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Political punk band Dead Pioneers, never misses. This song, in particular, goes incredibly hard. Gregg’s vocal delivery is almost painfully direct, no beating around the bush here. The music chugs harshly, aiding the poetry to its point. “He hates me, I like that.” Loud and clear.

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Denver Noise Fest re-launched on October 24-25, 2025, at DIY space The Denver Music Venue (aka the DMV) after around a decade of being dormant. The DMV has become the de facto place to see noise in Denver in the last year or so, as well as some of the improvisational and experimental music performances that have become a more active facet in the music s…

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Denver Noise Fest re-launched on October 24-25, 2025, at DIY space The Denver Music Venue (aka the DMV) after around a decade of being dormant. The DMV has become the de facto place to see noise in Denver in the last year or so, as well as some of the improvisational and experimental music performances that have become a more active facet in the music scene of the Mile High after a bit of a dip in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

The festival represented a kind of capstone to a year that saw an unmistakable and marked increase in activity in the city’s more left-field noisemaking. The summer saw the fifth edition of the ambient/experimental electronic music outdoor mini-festival, Listening Lawn, put together by the people of the digital label Multidim. Dean Inman curated the Tiny Blanket series on select Sundays in City Park in the spring and summer. Caracol Productions organized many concerts in an attempt to revitalize the classic Aztlan Theater, with shows from Martin Rev of Suicide, Laraaji, and multiple others. Creative Music Works, led in part by avant-garde music legend Janet Feder and Matthew Garrington, saw an uptick of activity this year, booking concerts at the newly refurbished Federal Theatre and art theater mainstay The Bug. Isaac Rivera organized unique musical experiences as at the Let It Be Stage. The good folks of Ghost Canyon Fest not only brought more challenging music to their own four-day festival but have helped to promote experimental music generally throughout the year. Thunder Shout Presents also promoted more adventurous music at various venues including Glob.

This didn’t all happen suddenly, but it felt like a major convergence of forces and efforts that yielded a richer music scene in 2025. But Denver has had a long history of “weird” and forward-thinking music that is more extensive than this article can cover.

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Ipecac at HQ

Impressive from the beginning, Ipecac is a genuinely exciting band with roots in 70s and 80s hard rock, metal and punk. Guitarist Ariadnee Ziady’s sheer command of guitar was reminiscent of peak Lita Ford in fusing hard rock chops and flair with keen pop instincts. The entire band had a collective charisma that was undeniable, with lead singer Isabella Osborne providing a welcome bit of rock theater.

Pink Lady Monster on the Sidewalk South of Pleasures

In guerilla style, Pink Lady Monster set up a P.A., borrowed electricity from a nearby source and treated all comers to an alternative to the UMS both in format and style. The band deconstructed quirkiness and turned it into a sometimes gentle and playful, sometimes confrontational but always intriguing No Wave funk that drew a crowd. The band succeeded, with an expert mixing of high concept art weirdness with dance music accessibility.

RAREBYRD$ at Hi-Dive

Swagger in abundance buoyed by dense low end beats, organic Afro-Cuban percussion and entrancing ambient soundscapes, RAREBYRD$ brought some of that East Side Denver metro energy and its gritty spirit to the Hi-Dive. Looking like the hip-hop equivalent of glam rock legends, the trio somehow embodied an alluring and confrontational energy that pushed and pulled in a set-long dance with the audience. Rarely does a hip-hop group go so hard with such elegance of execution.

Machete Mouth at Get Loud Stage

It would be tempting to compare Machete Mouth to Goldfrapp due to the richness of pop composition and soundscaping. But there is such a soulful richness and sheer emotional power and versatility to the vocal performances that it leaves a deep impression. Machete Mouth is able to sing about deeply personal subjects and about psychic pain that transforms those harrowing moments into expressions of a passion for life imparted to everyone who witnesses the performance.

Kitty Crimes at The Skylark Lounge

Occupying the liminal creative space between David Bowie, Peaches, early Big Freedia and Charli XCX, Kitty Crimes returned from a more than five-year hiatus of playing live like it never happened. With new songs like “HI EVIL GIRL 222,” Maria prowled the stage and the audience with a confident and charismatic ease. The set even included a cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” that Kitty Crimes made its own with copious audience participation. A warm and electrifying performance.

