NIVA Live List Finalists From 2024: Where Are They Now?
An update on where some of our favorite artists from the final lineup went and shined last year.
Photos by Valerie Magan & Emilio Herce
In 2024, the National Independent Venue Association unveiled its second iteration of the Live List, honoring and elevating must-see artists from around the globe who have had their careers nurtured and catalyzed through the efforts of independent concert venues across the United States. The NIVA Live List is done in partnership with the Black List, a crucial platform established in 2005 by Franklin Leonard to ensure that screenwriters, editors, directors, showrunners, and others would have access to resources that would further their potential and talents as much as possible. Initially, the Black List was founded with an annual survey of Hollywood’s most-liked but unproduced screenplays—though it has become a global-scale networking aid that helps get writers and filmmakers connected with industry figures.
The NIVA Live List acts similarly, with the mission of serving as a platform to help musicians build sustainable careers and connect with fans. NIVA membership consists of independent music and comedy venues, promoters, and festivals throughout the United States. “NIVA members book, promote and attend countless shows a year,” Jordan Anderson, Troubadour Talent Booker and Live List task force co-chair, says. “We see acts that really have the ability to go the distance and, with that, we believe the Live List is a way for us to continue to help develop and foster these artists as they move forward in their careers.” Jake Diamond, the Marketing Director for Union Stage Presents and Live List task force co-chair, echoes a similar hope. “We are very excited for the 2024 Live List,” he says. “The artists included on the list were handpicked by the folks who see hundreds of shows a year, so the authenticity is real. We hope both NIVA members and fans are excited to dive in and check out the acts they aren’t familiar with, and ultimately see them live. The Live List has endless possibilities when it comes to helping promote these acts!”
The 2024 NIVA Live List featured many up-and-coming artists, including Arcy Drive, Model/Actriz, Yard Act, the Heavy Heavy, and more. As we gear up for the 2025 Live List that will be dropping next week, let’s take a look at where 10 of our favorites are now and what kind of year they just had.
Annie DiRusso
In 2024, Annie DiRusso began building up to something major. She was everywhere, playing festivals like Kilby Block Party, Grrrl Camp, All Things Go and Capitol Hill Block Party, buddying up with the funniest man alive (Caleb Hearon) and releasing three great singles: “Legs,” “Wet” and “Wearing Pants Again.” She’s even had TikTok virality, headlined sold-out bills and is going to follow all of that up with a two-month, 32-show tour across America in 2025. The Nashville musician’s appearance on the 2024 NIVA Live List was a premonition, a first step towards DiRusso’s eventual breakout move. While she still puts on one of the best gigs around, her debut record, Super Pedestrian, is coming out in March. Paste’s own Casey Epstein-Gross recently sat down with DiRusso to chart her history as a performer. We named her the Best of What’s Next in an exclusive profile accompanying her album announcement. “There’s a reason she went viral on TikTok, after all,” Epstein-Gross wrote. “DiRusso’s not afraid to get hyper-vulnerable or hyper-specific on her tracks, and that’s precisely why so many twenty-somethings insist on her music being the soundtrack to their own lives.”
Dry Cleaning
When I look back at Paste’s trends since 2020, I don’t think any band has been more beloved by this magazine in that timeframe than Dry Cleaning. The South Londoners were the victims of COVID-19 halting their first-ever United States tour five years ago, when they were racking up some massive buzz around their Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks EPs. With every pent up in their homes, Dry Cleaning released two majorly impressive records, including their generationally-good debut, New Long Leg. There’s a reason they were named a Best of What’s Next pick in 2019: They’re one of the best bands alive, and winning a Grammy for Stumpwork barely scratches the surface of where they’re bound to go. Though we’re coming up on three years since their last record came out, Dry Cleaning spent 2024 retracing their steps, making up for that lost 2020 tour by stopping at 500-cap venues like the Roxy and the Empty Bottle and playing their EPs in full. Oh, and they also put on some first-rate shows at South by Southwest. Dry Cleaning are as potent as ever; I can’t imagine we’ll go much longer without album #3.
