that could express ideas about society, culture and the fragility of life with focus and integrity. Some might hear the music and take away that it’s an imaginative take on math-y metalcore with the kind of momentum and controlled chaos that that music manifests so well. But anyone that takes a listen to the group’s new EP Live Without there is a lot of pain and despair given air and room to breath and to let it drift some out of the psyche through the sheer release of performance and for the audience sharing in the energy of those moments. Suicide Cages also refreshingly and explicitly, according to its Bandcamp page, “stands against white supremacy in all its forms.” It’s a stance that has become increasingly brave with the rise of racist fascism and all that descends therefrom.

Listen to our interview with Devin Rombough and Mhyk Monroe of Suicide Cages on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below.

Suicide Cages on Instagram

Suicide Cages on Twitter

Suicide Cages on Facebook

Suicide Cages on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E20: Scorplings

Scorplings, photo by Tom Murphy

Scorplings is a noise rock/post-punk trio from Denver that started in 2023. The group quickly wrote and recorded demos it uploaded to Bandcamp beginning in June 2024. Along with its subsequent demos it was recorded at Scorplings’ rehearsal space and studio the Spaghetti Warehouse The band jokes about how its members met via music classified ads and longtime Denver indie rock musician and songwriter Bryon Parker (Accordion Crimes, Raleigh, Simulators) seemed to find his future bandmates out of a mutual interest in math-y post-rock band Slint as well as like-minded artists. Andres had recently moved from Los Angeles and drummer Dan had come to Denver from Chicago while Parker from the East Coast in the early 2000s but all finding a community in Denver for a type of left field punk rooted in jazz and angular song structures. At the same time one hears an instinct for informal atmospheric elements in the vein of a slowcore band and the unconventional pop song structures and melodies reminiscent of Yo La Tengo. There is a cinematic aspect to the songwriting like it’s inspired by the pacing and dynamics of classic movies. Fans of classic Chicago noise rock and DC post-punk will find a great deal to appreciate about Scorplings’ core sound.

Listen to our interview with Scorplings on Bandcamp and follow Scorplings on Instagram. Catch them live at Ghost Canyon Fest on the first night, Thursday, August 21 at What’s Left Records in Colorado Springs.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E19: The Problem With Kids Today

The Problem With Kids Today, photo courtesy the artists

The Problem With Kids Today is a punk and power pop trio from New Haven, Connecticut. The group’s sound bursts out of narrow genre with great exuberance, demonstrating an affection for and kinship with 1980s Kiwi rock, the more rambunctious and noisy C86 contingent, the unvarnished pop sweetness of Sarah Records bands like East River Pipe and Sugargliders, the Siltbreeze roster and earlier icons of tuneful ramshackle rock and roll rebellion like The Jam, The Who and The Replacements. The group is set to release its third album Take It! on August 22, 2025 via their own In The Shed Records imprint on CD, digital download and through streaming services. The album represents the band, having had its brush with more “professional” studios and its first tour under its belt, returning to its roots recording in its cleaned up and revamped shed-turned-home-recording-studio with friend Joe LeMieux. The resulting album has a scrappy charm and irrepressible enthusiasm with songs that have the punk spirit but a sound that incorporates a myriad of influences that fans of Tyvek, the more melodic side of Times New Viking and Parquet Courts at its most raw will appreciate greatly. In the interview we discuss where the band came from and its origins in the unique DIY scene in Connecticut where its members met and developed into the purveyors of melodic punk pop it has become.

Listen to our interview with the members of The Problem With Kids Today and follow the group at the links below.

The Problem With Kids Today on Instagram

The Problem With Kids Today on Facebook

The Problem With Kids Today on Bandcamp

The Problem With Kids Today on YouTube

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E18: doubleVee

doubleVee, photo by Logan Walcher

Oklahoma City-based duo doubleVee is comprised of former Starlight Mints frontman Allan Vest and his wife Barbara Vest who have been releasing some of the most imaginative pop songs going since starting to work on and release music in 2012. The Vest’s have a deep background in music and music culture with Allan writing scores for film and television and Barbara working in radio and producing the nationally syndicated film music program Filmscapes. Starlight Mints were one of the last, great indiepop bands out of that great 90s tradition that included artists out of and connected to the Elephant6 Collective. You can hear that level of compositional and aesthetic sophistication in the music of doubleVee. All of the project’s songs involve a fusion of imaginative storytelling and emotive melodies and an emotional immediacy and intimacy that truly sets the music apart from a lot of modern music. Their music videos reveal an eye for making something that feels like someone dispensed with the usual methods of production and made something accessible like a video a good friend with creativity and cinematic talent would make to share with an immediate social circle. The music of doubleVee invites you to step out of mundane normalcy into something more vital and fun.