The Milk Blossoms at The Skylark Lounge

Especially emotionally engaging, the songs for this show seemed to overflow with a raw vulnerability that entranced and soothed the psyche. With music awash in dreamlike melancholia, The Milk Blossoms brought a humanity and warmth in the performance of it that rendered deep heartache and vivid poetic imagery into the kind of soft catharsis that’s good for the soul. At the end of the set, original member Michelle Rocquet joined on vocals for stirring and powerful renditions of “Walk Back” and the particularly fervent “When We Kiss.”

While Seventh Circle has become a sober, all-ages venue since then, many things about the venue haven’t changed. I make my way through what used to be the living room of the little house-turned-venue until I reach the graffitied ticket booth, sturdy despite years of wear. “Long live DIY,” I tell myself.

In the backyard, I weave by the Seventh Circle street sign into the garage, a small space with a clown car capacity. There are a lot of people here tonight, and, despite attending shows like this countless times before, I forgot what it was like to go alone. I soothe my nerves by playing I Spy, seeing which band names I recognize in the collage of stickers lining the stagefront.

Team Nonexistent was up first. By now, I was fairly well-versed in their music. Their latest album, Teeth, scratched a musical itch I had had for a while now. I craved the angsty vocals, gripping builds, and catchy melodies of music from the 00s, but I’d grown tired of revisiting the problematic lyrics. It’s not the same screaming along to a song when in the back of your mind you know it contributed to your bad taste in men.

Back in 2007, I was a classic MySpace kid, living off caffeine, hair straighteners, and guys in girl pants. After a few visits to the Marquis and grungy basements, I quickly found myself inspired by Denver’s local music scene — the part of the music scene, that is, that was visibly dominated by dudes.

I began booking shows for guys in my high school, starting with the neighbors I smoked pot with every weekend. They called me “Beth the Secretary,” a nickname I would grow to loathe, as it became symbolic of how I’d be viewed in the scene for the next 13 years, regardless of the work I put into my career.

Whether I was booking sold-out shows in downtown Denver bars or creating a PR plan for a band, by my mid-20s it was clear that in these circles I would always be viewed as a groupie first and a business asset second. More than once I had received propositions for sex in the same conversations as business deals. Even worse, I spent countless hours comparing notes with other women who also found themselves going to the shows of men who had done the same to them, if not worse.

Given the lyrics of some of the songs in that genre, the misogyny wasn’t surprising. In fact, Denver had some of the classics in this department—3OH!3’s beloved hit “Helen Keller” was about an underage girl trying to get laid at a show. Meanwhile I, an underage girl with only a vague sense of consent, would try to dance the cringe away.

Other themes in these circles somehow objectified and vilified women while victimizing the songwriter, a true “art” in emo culture. The irony was that, locally, the same boys singing these songs were the ones I had witnessed cheating on their supportive girlfriends, or touching me and my friends without consent and feeling justified, even proud if I just rolled with it — a safety and comfort measure it would take me years to identify. And while many would argue that their lyrics were simply metaphors or creative expressions of pain, I can say firsthand that there was an alarming lack of accountability in the culture.

Kicking off the show at Seventh Circle, Team Nonexistent singer Sophia lets out their first wail into a pink microphone, skirt bouncing and purple flower face paint glistening (somehow all while carrying a perfect melody).

Watching Sophia crawl around the floor in kneepads and a skirt, yelling “Hey, if you touch me, I’ll fucking kill you,” —a simple lyric with a clear warning regarding non-consensual touch—I’m choked up with a strange mixture of rage and joy. The words pulse through me as I imagine all the times I’d sung along to lyrics demeaning to women when all that time, this was what I had really wanted to be screaming. I take a deep sigh of relief. I feel a revolution brewing.

Team Nonexistent was born in 2017 in the Pensacola, Florida bedroom of lead singer Sophia LaBelle-Plott. It began as a solo project, but a few years later when he moved to Colorado and played a show at Mutiny Information Café, it began to blossom into much more.

The night of the show, Denver bassist Magic, a longtime Mutiny employee, was running sound.

“As soon as [Sophia] started singing, my jaw dropped. I started looking them up on Instagram like, ‘Who the fuck was that?!’” he remembers.

Soon enough, Magic was showing Sophia his work, and the musical chemistry was clear.

“It was like they were showing me a map to a world I didn’t know existed,” says Sophia. “It was really special.”

The next step was securing a drummer. A mutual friend recommended Billie Christ, a longtime local musician and Hi-Dive employee. Besides being blown away by Christ’s drumming, Sophia and Magic were pleased to find all three of them shared the quirk of playing barefoot at practice.

