Queen City Sounds Podcast – Page 2 – Queen City Sounds and Art

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

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E22: Latter

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.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E20: Scorplings

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

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