Lip Critic
There are a lot of great NYC bands making alternative noise right now, whether it’s Been Stellar, Fcukers or Model/Actriz. But I’d wager that Lip Critic is the best out of all of them. The band shot out of a canon in 2024, traipsing across the country and making a stop at South by Southwest, including our Paste Party, where middle-aged dads gawked in awe at the band’s two-drumkit/two-mixer setup. Like Dry Cleaning and Annie DiRusso, Lip Critic are Best of What’s Next alums that have already established themselves as a steadfast live act. They’re the type of guys who discover new music via Bandcamp Daily and BrooklynVegan and aren’t so bound to letting the scenes they orbit fully shape them. That’s why their debut album, Hex Dealer, arrived last summer with influences pulled from Hong Kong Community Radio, MC Ride and Lightning Bolt. They’re a band willing to start a mosh pit at 12:40 in the afternoon, and they’ve already teased that their next record is done and on the way. If 2024 was the year of Lip Critic, then 2025 might turn them into a dynasty.
LP Giobbi
LP Giobbi’s presence on the Live List in 2024 was a breath of fresh air, and I want to give NIVA its props for showering one of the best active DJs with acclaim. Leah Chisholm was a classically-trained jazz pianist in her youth, and her work as LP Giobbi doesn’t stray too far away from piano-based music. But, rather than run up and down classical scales, she takes the jazz keys and turns them into vehicles of awe-striking house music. She also used to put Grateful Dead stems into her music. In 2024, Chisholm released a new album, DOTR, and kept up her reputation as one of the best arrangers in the West Coast electronica scene. Preceding her inclusion on the Live List last year, LP Giobbi collaborated with Taylor Swift on a remix of “Cruel Summer.” What’s in store for 2025? She has some tour dates scheduled February-March and August, including Palm Tree Music Festival in Aspen, Snowfort in Tamarack and CRSSD Festival in San Diego.
Medium Build
Many folks online believe that, if anyone is primed to have a blow-up like Chappell Roan did in 2024, it’s Medium Build. Nick Carpenter, known by his stage name Medium Build, spent 2023 on tour, dropping music and collaborating with huge artists. The indie singer-songwriter from Anchorage, Alaska, kicked that year off by releasing his EP Health—the follow-up to his 2019 album Wild. He soon got busy touring with two shows at SXSW in Austin, TX, including at our Paste Party. Throughout the rest of the year—most of which was spent on the road—Carpenter released a handful of singles, culminating in a live EP of Health and tours opening for FINNEAS and Lewis Capaldi. However, his biggest release of 2023, “Friend For Life,” was a collaboration with X Ambassadors and landed him a spot on the Billboard charts. In 2024, Carpenter released a new album, Country, made a song (“Yoke”) with Julien Baker and put out an EP of tunes (Marietta). All the while, Medium Build was never too far away from a stage, and he’ll keep that up in 2025. So far, he’s scheduled to tour with Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Zane Penny and play Coachella in April.
Michigander
In 2023, Michigander made a stop at our Paste Party in Austin during South by Southwest week, and Jason Singer’s group sounded tight as hell. They were gearing up for the release of their It Will Never Be The Same EP and kicking off what was, at the time, the band’s biggest-ever cross-country tour. Singer is a grinder, and his 2024 was identically busy. But 2025 holds a different kind of promise, in that Michigander’s eponymous debut album will see a full release on February 7. Considering how I had “Superglue” on repeat for most of 2023, I’d be foolish to not have my eyes fully locked onto where Singer and his band go next. First, they’ll be on the road in the South until Michigander’s release day, a set of dates that’ll wrap up a tour that’s been chugging along since October. Then, in April, Michigander will be touring as a duo (Singer and Jake LeMond) with Dawes on their spring run. It’s going to be a big, big year for Singer and his beloved tunes.
