Nika Danilova hails from rural Wisconsin, where she began making music as a teenager under the intentionally provocative (for rural Wisconsin) name Zola Jesus.

If you’re looking for any more evidence of how the Internet has altered the music business, consider this: Dracula Horse, arguably Knoxville’s most prominent record label, has spent the last two years giving its music away digitally in a pay-what-you-like ...

Dylan Dawkins' tracks may be instrumental, but it’s rare to find electronic music this lyrical: Dawkins’ loose-limbed synthesizers, which stretch and crawl in luxurious waves, rarely sit in idle ambience, recalling at turns both the spacey fog of Animal Collective ...

In performance, Dumb Lunch’s stumbling beats take on a darker aspect, as the music collapses into a vortex of noise, volume, and 21st-century underground shock theater.

By early 2011 Fine Peduncle’s sound had solidified into a suggestive, hooky blend of hip-hop and left-field electronica, brought together by Cole Murphy’s Timberlake-on-bad-acid falsetto. What really brought the project to maturity, though, was the incorporation of his lifelong fascination ...

Yung Life plays fuzzy, dreamy synth pop, the kind that hints of M83 and New Order and Suicide, the kind that sounds like it was made in 1982 instead of 2012, the kind where shadowy vocals are muted behind swirls ...

Wolf at the Door has made giant leaps in songwriting with their newest material. Seeds of their new direction are displayed on the recently released Weary Bones EP, but upcoming full-length American Castles, judging by the “very rough” early mix, ...

Wallace Coleman’s unlikely blues education began in East Tennessee.

Hudson K may intimidate the weak. It’s not just that Christina Horn is an especially talented vocalist, pianist, and songwriter. Standing at her keyboards, she wields her ice-blonde persona like a stiletto, as if maybe she’d kill you if doing ...

The everybodyfields' fairy tale story took a harsh detour into real life in 2007.

Protest the Hero has the earmarks of a first-rate prog-metal outfit, to be sure. But beyond the obvious technical brilliance—and occasional profligacy—of the band’s music, there’s an impassioned quality to Protest’s performance

Most bands who win the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album do not turn around and hire a beatboxer as their newest member. And most bands who top the Billboard Bluegrass chart for seven straight weeks are not likely to ...

The Rip Tide sounds like a new chapter in Condon's artistic journey.

Puscifer, the third band fronted by Maynard James Keenan, after the multiplatinum post-grunge art rockers Tool and the singularly platinum A Perfect Circle, is complicated—a side side project, you might call it.

Grant Olsen isn’t insulted when he’s told that “The Ornament,” the sweeping, harmony-drenched title track from his band Gold Leaves’ new album, sounds a lot like Fleet Foxes.