15 acts to see at this year’s SXSW festival

The 40th year of South by Southwest begins today, and nearly a thousand musical acts will descend upon Austin, Texas, across the next seven days. 32 of them will make a stop at High Noon to play the Best Paste Party Ever, which you can (and should) RSVP for here, but so many others will be filling up venues all across town. And, hey, a few of them will be taking a trip to Spicewood to play Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion. The Paste crew is heading south to catch up on the festival action this weekend, and here are 15 acts we can’t wait to see when we get there.

Adult Leisure

“Happy music for sad people.” That’s the self-applied tagline for Bristol’s Adult Leisure, and it’s about as accurate a four-word mission statement as any band has ever written. Neil Scott, David Woolford, Luke Denham, and Nathan Searle formed the four-piece during lockdown in 2020, and their debut album The Things You Don’t Know Yet finally dropped last October. The record is essentially the platonic ideal of what it feels like to get dragged out for a night on the town when you’d rather stay home and sulk, and by the end of it you’re grateful your friend didn’t let you wallow. The Smiths, the Cure, and a healthy reverence for ‘80s sophisti-pop are in the water here, but so are Fontaines D.C. and IDLES; it’s that particular British tension between wanting to dance and wanting to throw something. “Dancing Don’t Feel Right” and “Hold Me Close (Before You Go)” are the kind of songs that make you want to sprint to whatever stage they’re playing. The band has been steadily building toward this and now feels like exactly the right moment to catch them before they’re playing rooms that require a much earlier ticket purchase. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Ancient Greece

Toronto is a beautiful city. I mean, it must be. Look at all the great artists it’s producing: cootie catcher, Friends&, Ducks Ltd., Femtanyl, etc. But I’ve been super into this band called Ancient Greece as of late. They don’t have many songs to chew on, maybe seven or eight total, but they’re all rippers. The band self-released a self-titled tape back in 2024 and have stayed quiet on new music since, but that’s OK by me. “The Harbour” and “Glass Cemetery” get the job done every time. It’s like I’m being grabbed by the collar and dragged through spirals of awesome punk rock. Camille Jodoin-Eng, Richard Forbes, Tom Hinchliffe, Mitch Dixon, and Andrew Wilson have got my number and I can’t wait to have my face melted when I finally catch one of their sets in person. Go stream Ancient Greece right now and buy a ticket or wait in line to see them. —Matt Mitchell

BALACLAVA

Five guys in brightly colored ski masks walk into a bar in Ridgewood, Queens. That’s not a joke; that’s just what a Balaclava show looks like, and apparently it looks like that because Dylan Joyce moved to New York, stopped making music for a while, spent too long in the crowd at shows asking himself why he wasn’t up there, and eventually crunched out a bunch of tracks on a Tascam 424 until the itch was sufficiently scratched. The mini EP Have A Taste and the follow-up The 1/4 Inch Almanac are grime-caked and lo-fi and completely addictive in that way where you can’t figure out why a song is stuck in your head until you realize it’s because the hook has been slowly eating your brain from the inside out. “Pills on Vacation” is under two minutes and it will ruin you. Joyce has said he’s essentially just writing songs he wants to listen to, calling it selfish, but what he’s actually done is build a delivery mechanism for pure, uncut live-show energy. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Bayonne

No, not the town in New Jersey. Bayonne is Austin musician Roger Sellers’ solo project, and he’ll be playing a handful of hometown shows this week into next. Looking at the list of confirmed artists heading to this year’s SXSW, Bayonne is one of the electronic acts that I’m most excited about. Even though Sellers has been around for 15 years, making music under his own name and this one, his last LP, Temporary Time, had “Right Thing” on it, which means that he has a seat at my table anytime. We couldn’t snag him for The Best Paste Party Ever, but we’re still going to find time to catch one of his sets before the festival is over. Here’s hoping he’ll bring his new single “Multiphase” with him. —Matt Mitchell

Charley Crockett

Self-reliance and a healthy suspicion of The Man have long been recurring themes in Charley Crockett’s songs, which invariably land near the borderlines between country, folk, blues, and soul. It’s a sound that aligns perfectly with his background, a hazy tale of train-hopping, street corner busking, highway miles and, more recently, sold-out amphitheaters and auditoriums. And it’s easy to hear why so many people are buying tickets: he’s on a white-hot run of records that sound great and are remarkably even-keeled. In this way, he’s like the twangy version of his fellow Texans in Khruangbin: ultra-consistent, highly listenable and effortlessly cool. He’s got a great new record coming out next month, Age of the Ram, that will conclude his critically-acclaimed, star-making Sagebrush Trilogy. —Ben Salmon

