Queen City Sounds Podcast – Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E35: The Silver Snails

The Silver Snails, photo by Jasmine Ward

The Silver Snails has been percolating its new album Speed of Light for over a decade since the 2012 release of its debut album The Seven Melodies. The core of the group is husband-and-wife duo Lucas Ward and Elisa Fantini and fashions itself a “glam rock space pop family band.” Even a casual listen to the new album reveals great attention to songwriting detail, performance and production. It has a huge, uplifting, deeply melodic sound and in moments it may remind listeners of something Jeff Lynne and Trevor Horn had their hands in making. In fact, the group covers “Video Killed the Radio Star” by Horn’s New Wave band The Buggles (the video for the original song was the first to be broadcast on MTV) for Speed of Light including a music video made by the members of The Silver Snails. The couple’s three children Jasmine, Celeste and Elias also contribute to the project’s creative efforts including live performances. Long before The Silver Snails became a band Ward was a close friend of singer/songwriter Elliott Smith from whom Ward took some inspiration in his own musical endeavors as someone who writes and records his own songs with keen attention to craft and performance. The album is indeed like a glam rock affair but one that is just as informed by the playful, experimental and imaginative psychedelic rock of Flaming Lips with some sonic resonances with the more space rock end of ELO. Co-produced by Dylan Magierek, mixed by Peter Katis and Adam Selzer and mastered by Greg Calbi and Sterling Sound, its an album that sounds like something from a classic era of pop but with an immediacy that hooks you in with every song. Speed of Light was released on September 5, 2025 on streaming, digital download and CD.

Listen to our interview with Lucas Ward on Bandcamp and follow The Silver Snails at the links below.

thesilversnails.com

The Silver Snails on Facebook

The Silver Snails on Instagram

The Silver Snails on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E33: Laveda

Laveda formed as a dream pop band in Albany, New York in 2018. The core duo of Ali Genevich and Jake Brooks released two outstanding albums of deeply introspective, atmospheric and tender records with 2020’s What Happens After and 2023’s A Place You Grew Up In. As though the title of the latter was a prompt to evolve creatively Laveda relocated to New York City the same year and whether it was already happening then or more came together once in the big city the band evolved in a decidedly different sonic direction without losing its instincts for crafting memorable melodies and vivid, emotionally vibrant and immediately relatable lyrics. 2025’s Love, Darla marked a change in style for a more gritty, more angular, almost No Wave sound as though Genevich and Brooks had delved further into the Sonic Youth catalog and found their way to the likes of Live Skull and, perhaps unrelated, The Cleaners From Venus. The new album sounds like the work of people who made the move to pursue their art further and didn’t come out the other side jaded. Instead transformed and challenged to do something to reflect their own development as people and artists.

Listen to our interview with Genevich and Brooks on Bandcamp and follow Laveda at the links below.

Laveda on Instagram

Laveda on Facebook

Laveda LinkTr.ee

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E32: Broken Record

Broken Record is a Denver-based band that formed after singer/guitarist Lauren Beecher and bassist Corey Fruin moved to the Mile High City from Connecticut in 2017. Both had roots in the underground and DIY scene in and around New Haven and in forming Broken Record around some material Beecher had been working on what emerged was music that reflected the influence of punk and hardcore, certainly in the ethos of the group, as well as the atmospheric melodic qualities of The Cure. If you caught the band early on you might be excused to hearing in the music a touch of Hüsker Dü’s emotionally rich and fierce yet gentle aesthetic. The fledgling outfit found a home in the local hardcore scene and played early shows with the likes of then relatively newly founded bands like Destiny Bond and Ukko’s Hammer. And yet Broken Record never seemed out of place even though the catharsis of its music wasn’t formed from the same set of sounds but the emotional core of the songwriting shared a similar vulnerability and intelligence in expressing emotion with a keen sensitivity in the language of emotionally charged rock music.

The quartet released its debut full-length I Died Laughing on April 24, 2020 and of course could not tour around the record due to the global pandemic. But on that album one hears the knack for melodic jangle and shimmer embedded into earnestly energetic hooks with the expert pacing and Beecher’s warmly thoughtful vocals that strike the perfect emotional coloring for songs that are often poignantly melancholic and always deeply observant. For the 2023 album Nothing Moves Me the songwriting seemed to experiment further with tone and style incorporating delicately minimal guitar leads and triumphant choruses while seeming to be able to mine the more interesting ends of adolescent angst as a lens by which to understand the sometimes disillusioning aspects of adulthood. Like an entire record of what your teenage self might have to say about your current adult self. The 2025 album Routine (via the band’s own imprint Power Goth Recordings) and its cover of suburban American would-be normalcy takes the band’s established themes further to seemingly comment with great insight into the compromises and perils of navigating life in late capitalism and how that can cast a pall over your life if you’re not equipped to find some meaning in a socioeconomic environment seemingly designed to erode your joy and ability to live a full and dignified life. But also on the album the band seems to find the threads of psychic resistance to it all in creative acts and writing songs that feel like a shaking off of the gloom with music that feels like an expression of basic human solidarity.