Lead guitarist Jesse Newman was harder to wrangle. The band had to ask Jesse to join the band twice after being blown away by their solo act Goose. But Jesse’s initial hesitance wasn’t due to lack of desire. “All I’ve ever actually wanted was to play in a band with people, but it just never happened because I was too shy. Getting that second request was critical,” they recall.

Together, the band uncovered a place to truly unmask—both for themselves, and their audience. “In the band, I get to be normal,” says Sophia. “I’ve done like eight years of customer service, which is a lot of masking and people-pleasing. This is for me.”

Since their formation, Team Nonexistent has seen various triumphs, including the October 2024 release of their album Teeth.

Recorded at Band Cave Studios by Collin Ingram, the engineer behind albums by local favorites like Short Shorts, and mastered by Nick Townsend, who has worked on albums by Cheap Trick, Dr. Dre, and Garbage, to name a few, Teeth has the combination of tight musicianship and well-produced tracks that make the album a delectable listen.

While the mix alone was enough to perk up my ears, those lyrics are what will keep me a loyal fan. I now have the pleasure of replacing phrases from my old Seventh Circle days, like “You’re nothing more than a typical whore” with “Feminine identity, it’s always endangered me. Why don’t I let it endanger someone else?” and each time I feel my inner teen moshing with joy.

According to Jesse, Team Nonexistent doesn’t consider themselves a blatantly political band, but the inherently politicized elements aren’t lost on them.

“We live in a political world. All these parts of our identity, whether that’s gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or neurodivergence are all political things, impacted by political views,” they tell me.

Magic notes that while they’re impacted by politics, they also recognize the privilege they have in playing with a band like Team Nonexistent. “Being a trans band and being so public and vocal about our identities is not even really that scary to me, personally. It’s a gift to be able to exist in a way that other queer folks, especially in less safe states, can be represented,” he says.

The band relies on trustworthy colleagues to let them know which venues, performers, and organizers are safe to work with, and which ones allow harassment and discrimination, and they maneuver their connections accordingly—for their safety, and the safety of their fans.

Team Nonexistent agree that the Denver music scene has become safer and more inclusive over the years, but note that there’s always room for improvement.

“I do wish there was more accountability,” says Sophia, “But I am happy to hear that there’s less of those things happening lately—more people that share our beliefs and align with a punk scene.”

When it comes to defining their genre, there’s one pet peeve the band shares when it comes to defining their music.

“For a myriad of reasons, I hate when someone call us Riot Grrrl,” says Sophia. “I’m not a girl, we’re all trans, and my music doesn’t even sound like Riot Grrrl,” he says.

So what does Team Nonexistent want to be known as?

“I want to be making music that can be heard by anyone who would need it. To be a source of comfort, or be someone’s queer punk rock band,” Sophia says. “When I was a kid, people didn’t look like me on stage. To see people that look like me, act like me and are like me is really important. I hope that I am like that for someone.”

Curated by DNA Picasso

Nelo & Siah Rain’n
“Next Stop Denver” (feat. Wayne Watts)

• Nelo and Wayne Watts link up to bring Denver’s vibrant culture to life in their latest collaboration, “Next Stop Denver,” produced by Siah Rain’n. Throughout the song, the two hip-hop artists pay homage to the city they call home, dropping references to local artists,…

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Sundays will be “intentional,” she said. In the morning, the space could be used for yoga or meditation, with mats spread along the squeaky-clean c…

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Denver’s goth scene goes back to at least the 1980s. Bands like Your Funeral, which once opened for The Birthday Party at The Mercury Cafe, Boulder gloom punkers Electric Third Rail, and deathrock band Soul Merchants, which included legendary recording engineer Bob Ferbrache, were luminaries of that early scene. But throughout the 90s, when goth nights were a regular thing at local clubs, other artists came to be known, like Seraphim Shock (who are still around but now based in Georgia), Blackcell (also still a thing), Faces Under the Mirror (ditto), Pure Drama, and The Siren Project (who occasionally still play). That phase of the local goth scene had major events including the Denver Dark Arts Festival at the now defunct downtown dance club/venue Rock Island in the early 2000s. At that time, electric body music (EBM) and future pop was in its heyday, but artists such as Emergence played alongside their more rock-oriented peers like Fiction 8, Caustic Soul, and Born in Winter in a fairly diverse scene, with bands you could spend paragraphs naming. But that scene really lost steam around the second half of the 2000s, though plenty of the more enduring electronic artists persisted. It seemed like the goth scene stayed in a spiral of EBM and future pop for years, with legacy artists still garnering attention.