Petey
Petey’s first taste of fame didn’t come from making a great rock record. No, he went viral regularly on TikTok in 2023, amassing over a million followers and 30 million likes on his videos. His account was one of the first that I followed on the app, but now his successes revolve around him being a dynamite rock ‘n’ roll act. Over a year ago, he made an album called USA and sold out shows across America. And those fans showed up and sang every word back at Petey night after night. Caught somewhere between the Band and blink-182, Petey’s stuff is splendid. USA was, as he put it, “an origin story of a typical American male in their 30s,” but the work across those dozen songs could have easily been affixed to anybody trudging through adulthood in the 2020s. In 2024, Petey dropped an EP, The Closest Thing to Being Over is Going On, and kept his touring cred alive and well. In 2025, he’s set to hit the road opening for Hippo Campus before “bringing the yips” to Europe in February. And, per his Instagram in December, he is making an album with producer (and Death Cab For Cutie alum) Chris Walla. It’s going to be a good year for the Petey faithful.
Slow Pulp
In 2023, we named Slow Pulp—surprise, surprise—the Best of What’s Next for the work they did on their sophomore album, Yard, where they deployed peculiar, harmonious sounds to unpack conflicting emotion. And their introspection arrived catchier than ever before. The album tracks the band’s ever-evolving relationships with isolation and collaboration, the fluctuating roles one plays as an adult whose independence grows more complicated year after year—offering the ideal soundtrack for any mid-20-something who is caught re-assessing their social role in those unwieldy years that immediately follow college. Yard sees the band toy with its sound playfully and freshly. Emily Massey pushes her vocals beyond the deceptively low-effort utterances that have become her trademark. Take “Cramps,” for example—a punk-leaning track with immersive guitars reminiscent of mall emo hits breaking only when Massey sustains: “But I want everything.” “Mud” is its closest neighbor, at times pummeling and at other instances crunchy, falling somewhere between pop punk and fuzz rock. Yard was a genuine level up for Slow Pulp that revealed the band’s versatility. In 2024, Slow Pulp played Kilby Block Party, Best Kept Secret and opened for that mystical Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie tour. They’re off the road now, likely making their next record, but they were easily a defining act in 2024 and worthy of inclusion on the NIVA Live List (I saw them twice and can confirm they’re one of the best working live acts).
The Last Dinner Party
After releasing “Nothing Matters” in 2023 and earning a fan in me, the Last Dinner Party exploded in 2024—dropping one of the best debut albums of the year and becoming one of the UK’s most in-demand live acts. To quote Elizabeth Braaten in her review of Prelude to Ecstasy, the album was “an incredible introduction that creates an inescapable feeling that we are bearing witness to the birth of a generational talent.” Thanks to their collaboration with James Ford, the Last Dinner Party put on a pop masterclass a year ago—which means they could have an even bigger 2025. They’re out of sight until May, but the band will return to open a London show for Olivia Rodrigo and play in France (Lollapalooza Paris), the Netherlands (Pinkpop Festival) and Brazil (C6 Fest). It’ll be a very prismatic European summer for the Last Dinner Party. I can’t wait for them to come back to the States.
Raye
It felt like Raye was everywhere in 2024, as the momentum from her 2023 LP My 21st Century Blues vaulted her into the mainstream. She has a Global 200-charting project, won British Artist of the Year at the Brit Awards, landed on the BBC’s 100 Women list and scored three nominations at the 67th Grammys. Last year, she was deep in the pocket of festival season, showing up at Lollapalooza, Camp Flog Gnaw, Reading and Leeds, Pukkelpop, Montreux Jazz Festival and elsewhere. Her single “Escapism” is still dynamite two years on, and I’d imagine that she’ll continue pulling large crowds anywhere she goes in 2025. Hell, she might even nab some awards brass in a few months. And, if she drops her sophomore album before the year is over, few jazz-pop artists will be in better focus come 2026.
Stay tuned for the unveiling of the 2025 Live List from NIVA this week.