Listen to our interview with Lauren Beecher and Corey Fruin on Bandcamp and follow Broken Record at the links below. The band is celebrating the release of Routine with a show at The Skylark Lounge Bobcat Room on Saturday, November 15, 2025 with Precocious Neophyte and Safekeeper, doors 8 p.m., show 9 p.m.

brokenrecordisaband.com

Broken Record on Bandcamp

Broken Record on Instagram

Broken Record on Bluesky

Power Goth Recordings on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E31: Ches Smith

Ches Smith’s Clone Row, photo courtesy the artists

Ches Smith is a drummer, percussionist and composer originally from California and now based out of New York. His career as a musician has been varied and acclaimed including playing on albums with and playing with the likes of John Zorn, Mr. Bungle, Xiu Xiu, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros Terry Riley, Marc Ribot (as a member of Ceramic Dog), Secret Chiefs 3, Nels Cline and Dave Holland. Smith’s mastery of technique is not divorced from a creativity in crafting rhythms to whatever musical style and mode or mood he finds himself contributing to or writing himself with his various collaborators. In 2025 Ches Smith offered his latest opus, Clone Row which includes performances from avant-garde guitar legend Mary Halvorson, jazz luminary Liberty Ellman and multidisciplinary sound artist Nick Dunston. It’s an album of music that moves with imaginative flow of layered rhythms and tones like if one of those more gifted 2000s math rock bands like Hella and Battles were more into fusion and free jazz. Although instrumental the songs speak musically with a cinematic quality.

Ches Smith’s quartet for Clone Row is currently touring the USA with a stop at The Federal Theatre in Denver on Wednesday, October 15. Listen to our interview with Smith on Bandcamp and follow the musician and composer at the links below.

chessmith.com

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E30: Shonen Knife

Shonen Knife is a pioneering Japanese punk band that started out in Osaka in 1981 inspired by the kind of music that influenced the Ramones like 60s girl groups and by the Ramones themselves. The trio were a rarity in Japan in the early days as an all-female group and its lyrics about food, animals and pop culture paired with infectiously upbeat melodies were all but a precursor to pop-punk and a focus on everyday joys over the horrible things we often face in the world we experience. After all, if you only focus on the negative it’s harder to get through tough times. Shonen Knife embraced by American artists and labels like K Records in Olympia, Washington and Sub Pop out of Seattle and Sonic Youth, Red Kross and Nirvana who were instrumental in getting the band a record deal with Capitol Records in 1992 for the release of its 1993 album Let’s Knife. Shonen Knife has remained a bit of a cult band since and its reliably fun music and charming and energetic live shows has justified its legendary status. The outfit’s latest album Our Best Place got a 2025 vinyl reissue available on the tour and afterward through the Good Charamel website. The album is vintage Shonen Knife with fun and sometimes surreal songs about good times, beloved food and personal empowerment.

Listen to our interview with Shonen Knife co-founder, vocalist and guitarist Naoko Yamano on Bandcamp and follow Shonen Knife at the links below. The band performs at HQ in Denver, Colorado on October 9, 2025 with The Pack A.D..

Shonen Knife on Facebook

shonenknife.net

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E29: In the Company of Serpents

In the Company of Serpents, photo by Tom Murphy

In the Company of Serpents began as a kind of doom band in early 2011 and its first few releases were crushing, heavy affairs that set the group apart from other doom acts of the time partly because the core of the songwriting was always a little different. The lyrics seemed informed by a more than passing familiarity with esoteric knowledge well beyond knowing who Aleister Crowley was or that the Ride-Waite Tarot deck had art illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. The band has also benefited from having immediately recognizable artwork including its double cross icon with the serpent in a crossed over Ouroboros image. Around the mid-2010s or so, singer Grant Netzorg, formerly of dark Americana band Bone Orchard, realized that trying to be the heaviest band in a world where many other artists were already in that league wasn’t where he wanted to be creatively. His deep interest in cinema and the cinematic possibilities in songwriting lead him to exploring more atmospheric guitar ideas in the vein of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti with shades of Daniel Lanois. The 2017 album Ain-Soph Aur reflected this shift most fully and the next two albums Lux (2020) and A Crack in Everything (2025) expanded upon these instincts for crafting deep sonic narratives. The new record, though, is a new frontier for the trio now comprised of Netzorg (vocals, guitar), Ben Pitts (bass, lap steel) and Andy Thomas (drums) as it is Netzorg’s most personal album to date in terms of the lyrics that all but openly discuss his struggle with addiction and confronting his now former mentality with creativity and radical self-honesty. It’s easily the band’s finest and most emotionally stirring record and the first to feature the new line-up on a recording.

Listen to our interview with In the Company of Serpents on Bandcamp and follow the group at the links below.

In the Company of Serpents on Facebook

In the Company of Serpents on Instagram

In the Company of Serpents on Twitter

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E27: Rebecca Pidgeon

Rebecca Pidgeon is songwriter, guitarist, singer and actress who released her twelfth album Unillusion on August 29, 2025 via Toy Canteen Records. Pidgeon’s most recent albums have been layered and lushly produced With the new record she took a different approach to the composition and recording for a more intimate feel and minimal sound sources, mostly acoustic guitar and her typically expressive and finely inflected vocals. When discussing the material for the forthcoming album with longtime producer Fernando Perdomo he encouraged her to watch episodes of the MTV Unplugged series and the spontaneous energy and eminently human scale of those performances seemed to suit her vision for the album. Working with a group of musicians including Perdomo, Andy Struder on violin and viola, Eszter Balint also on violin and Matt Tecu on drums, Pidgeon naturally on guitar, the songs came together with stories and poetic themes from the mythical to the poignantly personal. The music has a raw quality but that is inviting and embraces you with the songwriter’s unique narratives and emotional nuance.

Listen to our interview with Rebecca Pidgeon on Bandcamp and follow the artist at the links below.

rebeccapidgeonmusic.com

Rebecca Pidgeon on Instagram

Rebecca Pidgeon on YouTube

Rebecca Pidgeon on Facebook

Rebecca Pidgeon on Twitter

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 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

lastlegofthehumantable.com

Cloakroom on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E23: Buildings

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.

Buildings on Facebook

Buildings on Instagram