But the late 2000s and early 2010s saw bands emerge who found inspiration in death rock and old post-punk, as well as classic industrial music. However, these bands’ interests also crossed over into noise (recalling the older goth scene), dance music, indie rock and shoegaze. There wasn’t a name for what was emerging, and it was not music generally embraced the local goth scene. Portland’s Soft Kill were early adopters of that sound when the group got going in 2010, but in other corners of the American underground, similar impulses were bubbling up.

Denver’s Echo Beds played its first show in 2010 after forming with Keith Curts and Tom Nelsen, who both had origins in local post-hardcore, garage rock, and experimental music. Their new concern was much more focused on a kind of tribal industrial sound, with electrifyingly visceral percussion that would begin to include a live setup with two metal barrels, robust amplification, bass guitar, power electronics, and feral vocals. A band called Sew Buttons on Ice Cream came out of avant-garde heavy music and political punk, as David Samuelson and Shannon Webber formed the group that would soon call itself Church Fire around 2011, producing some of the most commanding, melodic, industrial dance music around. At that time, no one would have identified either as having been part of a movement, and locally there were few bands like them. But over the next few years, their unintended kinship with like-minded artists worldwide would become obvious.

Toward the middle of the 2010s, there was a surge of music called “darkwave,” a blanket term for music influenced by post-punk, industrial, dark synthpop, minimal synth and/or coldwave—a sound that wasn’t simply the next post-punk revival. In those early days the genre was very much linked with the national DIY underground circuit, so you could see shows with, say, Baltimore’s industrial dark pop duo Curse, along with Church Fire and Echo Beds, on the same bill at DIY space Rhinoceropolis in Denver without it being defined as a darkwave show. Those DIY/underground connections also meant most if not all of those early darkwave adjacent shows happened at DIY spaces in Denver.

What cemented the fact that something exciting and inspiring was happening occurred when I was invited to go on tour with Echo Beds in 2014 to the Midwest, which was the last place I would have expected to find music that would resonate directly with what founders Tom and Keith were doing. But the tour launch show with experimental doom juggernauts The Body at Mutiny Information Cafe set the tone for the best tour I have been on to date. The tour took us first to a largely abandoned edge of Kansas City at a three-story collective run by art students and industrial music weirdos called Negative Space, then to a show in Iowa City in a house basement that had to be moved to the basement of another house a few blocks away due to a noise complaint. Another show date happened in Chicago with a concert booked at what seemed like a still-functioning porn theater. Afterwards we spent a few days in Minneapolis and witnessed minimal synth and industrial music at a festival and a super secret house show in a residential neighborhood that hosted regular D&D sessions. On the way back to Denver there was a show at one of the coolest record stores in the country, Total Drag, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And the tour finished with a night at a space that was part of a building that once housed Saddle Creek Records in Omaha. At every turn, we met or reconnected with amazing and interesting people who were plugged into an underground music community and, if not directly involved in the nascent darkwave scene, were at least open to hosting and supporting it.

The momentum I felt from that tour in 2014 wasn’t an anomaly. Darkwave bands were popping up over the next decade and experiencing varying levels of popularity and success. Certainly, Boy Harsher has gained great popularity, and I once traveled with Denver industrial-shoegaze-post-punk greats Voight to Santa Fe to see them at a warehouse, before staying the night with two of the founders of Meow Wolf, before the art wonderland expanded to Denver.

Since the 2010s, it seems as though the current era of darkwave in Denver and elsewhere has been marked by more accessibility for people outside of the DIY underground, and that may partially be due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of so many of the usual spots the bands used to play, along with a greater awareness of the music overall. Rather than being held at special sites that often required some level of insider knowledge about the DIY music scenes, the events took place at more commercial establishments. With at least three active promoters in Denver-focused on goth and darkwave music and their creative kin and DJ nights catering to the subculture—e.g., Milk Bar, Dark Tuesdays at HQ, Possessor at 715 Club, events at The Crypt—the infrastructure to support the darkwave scene and help it flourish are now very much in place. Over the past five years, new bands in this space are also attracting more local fans to the live music scene. With one-man industrial dance cult Hex Cassette; electronic industrial artist Sell Farm; hyperpop project Gwisina; industrial punk performance artist Aeon Exit; death rockers such as WitchHands, Weathered Statues, and Radio Scarlet; and post-punk acts like Voight, Plague Garden, Cherished, and Church Fire going stronger than ever, there has never been a better time to get into the new darkwave.

by Rachael Wesley

I have a novel idea for your next sunny weekend, one to get you away from the nets in Washington Park and out wandering the city streets. A scavenger hunt for that quintessential Denver staple. How long until you spot a blue-and-red-donut-ed Phish license plate, a “Steal Your Face” Grateful Dead sticker, or a Billy Strings emblem on a t-shirt? I give it 10 minutes tops.