cootie catcher

This Toronto indietronica group has only gotten better with time—we quite liked their recent sophomore album Something We All Got (an acronym for SWAG, obviously), and even did a feature on them last month for our Best of What’s Next series. As I wrote in that piece, “They write jangly, heart‑on‑their-sleeve indie pop that could pass for classic twee if you only heard the guitars. Except it’s not just guitars: the band weaves tinny drum machines, chopped‑up vocal snippets, and live‑triggered glitches into each measure, making the songs feel less like a scene revival and more like someone snuck a laptop into a basement band… In that sense, the twee is just the vehicle. The cootie catcher effect, then, feels less like a scene revival and more like a Trojan horse: familiar indie‑rock shells smuggling in lofi beats and chopped‑up samples.” —Casey Epstein-Gross

Endearments

Kevin Marksson has been through it: a failed marriage, a hopeful new relationship, and apparently six years of turning all of that over in his head until it became something beautiful. That’s the short version of how Endearments, his Brooklyn trio with guitarist Anjali Nair and drummer Will Haywood Smith, arrived at their debut full-length An Always Open Door, out this March on Trash Casual. Produced by Abe Seiferth—the guy behind records from Nation of Language and Guerilla Toss—it’s the kind of album that makes heartbreak feel like something worth revisiting. “Real Deal” hits like a memory you thought you’d filed away for good. Nair’s guitars on “Summersun” will swallow you whole. Their songs are emotionally honest without being precious about it, and you can feel it in every beat. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Good Flying Birds

Good Flying Birds may or may not be directly influenced by D.L.I.M.C.—Kellen Baker didn’t cite them in Paste’s Best of What’s Next feature on the band in August—but they certainly are cut from the same cloth. Both construct short, earworm-y songs by making expert use of a limited toolkit, and neither is afraid of a little hiss and fuzz around the edges. In this corner of the rock and roll universe, homemade signifiers are a feature, not a bug. In fact, their debut album, Talulah’s Tape actually compiles “all (Baker’s) scattered demos … recorded at home between 2021-2024,” according to Rotten Apple, which makes it an unfiltered look at his exceptional ability to write melodies and guitar riffs catchy enough to cut through the lo-fi atmosphere. The rollercoaster chord progression of a track like “Down On Me,” for example, is instantly bop-along-able, while “Dynamic” packs like four different killer hooks into three minutes. Both sound like the early recordings of Elephant 6 heroes the Apples in Stereo. More often though, Good Flying Birds sound like the Apples’ trippier E6 sibling, the Olivia Tremor Control. —Ben Salmon

Joshua Ray Walker

I don’t know much about singing, at least not in the technical sense, but I’m pretty sure I can tell a good one from a bad one. Joshua Ray Walker’s got a good voice, maybe one of the best I’ve heard in a long time. I found an old record of his, What Is It Even?, around Christmastime last year and have held onto it tight ever since. Walker can spin a story, and his characters are compelling and familiarly flawed. They’re human portrayals of human people, though the particulars on his new tape, Ain’t Dead Yet, land closer to home for Walker than one might expect. “Human beings are super multi-faceted, and part of the reason I wrote about characters in the first place was because I could explore things about myself that I didn’t feel comfortable exploring if I were to admit that it was really about me,” he said. One cancer diagnosis later and Walker has emerged healthy and full of memories he’s asked us to step into alongside him. Ain’t Dead Yet isn’t just a declaration, but an earned occupation. Check out “Thank You For Listening.” It’s powerful. Walker will be playing The Best Paste Party Ever, bringing that good voice of his to our outdoor stage so all of Austin can hear it. —Matt Mitchell

Liz Cooper

A switch-up in sound has plagued quite a few bands I’ve liked, to be honest. Liz Cooper’s OG style—Nashville-driven, good-hearted, cosmic-flavored rock and roll—grabbed me as soon as I heard it in 2016 and again in 2018, when she and her old band the Stampede released Window Flowers. That’s a damn good record (“Mountain Man” and “Outer Space” went platinum in my dorm room), and Hot Sass turned even more psychedelic three years later. Last month, Cooper went through total reinvention on New Day, ditching the Music Row singer-songwriter gig for something more experimental. Maybe this is how she was supposed to sound the whole time. Cooper has always been a great guitarist—and her instrument sounds really good on “IDFK” and “Boy Toy” (especially “Boy Tune”; what a tune)—but the keys on New Day bring a level of excitement to Cooper’s ideas that weren’t there before. She taught herself how to play piano, chased after big hooks, and came back with a smart, empowering, cathartically queer record inspired by Beck, Lou Reed, and her pop-singer friend Caroline Kingsbury. Working with producer Dan Molad was a good choice; “Baby Steps” and “Sorry (That I Love You)” are two of her best songs to date. Liz Cooper has never sounded so alive, and her new record’s title lives up to itself. I can’t wait to hear how these tunes sound on stage. —Matt Mitchell

