Portraits Of Past prefers to be called a hardcore band, though many other adjectives and sub-genres have been leveled at them over the 30 years since these five childhood friends initially called it quits.

After many years of pent-up demand from listeners old and new, the darkly melodic, explosive, and reluctantly “legendary” five-piece originally from the San Francisco Bay Area is back for Summer 2025 to support a vinyl reissue of their classic 1996 self-titled album. This time around, showgoers can also expect the live debut of tracks from the 2009 Cypress Dust Witch EP.

Likened to a soft summer rain, she’s green is a Minneapolis-based dream-inducer composed of vocalist Zofia Smith, guitarists Liam Armstrong and Raines Lucas, bassist Teddy Nordvold, and drummer Kevin Seebeck. The band has played many shows throughout the Midwest and East Coast, sharing bills with acts such as Hotline TNT, Glixen, Friko, and more. The Star Tribune recommends bringing “earplugs and maybe a tissue for their set.” They initially received recognition through their first two released singles, “river” and “smile again”, both recorded and mixed at home. A raw emotional intensity shines through their honest and explorative songwriting process. After the release of their debut EP Wisteria, they were named one of First Avenue’s Best New Bands of 2023. In April of 2024, they got the most votes from industry professionals for MPR station The Current’s first annual Scouting Report Poll of the top rising artists in Minnesota.

Formed in 2020 in Dearborn, Michigan, Prostitute is an experimental post-punk and Arab rock band. Born out of the isolation of the COVID-19 lockdown, the band’s debut album, Attempted Martyr, was written in the midst of global and personal turmoil, capturing the zeitgeist of a world unraveling. A loose concept record, it chronicles the rise and fall of a doomed zealot whose pursuit of holy vengeance spirals into a psychotic orgy of violence, greed, and lust.

The band was initially formed by Moe Kazra who enlisted childhood friends Andrew Kaster and Dylan Zaranski, with Ross Babinski and Bret Wall later completing the lineup. Together, they self-funded the album, working with legendary engineer Chris Koltay to shape a sound that’s both abrasive and hypnotic—an unrelenting blend of warped guitars, primitive basslines, frenzied drumming, and corrosive synthesizers, interwoven with samples from diverse cultures, ranging from African to Middle Eastern and East Asian influences.

Tracks like “All Hail” (inspired by the 1977 Hanafi Siege of Washington D.C.) immerses listeners in a volatile, hostage-like environment. “Judge” channels Milton’s Satan in a chilling rallying cry, while “Body Meat” grapples with religious desperation and the tenuous boundary between faith and madness. Khachab and Kaster’s lyrics have been described by Pitchfork as “disturbingly poetic” with the ability to “lacerate with image alone.” Crude sloganeering and scenes of horrific violence are juxtaposed with literary allusion and Islamic symbolism, creating what the band calls a “theatricalization of terrorism.” Through this lens, they examine and critique the xenophobic stereotypes targeted at Arabs, distorting them into grotesque caricatures.

Over the past four years, Prostitute has established a reputation for their punishing, high-energy performances. The band’s live shows, described as “dangerous” and “volatile”, finds Moe delivering politically charged sermons atop a deafening bacchanal of sound. In 2023, Prostitute performed at the re-opening of the iconic UFO Bar in Detroit, followed by a series of benefit concerts for Palestine, Lebanon, and Sudan. These performances solidified their growing presence, leading to invites to play at No Rest Fest and New Colossus Festival.

As Prostitute continues work on their sophomore album, they are delving deeper into electronic and Arabic dance influences, drawing inspiration from the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. Their sound continues to evolve, with new tracks incorporating dabke rhythms, Arabesque melodicism, and industrial synth textures, all while retaining the same anarchic energy that defines their unique sound.

claire rousay is a Canadian-American musician, composer, and artist currently living in Los Angeles. rousay’s work operates in genre-spanning fashion; she is primarily known for composing highly emotive whisper-quiet musical works that heavily forefront music concrete and sound design elements like haptic sound and field recordings. These avant garde elements are often paired with strings, piano, and electronic melodies and textures. Her albums in this vein – on celebrated labels like Thrill Jockey and Shelter Press – gained her notoriety in the international ambient and experimental community.

rousay remains stylistically mercurial and incorporates generic elements from rock, electronic, hyperpop, noise, folk, free jazz, and more into her compositions. In some ways rousay is always busy making music about music, and too, music about everyday life, about the ordinary. A delicate and deeply timbrel quality is helixed into the musical components of rousay’s work. Quotidian sounds and spoken word elements are woven into melodies that have been temporally manipulated; time is compressed and expanded, chords are frozen in place, instances take eternities, and occurrences flash by with immediacy. Her work investigates styles, forms, times, and experiences. In this way, rousay is a formalist – interested in the material of music and sound, in technique – and yet her work is profoundly emotive and incredibly impressionistic.

rousay has performed at esteemed festivals and venues internationally; notably Unsound (Krakow), Big Ears (Knoxville), Rewire (The Hague), and Le Guess Who (Utrech). She’s installed or exhibited her work at ICA (London) and Art Gallery of NSW (Sydney). She’s done artist residencies at Ina GRM (Paris), The Momentary (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), and WORM Sound Studios (Rotterdam). She’s also given artist talks and workshops at renowned institutions worldwide regarding her practice as an artist, composer, and listener.