Hippies, the label people often apply to contemporary jam band fans, are everywhere in this city. Among other things, my passion for Phish and penchant for bright clothing and big jewelry make me a part of this scene, and I have long contemplated Denver’s abundance of “us.” Perhaps other denizens, crunchy or not, share my curiosity. Given the green light from Denverse to indulge my interest, I danced in to investigate.

I began by revisiting The Beats. A subculture of authors and poets who rose to notoriety in the 50s, The Beats shunned the cultural norms of the time, sought spiritual enlightenment, and loved their sex, drugs, and bebop jazz. I had a brief affair with them at 20 when a colleague questioned why I hadn’t read On the Road. “Get on it, Rachael. It’s required reading for all hippies.” And while I flew through Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece and enjoyed William Burroughs’ Junkie, I burned out halfway through Dharma Bums, and Naked Lunch confused the hell out of me.

However, The Beat influence along the Front Range is profound. Fans can take self-guided tours of popular old haunts, the faces and names of Beat writers and luminaries appear in murals and on buildings downtown, and Naropa University’s writing program, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets, was incepted by Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg.

The Mile High is proud of its connections to these cats. On the Road follows its protagonist traipsing across the US, and though Denver isn’t the main setting, it’s a prominent one. In real life, the most famous Beats roamed this city, patronizing jazz clubs in Five Points and the bars along then-seedy Larimer Street. In a near perfect bridging of two subcultures, Denver-raised Neal Cassady, buddy of Kerouac and basis for his iconic character Dean Moriarty, has deep ties to the early days of the Grateful Dead, driving a bus for the Merry Pranksters, Kool-Aid acid testing, and inspiring songs.

Today’s hippies relate to Beat counterculture in several ways. Many of us have a proclivity for altered states of consciousness, improvisational music, and traveling on the open road, and it’s not considered unusual to forgo conventions such as marriage, children, or traditional jobs. Inheriting the “peace and love” from the flower power generation that followed The Beats, we (try to) practice similar tenets of kindness, respect, and support. Denverite Tiffany Jo Wirth noted she “found work, housing, and friendships to last a lifetime” within weeks of moving here because of the Colorado Phish Chicks Facebook group. And when the Marshall Fire destroyed hundreds of homes in late 2021, several Phish fans banded together to collect and drop off needed goods and supplies. We’re as civically engaged as a religious congregation, only instead of mass we attend concerts and in lieu of a tithe we’re gouged with ticket costs.

“Church” admission makes jam band fandom an expensive hobby. We attend a ton of concerts. It’s something all fans, no matter which band’s ticket stubs stack higher in their collection, have in common. We worship live music.

Denver’s history with the art of live music runs deep. For the first part of the 20th century, Five Points benefited by being the only jazz scene between St. Louis and California. It was an improv hotbed for decades, hosting legends such as Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Miles Davis. No wonder those hard-partying, erudite Beats appreciated its clubs.

When the world lost jam godfather and Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, in October 2024, among the tributes pouring in was a quote from Lesh posted on Phishonphilm’s Instagram account: “When Coltrane was alive I would catch him every chance I had.” Jam wouldn’t, couldn’t exist without jazz. Both heavily rely on improvisation, that in-the-moment music-making unfamiliar ears may label as “noodling.”

And Denver, a city which aided in launching The Beats and birthing the cool, has nurtured the jam scene— and significantly so—since the late 60s, starting with the Grateful Dead’s first show here in 1967. The jam innovators played in the Front Range dozens of times, including 20 concerts at Red Rocks. Many consider their show on July 7, 1978, as one of their best. Widespread Panic holds the record for most sold-out performances at Red Rocks with 72. Phish’s first venture outside of New England occurred in 1988 in Telluride, and they’ve been guaranteed to play at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park every Labor Day weekend since 2011. Billy Strings’ meteoric rise can also be attributed to his Colorado presence. In 2018, The bluegrass phenom shared the stage at festivals throughout the state, and he and his bandmates played in the tiny Globe Hall. Their Ball Arena debut is scheduled for January 2025. Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom and Cervantes’ Other Side keep Five Points jazz alive by hosting frequent shows. Witnessing Garage a Trois, a rarely performing jazz quartet, or supergroup trio LaMP in an intimate setting proves just as magical as these larger concerts.

