10 Bands to See at Shaky Knees 2023

To put it bluntly: this year’s Shaky Knees lineup is not great. With the caveat that major American festival lineups seem to be becoming universally less interesting, this year’s spread doesn’t provide much by way of artistic intrigue or critical relevance. This annual Atlanta event’s rock-centric bills tend to offer a refuge from large outdoor festivals loaded with chart-topping pop stars, but for the most part, the 2023 edition, which marks the 10th anniversary of Shaky Knees, fails to come up with compelling alternatives to top 40 banality.

Booking a rock-forward lineup largely lacking in exciting bands is a head scratcher, considering the vast amount of talented, interesting bands that are touring right now and itching to collect a festival paycheck. This year’s lineups at Utah’s Kilby Block Party and Ohio’s Nelsonville Music Festival are considerably more enticing if you’re a fan of guitar music, and although North Carolina’s Hopscotch Festival hasn’t unveiled their September bill yet, their track record is nearly unparalleled when it comes to booking finger-on-the-pulse rock bands.

The Killers, Muse and The Lumineers will headline this year’s Shaky Knees on May 5-7, which is disappointing to say the least, given that the latter two bands have existed outside the zeitgeist for at least a decade—even though their gargantuan streaming numbers suggest that Muse’s vapid, conceptual space rock and the early 2010s wave of hokey, stomp-clap folk, which can practically claim The Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” as its theme song, still have mainstream appeal. It’s also worth pointing out that, according to my count, this year’s lineup is 90 percent white and just over 60 percent male—again, pretty staggering considering Atlanta’s large Black population as well as the widespread diversity among rock musicians who are pushing the genre forward into more interesting territory.

Despite a lot of white male mediocrity, both in marquee and undercard slots—who on god’s green earth is dying to see insipid dude groups like Trash Panda, Beach Weather or Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol in 2023?—thankfully, there are still a few gems if you look hard enough. Hip-hop legends Cypress Hill and Digable Planets will perform classic albums in full, veterans Yeah Yeah Yeahs are gearing up to support Cool It Down, their first album in nine years, and Brooklyn avant-garde rockers Water From Your Eyes are fresh from their new Matador Records contract and the release of two great singles.

Here are 10 acts to catch at this year’s Shaky Knees Festival:

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
April marked the 20th anniversary of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ sleazy, wiry debut album Fever To Tell, but the band hasn’t reemerged for a nostalgia victory lap—they returned with a new album last fall, and it showed they have a lot more to give. Their fifth and latest album Cool It Down is full of atmospheric, groovy electro-rock, and it proved they have both an awareness of what made them initially interesting and a desire to carve out new paths. If you’re just planning to scream along to “Maps,” one of the most iconic rock songs of the last few decades, you’ll likely leave satisfied, but you’d be naive to preemptively write off Karen O and company’s new material.

Digable Planets
NYC’s Digable Planets may only have two full-lengths to their name, but this trio have cemented their place in jazz rap history alongside greats like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. Their first album Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) celebrated its 30th anniversary back in February, and the MC trio of Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, Craig “Doodlebug” Irving and Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira will perform it in full for Shaky Knees festival goers. Listening to the album in 2023, it’s hard not to resonate with its joyful, funky ease and vivid, no-holds-barred paintings of New York City life in the ’90s. Laced with Afrofuturistic psychedelia, liberating politics, a sharp poetic eye and a potent sense of optimism, Reachin’ is essential listening, particularly in a city at the center of several civil rights struggles, from Cop City to anti-trans violence.

Water From Your Eyes
Water From Your Eyes make music that sort of makes no sense. They take a rather common combination of dance music and melancholia, deconstruct their parts and glue them back together in the most challengingly batshit way possible. However, this oddball, New York-based duo doesn’t strike me as some weird social experiment—there’s a deep yearning at the center of their strange melodies and bombastic synth dirges. At times, the songs that make up their 2021 full-length Structure sound like they’re being fired out of a circus cannon, as there’s an inherent silliness and frenzy to their craft, but they’re also disarmingly expressive, packed with vulnerable, freeing revelations that feel at once impressionistic and deeply personal. In January, the band announced their signing to Matador, and they’ve since released two wonderfully eccentric singles, “Barley” and “True Life,” both from their forthcoming album Everyone’s Crushed, out on May 26.