The new doubleVee EP Periscope at Midnight, with eye-catching art by Grant Fuhst, is being released on July 25, 2025 digitally and on CD. It’s a kaleidoscopic journey to fantastical places through the lens of everyday curiosity pursued to stimulate the mind and the senses. For the EP the Vests wrote four new tracks and re-imagined a couple of older Starlight Mints songs “Submarine Number Three Vee” and “Maybe Tonight [What’s Inside of Me?]” and brought to all the songs an orchestral power pop sensibility lends each a cinematic aspect that give a dramatic dimension to the songwriting. Fans of XTC and The Apples in Stereo will find much to like about doubleVee’s creative pop songcraft.

Listen to our interview with doubleVee on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below.

doubleVee.net

doubleVee on Bandcamp

doubleVee on YouTube

doubleVee on Facebook

doubleVee on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E17: Chris Stamey

Chris Stamey, photo by John Gessner

Chris Stamey is one of the leading figures of American indie rock as we know it. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Stamey grew up in Winston-Salem and earned a degree in philosophy from NYU. While living in New York, Stamey became the bass player for Alex Chilton’s band for around a year and released a 1978 by another Big Star alum Chris Bell on his own Car Records imprint with “I Am the Cosmos” and “You and Your Sister.” Around that time he formed The dB’s with Peter Holsapple. That band’s jangle guitar and post-punk sensibilities in terms of literary lyrics and willingness to write emotionally complex songs made it a favorite of college radio throughout the 1980s before splitting in 1988 (though back together since 2005). Stamey is renowned for his production and his credits would be too long to list. For example perhaps unexpectedly he produced the first two Le Tigre records and Pylon’s classic 1983 album Chomp. Simply put indie rock and pop bears the hallmarks of Stamey’s work directly on indirectly for decades. He has played in numerous bands during the course of his lifetime including a short stint in Let’s Active with his friend and also legendary producer Mitch Easter and he has had an acclaimed solo career as well.

Stamey’s latest long player Anything Is Possible released via Label 51 Recordings on July 11 on 12” LP vinyl (out August 8, 2025), CD, digital download and on streaming. The new record Stamey says “is a love letter to the kind of harmonically rich yet often lyrically innocent pop music I heard, on the family turntable and especially on AM radio, growing up in the late 50s and mid-60s in the American South.” With contributions from Tthe Lemon Twigs, Mitch Easter, Probyn Gregory (Brian Wilson Band), Marshall Crenshaw among other luminaries of modern music the album has the sophisticated and sonically detailed pop songcraft that Stamey has perfected across a lifetime. Shades of Harry Nilsson and Brian Wilson can be heard throughout the album supported by Stamey’s knack for fusing texture and tone into the kinds of pop hooks and moods that linger with you.

Listen to our interview with Chris Stamey on Bandcamp and follow the artist at the links below.

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Chris Stamey on Apple Music

Chris Stamey on YouTube

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Chris Stamey on Bluesky

Chris Stamey on Facebook

Chris Stamey on Twitter

Chris Stamey on Deezer

Chris Stamey on TIDAL

Chris Stamey on qoboz

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Chris Stamey on Amazon Music

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E16: Willie Nile

Willie Nile, photo by Cristina Arrigoni

Willie Nile is a a New York-based singer-songwriter and guitarist who released his twenty-first album The Great Yellow Light on June 20, 2025 on CD, 12” LP, digital download and streaming via River House Records. Nile moved to NYC in the early 80s in time to catch the early and classic days of the city’s punk scene and by the time of the release of his 1980 debut album the musicians on the record included Jay Dee Daugherty (Patti Smith Group) and Fred Smith (Television). Then as now Nile’s uplifting songs struck a chord with his literary turns of phrase and the spirited delivery. That debut record was released on Arista Records after Nile met Clive Davis and that same year Willie Nile foud himself joining The Who on their 1980 summer tour. But following the release of his 1981 album Golden Down Nile’s career was stalled by legal problems and he didn’t return to the music world until later in the decade. Nile became a bit of a songwriter’s songwriter and had a fan in Bruce Springsteen who invited him to share the stage with the E Street Band in 2003 at Giants Stadium and Shea Stadium. Interestingly enough, though, Nile really his his stride as an artist from 2009 onward when he seemed more prolific than his entire earlier career with highly acclaimed albums along the way. The new record is brimming with passion and compassion and striking for Nile’s charismatic delivery.

Listen to our interview with Willie Nile on Bandcamp and follow his exploits at the links below.

willienile.com

Willie Nile on Facebook