Bands such as Leftover Salmon and Yonder Mountain String Band began in the Front Range, and musicians from groups like Greensky Bluegrass and the Infamous Stringdusters have settled in the area. When I asked Boulder-dwelling banjoist Andy Thorn of Leftover Salmon why the Front Range was blessed with so many resident musicians, he told me it’s because they can count on the locals to turn up to a show any night of the week.

How could improvisational musicians not love playing here, knowing the crowds will show up at the box office and throw down on the dance floor while they get to perform at mythical venues like Red Rocks, staring out at 9,000 adoring fans through the “birth canal”—what My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James calls those flanking rocks of “Creation” and “Ship.” And, in a chicken-or-egg scenario, the number of musical offerings the city has to offer came up repeatedly when I spoke with other transplants regarding their decision to relocate here.

Music-meets-mountain tourism is also a big draw for my nature-obsessed culture. Former Ohioan Grace Poll initially traveled here for all things music but fell in love with river life on the Arkansas. I heard similar stories from other current inhabitants. Those who originally traveled here to see music and discovered that, in addition to its plethora of concerts, Colorado exploded with outdoor riches: extensive climbing, river floating, rafting and paddling, camping galore, over 300 disc golf courses to match the 300 plus days of sunshine, and an endless trove of hiking trails. This appeal applies to visiting musicians as well. At a recent Sam Grisman Project show, the audience learned it was guitarist Max Flansburg’s first time in the state. In the days following, the avid fisherman’s social media showed him in the South Platte staring with respect at the trout in his hands.

Then there’s the giant, preexisting community that calls this part of the country home. Just like the gigantic Koreatown in Los Angeles or the droves of Italians in the Northeast, we jam band fans settled in Denver to be among people who hold similar values. Christy Articola, founder and publisher of Phish-centric magazine Surrender to the Flow said that stepping into existing social circles made her move easier and New York-born-and-raised Brittany Thornton declared Denver “a phabulous place to grow (my) Phishy circle.” These claims ring true for me. I arrived in Colorado in 2015, desperate for connection after two years of the loneliest existence in Las Vegas. It was a breath of fresh green flower to be greeted in my new city by old friends and to fall into fast friendships with others due to our common interests.

Music. Nature. Community. Three legitimate reasons for a particular demographic to call a city home. If only it were that simple. There is a myriad of variables to factor in, including but not limited to school and work opportunities, family presence, and proximity to a major airport. Another jam band fan even told me it was the lack of mosquitos that inspired his move. Whatever the motive, there’s plenty to love here, and, being the nonconformists we are—in pursuit of Jerry Garcia’s philosophy of “opting for fun in this lifetime”—we relocated hundreds or thousands of miles to attain our American dream.

Eric Cartman was able to chase the hippies from South Park in the episode Die, Hippie, Die, but I think his efforts would fail today. If anything, it seems Colorado has endeavored to welcome more through the development of venues across the state. RiNo neighborhood’s Mission Ballroom has been a fan favorite from its 2019 opening, and Fiddler’s Green recently sunk $6 million into improvements. Colorado Springs’s new 8,000-seat Ford Amphitheater hosted their first shows in August 2024.

International acts are taking advantage of Colorado’s legion of music zealots too. Australian psychedelic band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard will hold their inaugural Field of Vision festival at the Meadows Center in Buena Vista in August 2025. The eclectic sextet is immensely popular in both the jam and metal scenes; the event should garner an equal mix of tie dye and black clothing. Now that would make for an amusing scavenger hunt.

Illustrations by Maggie Owen

Local Music Rec From DNA Picasso

Taken from our Winter Local’s Playlist. Check out our current winter issue for more!

The Denverse Sampler

We’ve launched a monthly music playlist filled with random local songs submitted by various artists. It’s a super fun way to play musical roulette and find hidden gems here in Denver. Click the record below to see January’s list.

Seventeen years ago, Bright Channel played their final show. It was at Red Rocks of all places. They were opening for The Fray because The Fray were big fans.

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