Stephen Thompson

Looking at a ukulele, the instrument shouldn't be able to do everything it does in Taimane Gardner's hands.

Petrol Girls' sonic intensity is barely contained by the boundaries of a single song; the band's rage at corrupt and exploitative systems is never contained, period

It's hard to pin down Porridge Radio's sound from song to song, or even from moment to moment.

Control Top's jagged post-punk has a cheerful quality that somehow meets in the middle between the rowdy chaos of punk and the sly precision of new wave.

Kate Davis started out as a jazz prodigy, studied the standards... and now has an album full of alternately spiky and ethereal indie-rock.

Korean singer and producer CIFIKA moves breezily across genres and languages, crafting intoxicating electro-pop earworms that couldn't go down more smoothly.

The band commands a big, vibrant sound that calls on its influences — just about any anthemic indie-rock band of this century — while still sounding distinct.

Williams' brightly rendered Americana songs dispense poppy, anthemic uplift and earthy grit in equal measure.

Black Country, New Road packs a career's worth of frenetic force and stylistic detours into a single nine-minute song.

Audrey Nuna's a fast-rising rapper whose flow captures a bleary-eyed swirl of aspiration, hedonism and deeply complicated romance.

Bethlehem Steel's Becca Ryskalczyk writes songs about finding motivation and strength amid a deluge of negative forces: depression, lousy relationships, feelings of apathy and futility.

A bicoastal kid now based in Virginia, Angelica Garcia pulls a rich array of sounds from a young life spent straddling boundaries and transcending barriers.

Within the Puerto Rican music world, Andrea Cruz is a throwback: She constructs softly flowing folk songs that reflect on humanity's connection to the natural world.

Australian singer-songwriter Alexander Biggs works with simple ingredients — an acoustic guitar, soft and distant piano lines, a hushed and heavily accented voice — but mines them for haunting drama.

The coronavirus pandemic shut down SXSW this year, so we're bringing SXSW to you. Meet 100 of the bands and artists we intended to see at the 2020 music festival.

Mutono's infectious, blissed-out R&B reflects on a desire for comfort and community amid arrangements at the midpoint of the cool vulnerability of Frank Ocean and the sleek balladeering of Khalid.

The cancellation of SXSW was a huge blow to musicians hoping for a big break. But you can still hear artists who were slated to play the festival with NPR's The Austin 100.

Help settle your jangled nerves, slow your heart rate and string up a little hammock for your soul with 6 hours of calming music.

The English pop star has a Packers logo tattooed on his upper arm. So NPR Music's biggest Packers fan sat him down at the Tiny Desk to ask: What's the deal with that?

Backed by a small string section, Stevenson performed three songs that sounded so gorgeous, an actual marriage proposal broke out shortly after her set ended.