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July 4, 2025

Katherion: “Dance”

Song of the Day

By: Taylor Wallace

Happy Hot Dog and Fireworks Day! Whether you’re staying home and having fun or enjoying one of the city’s myriad of events, you might need something to wavy-baby dance to. Austin’s Katherion has been hitting stages between Austin and Houston for the last three years leading up to her debut album EROS, out later this year. The Walker-Lukens produced album explores the various stages of romantic relationships, all wrapped-up in the soft textures of Katherion’s dreamy alt-indie sound and light, lofty vocals.

“Dance” employs a bouncy bossa nova beat to personify the emotional dance relationships can put us through, especially if your head and your heart are at odds. Despite the song’s inner-turmoil, Katherion surrounds it wither her bubbly, sun-drenched guitar that makes you feel like your in a warmly-lit room with dozens of colorful silks hanging from the ceiling. And that bossa nova beat gives you the right groove to lean on your toes and enjoy your own little dance space.

July 3, 2025

Okkervil River & The Antlers: “Lost Coastlines” [Live In Studio 1A]

Song of the Day

By: Taylor Wallace

A collaboration between Okkervil River and the Antlers, two of the poetic indie bands of our time, both in sound and word, is one that seems so perfect you can almost see photos of Will Sheff, Peter Silberman, and Michael Lerner cutely cropped together like a fan zine-style shipping board.

Last year this music nerd head canon manifested, and the groups came together for a collaborative tour where Lerner and Silberman did an Antlers set, Sheff and bassist Julian Cubillos did a set as Okkervil River, and the night ended with a set by the full quartet, performing songs from both repertoires.

Each show was recorded, and last month they released the appropriately titled Band Together, a showcase of their favorite takes from the tour’s full sets. To mark the occasion, they recaptured that collaborative magic once again, this time in the cozy annals of KUTX’s Studio 1A. “Lost Coastlines” is an Okkervil River track, taking us back to 2008’s The Stand-Ins.

Band Together is out now. You can see the full Studio 1A session at KUTX.org.

July 1, 2025

Keihl Phillips: “Iced Green Tea”

Song of the Day

By: Taylor Wallace

Being a sound designer doesn’t often mean you’re looking to use your own music, or even that you’re a musician at all. Sound designers are the folks who choose the right song to elevate scenes and make you feel a certain type of way in a TV show or the person who finds the right bit of background music to make your ad pop. In any case, you’re like a music scientist and detective in one — sourcing the right materials and experimenting until you find the solution to the mood and tone equation.

Native Austinite Keihl Phillips is seeking to buck a part of this trend with his own self-titled music project. Though the project began as a way to beef up his profile on the sound design side, Phillips caught the bug, and earlier this spring, he released A Mixed Bouquet, a synthesis and love letter of all of Austin’s music genres in one thoughtfully produced package. “Iced Green Tea” takes us down the more electronic and house veins of the city, providing a chill, pulsing groove perfect for a nighttime drive around the city and your Fourth of July playlist.

June 30, 2025

GHOSTWOMAN: “Alive”

Song of the Day

By: Taylor Wallace

Belgian/Canadian duo GHOSTWOMAN are all about finding freedom in a reckless space. On the upcoming album Welcome to the Civilized World, they take this notion head-on and put it center stage.

The album was recorded on an old tape recorder using old instruments. The recording space was a home they didn’t bother to treat for sound, and the lyrics came long after the songs, which the duo let flow through them without any pesky overthinking. What they’ve created is something organic that oscillates around different sounds all tied together by the aforementioned conditions and nostalgic inspiration.

The album’s debut single “Alive” takes on a vintage country rock sound, not quite like the Byrds, and not quite like Whiskeytown, but something that takes you to both of those places simultaneously.  

Welcome to the Civilized World is out September 5th on Full Time Hobby and Dine Alone Records.

June 25, 2025

Local Al: “Hold Me – Pidän (mä pidän)”

Song of the Day

By: Taylor Wallace

So, you’re a runner looking for a playlist. Maybe you do a quick Spotify or Tidal search, hit the one that matches your personal taste the most, or just hit play on the first one that pops up. Maybe you go an extra step to ask a friend or consult a subreddit. Maybe. Eventually, you cobble together a perfectly timed playlist. But what if, what if you just fully composed your own?