Shame
It’s been roughly five years since the stateside ascent of London quintet Shame, and they’ve shown few signs of letting up. The group released their third album Food for Worms via Dead Oceans earlier this year, and it finds them moving beyond the speak-singing, Fall-indebted post-post-punk craze from which they emerged. “Fingers of Steel,” the opening track from their new album, is possibly their best song to date, channeling the timeless, heartfelt melodies of Echo and the Bunnymen, with frontman Charlie Steen encouraging a friend to fully come into themselves, ultimately to no avail.

Tanukichan
Hannah van Loon’s brand of dream pop excels in its contrasts. Her filmy, delicate voice is the heart and soul of her songs, and when paired with girthy, gnarled guitars, it becomes this warm, irresistible calm within the storm. The Bay Area singer/songwriter released her second album GIZMO earlier this year, which marked a more ambitious, dynamic shift from her knockout 2018 debut Sundays. GIZMO is a continuation of her partnership with producer Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi, and it explores a wider range of textures, from nu-metal to dance music.

Peaches
Peaches has garnered a reputation for her loud, subversive, sex-positive feminism, which sits at the forefront of all of her work. With in-your-face song titles like “Lovertits” and “Vaginoplasty” and a vigorous electroclash sound, this Canadian multi-hyphenate artist is practically a professional head-turner. Over the past two decades, she’s worked with everyone from Christina Aguilera and P!nk to Kim Gordon and Iggy Pop, and most recently, she opened for LCD Soundsystem at Red Rocks and performed at the 50th anniversary screening of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. Her latest full-length Rub was released in 2015.

Snail Mail
Since the 2016 release of her debut EP Habit, Lindsey Jordan (aka Snail Mail) has mesmerized listeners with her take on incisive, hooky indie rock. Her first full-length Lush, featuring the gorgeously catchy singles “Pristine” and “Heat Wave,” arrived in 2018, followed by 2021’s Valentine, which displayed her gripping emotional intelligence and knack for earworm-y melodies. Valentine’s title track is a microcosm of what Snail Mail does best: unforgettable, ascendant choruses, self-aware earnestness and urgent scream-along lines like “Fuck being remembered / I think I was made for you.”

Cypress Hill
Black Sunday, the second album from West coast hip-hop titans Cypress Hill, celebrates its 30th anniversary this July, and fans will hear it from front to back at Atlanta’s Central Park. Boasting high-as-a-kite mega hits like “Insane in the Brain” and “Hits from the Bong,” this multi-platinum album is essential listening for weed smokers and rap fans alike. B-Real’s aggressively nasal voice may not be for everyone, but their funky rhythms, funny, shrewd wordplay and gutsy, resolutely anti-cop tales are hard not to appreciate.

OFF!
I think it’s pretty safe to say that punk veterans OFF! are the heaviest offering at this year’s Shaky Knees. Fronted by Black Flag and Circle Jerks co-founder Keith Morris, OFF! have been releasing urgent, snappy hardcore punk songs since the early 2010s. Last year, the band released their first album in eight years, Free LSD, which somewhat deviated from their no-nonsense, 60-second-or-less song format. Though the album is still full of potent hardcore punk exhaust fumes, there are some newfound metallic and stoner rock edges, and even a collection of free jazz-inspired interludes that spell out the album title’s initials.

Soccer Mommy
Things have been on the up and up ever since Sophie Allison began self-releasing home-recorded songs on Bandcamp under the name Soccer Mommy in 2015. Her debut studio album Clean arrived in 2018, and its tender rock songcraft struck an emotional chord with critics and fans alike. Her two latest releases, 2020’s color theory and 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, showed just how well she can adapt to different sonic palettes, from 2000s radio rock to textured, dissonant dream pop.

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Lizzie Manno is a former Paste editor, with bylines at Stereogum, Pitchfork, SPIN, Billboard, Flood Magazine, The Recording Academy and Cleveland Scene. Follow her on Twitter @LizzieManno