Black Moth Super Rainbow –  now two decades into their candied up career – emerges from the technicolor pollen puckered Pennsylvania landscape with a new and reformulated fructose-blasted seventh album. Soft New Magic Dream is announced today for a June 6th release via Rad Cult, and it comes that familiar rush of flavors that pump directly from the BMSR soda fountain; that signature blend of strange neon nostalgia, sweetly melancholic synth pop wizardry, hip hop head bobbing, and citric acid tinged freak out flourish.

Today they share the new single “Open the Fucking Fantasy,” alongside an announcement of a North American tour in summer 2025. Check out the new searing new single via YouTube (as well as the video for the previously released “All 2 of Us”). Pre-order the album here.

It’s been seven years since the more sinister Panic Blooms, and in that time plenty has happened in the house of Rad Cult, but with Soft New Magic Dream, we are invited to bask in the analog sweet and sour embrace of that classic and here notably chilled out and snoozled up BMSR sensibility.

Soft New Magic Dream has a nuanced flavor profile; these are freaky love songs, they funk up crunchy and rattle the speakers here and there, they melt down gelatinous at the right temperatures, and even go full ballad in a few extra-soft spots. The album balances sugar kinked romance with their distinctive and here notably downtempo funky production. Never fully eschewing BMSR’s signature strange liquid centers, these songs still flirt with the uncanny while honing in on the deeply melodic and approachably groovy tendencies they’ve have been exploring in their twenty years of lid flipping. Soaring synth leads ribbon through taffy colored chord changes and highly tactile and fractured drum programming and breaks.

Tobacco’s classic vocoder vocals, puckish as ever, burble fawning tenderness and body horror quasi erotic double dares in the fizzy saturated mist. These gummy serenades will leave you blissed out with a cavity-crumbled ear to ear grin.

As the BMSR project has evolved, from the scuzzier and folk-tinged backwoods leaf worship of the first albums into the more anthemic roller disco fog machine scenes of their mid-career, and then darker turns in the last few recent albums, Soft New Magic Dream feels like another subtle and surprisingly tender twist on that now-classic sound you’ve come to expect from BMSR. A turn towards something more serene, more direct, playfully wooing us without totally ditching that enigmatic crooked smile.

Lose your toothbrush in the clouds and get ready to guzzle down this potent marshmallow cloudscape concoction optimized for falling into face first.

Door-to-door heartbreak salesmen Nature TV peddle an elixir of escapism and adventure. Sorrow and despondency. Contemplative nostalgia and tender melancholy. Hailing from Brighton it’s a canvasing technique they employ around the British Isles. Geographically out of phase with the main character energy of London, Guy Bangham (guitar, vocals), Josh Eriskin (bass), Jimmy Hunt (lead guitar, backing vocals) and Zal Jones (drums) write sadboi yacht rock layered with all the buried trauma of a Wes Anderson plot.

It’s a sales pitch that’s brought them fans at press and radio alike, with DORK, DIY, The Line of Best Fit, Gigwise, The Wild Honey Pie, Hype Machine, Radio One, Radio X, BBC Introducing and Amazing Radio all lining up to call themselves fans. Equally infatuated are the editorial gatekeepers at Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Deezer, earning the band playlist placements such as New Music Friday, Hot New Bands, Garden Indie, Stress Buster, The Lovely Little Playlist, Lo-Fi Indie, Alt Rocked, The Most Beautiful Songs in The World, David Dean Burkhart, Nice Guys, The Daily Dose and BIRP!

Live, the four-piece have captivated audiences at festivals such as ILMC, The Great Escape and Wild Paths alongside support slots with PINS, Wyldest, CVC, VANT, and Swimming Tapes. Following a UK tour with Trudy & The Romance the band took to the road for their own headline dates in October 2022 where they sold out Sneaky Pete’s (Edinburgh), Green Door Store (Brighton), The Washington (Sheffield), and The Victoria (Dalston).

UNIVERSITY are three—well, four, if you count the one pulling the strings—inquisitive souls bound by fate (and maybe “time travel,” if you ask them quietly). This Crewe-based band dives into life’s existential quirks, exploring adolescence, self-identity, and a touch of mania. Their music is “like getting punched by a gorilla but cuddled after,” blending influences like Nouns, Hella, and Cypress Hill into a patchwork of vintage-futuristic textures.

Hailing from a northern English railway town, UNIVERSITY channel the monotony and challenges of small-town life into an “explosion of energy” (NME). Inspired by everything from midwest emo to UK grime, they craft a cathartic mix of emo, punk, and hardcore—a restless anthem for a generation navigating chaos.