That notion struck Finnish DJ, musician, and music curator Aleksi Pahkala, better known as Local Al. Despite being a lifelong athlete, he was forced into a position where running became a necessary method of exercise and movement – not an option he would have ever chosen for himself. But Pahkala seized the opportunity and took his previous relationships with music and musicianship to another space. Putting breakbeat structures and what he deems a subtempo (a state, not a tempo, something that moves with you) for an electronic experience fit for your spiritual and physical cardiovascular health. 

His debut album Subtempo Studieds: Run Now, Understand Later is made to accompany you on your run, not necessarily dictate it. Think of it as an album for running, not exercising. And each element has been put to the test foot-to-ground by Pahkala, tying together music and biology.

Subtempo Studieds: Run Now, Understand Later is out now.

June 24, 2025

Tamir Kalifa: “Jackie’s Rock”

Song of the Day

By: Taylor Wallace

Even if the name Tamir Kalifa is new to you, his projects certainly are not. A member of both the orchestral-indie collective Mother Falcon and its alter ego rowdy party band Sip Sip, Kalifa’s part of two of Austin’s biggest “moment bands” of the 2010’s.

A photojournalist who splits his time between Austin and Berlin, Kalifa marries his storytelling talents on Witness, a nine-song album with each track visually represented by a set of photographs. On “Jackie’s Rock,” Kalifa gingerly pays tribute to nine-year-old Jackie Cazares, one of the victims of the Robb Elementary shooting in Uvalde in May of 2022 whose family Kalifa has grown to know in particular. The song is a beautiful demonstration of combining delicate and powerful, and here’s where Kalifa pulls out some of the Mother Falcon magic, using strings to be sun-soaked and lovely without being outwardly cheerful or disingenuous.

Witness comes out this fall.

June 23, 2025

Ramesh w/ Invoke: “Broadway” [RECORDED LIVE IN STUDIO 1A]

Song of the Day

By: Taylor Wallace

It’s the last week of Pride Month, and we’ve got one more great profile for you, and this one gets a little teaser.

Ramesh Srivastava spent the 00’s enchanting audiences with the catchy indie-pop group Voxtrot, a group Ramesh started after high school and moving to Europe. He brought Voxtrot back home to Texas, making them one of Austin’s most prominent bands of the 2000’s.

Part of what prompted Ramesh’s move to Glasgow was the need to seek community compared to the loneliness of being a queer half-Indian boy in Texas. After Voxtrot broke-up win 2010, some of those same demons came full circle, creating an identity crisis surrounding his queerness, religion, and culture. His innerwork through that process is encased in his upcoming solo album Search for Freedom & God, a work dealing with everything from existentialism, spirituality, love and heartbreak, and the pursuit of purpose.

Ramesh stopped by Studio 1A recently to preview some songs from the upcoming album, fully acutalized with the help of award-winning Austin string quartet Invoke. You can see the full Studio 1A at KUTX.org.

June 6, 2025

West of Rome: “Movement In Your Picture”

Song of the Day

By: Taylor Wallace

South Texas rockers West of Rome are here to dislodge the kernel from your craw and even offer you a spittoon so you can get that novel, satisfying “ting.” The band is made-up of childhood friends who, in the absolute tumult leading up to and including the pandemic, decided to finally come together creatively to carve out their own little slice of happiness and maybe try to make a little bit of sense of the mishegoss.

And while their alt-country-for-the-dance-hall sound does make for a perfect night in your mud kickers, the songwriting digs as deep as their energy whirrs. In “Movement In Your Picture,” the lead single off the group’s debut album Keep It Fly In the Negative Zone, singer Kevin Higgenbotham pontificates on life’s unanswered questions and windows of opportunity that were never opened past the curtains.

West of Rome brings a night freewheeling fun to the Continental Club tomorrow night for a long-awaited album release show with Warren Hood.

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