The Sophs

The story goes that Ethan Ramon cold-emailed demos to Rough Trade before the band had ever played a show, and Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee signed them on the spot. I keep turning that over because it explains a lot about what the LA six-piece actually sounds like, which is a band that has absolutely no interest in waiting around for permission. GOLDSTAR, their debut, comes out tomorrow, and it’s one of those records where you spend the whole first listen trying to figure out what genre you’re even in. Folk song, then funk, then something that’s basically flamenco-pop-punk, then a near blues drawl. Ramon’s got this quality where he can sing about genuinely messed-up stuff—death wishes, craving validation, intrusive thoughts he probably shouldn’t be airing in public—and make it feel like the most fun you’ve had all week. Hell, a song called “Death in the Family” should not be as catchy as it is. And they’re playing nine shows at SXSW this year, so really, there’s no excuse for missing them. —Casey Epstein-Gross

TTSSFU

I’m a big fan of what Partisan Records is doing. Great people running the label, great artists filling up the roster. One of those artists, TTSSFU, has quickly become a personal favorite of mine. Tasmin Stephens is among Courtney Love’s many daughters, and her 2025 tape Blown has stuck around in my rotation since dropping last August. “Forever” is The One for me. You can tell that Stephens graduated from the Sky Ferreira school of alt-pop, and we’re all better off for it. “I like people who create a force around them,” she said. Returning to Blown and its predecessor Me, Jed and Andy, I can see that future taking shape for Stephens already. She isn’t the only performer combining dream-pop and noise-rock together right now, but she’s by far making some of the most compelling, replayable attempts. —Matt Mitchell

Victoryland

Ex-Blood member Julian McCamman sounds like Robert Smith channeling Dean Wareham, or Dean Wareham channeling Robert Smith, all over My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It. Under the banner of Victoryland, McCamman unleashes strident guitars and skronky synthesizers. “Fits” is like a hypnosis tape, a track that makes me scream, “I LOVE MUSIC!” so loud my head vibrates. I wish those six minutes could go on forever. McCamman arrives at the mix by falling straight into its bursting contrasts of acoustic guitar, glitchy electronics, and brushed, scratchy drumming. I swear the instruments go ten different ways and his voice tries to follow each of them, revealing this messy, squirming pop song that grows and grows and grows until its muscles have no choice but to contract. My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It diverts from the indie-rock sameness of the first Victoryland LP, Sprain, and sounds upscaled, sometimes psychedelic on “I got god” and “I’ll Show You Mine.” The album blurs but never bores. McCamman’s guitars always sweep and his electronics always swirl. And My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It never lulls, instead falling into this romantic, exciting trance. The outro of “Fits” alone—a one-minute balm of sugary, winking modulation—will put you in a coma. —Matt Mitchell

Water Damage

Who wants to get beaten up at the Dream House? Austin band Water Damage takes the droning minimalism of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and turns it into a kind of violence—them fighting their instruments, their instruments fighting the sounds being wrestled out of them, and those sounds, in turn, fighting us, the listener, pummeling us with the band’s self-described defining features of noise and repetition. It’s like showing up at Young and Zazeela’s music and light installation only to get mugged by the entire Theatre of Eternal Music. It fucking rocks. There’s a solid history of gonzo rock bands playing the music of (or alongside) minimalist composers like Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, and Steve Reich. Unlike Faust and Acid Mother’s Temple, though, Water Damage has so far focused entirely on that one thing, smartly and methodically bashing through their own original drone compositions. It’s not really off-base to compare something like “Reel E” to the minimalist experiments from Faust or Acid Mother’s Temple, but it also might give the wrong impression. For those bands this kind of stuff was an occasional compliment to the maximalist noise and rock they typically made. Water Damage are no dilettantes, though. The group exists to powerfully contemplate a single note or chord for long periods of time, and that’s about as noble of a goal as I can think of. —Garrett Martin

Wilby

Maria Crawford’s latest project, Wilby, is all indie-rock goodness—a modern-day take on the ’90s melancholia of Mazzy Star and The Cranberries. Crawford’s not new to the music scene by any means (Nashville lifers might know her as the folk artist Mar), but Wilby’s debut record, the introspective deep-dive Center of Affection, finally arrived last October. There’s a lot of raucous bands on this list, so if you need something of a cool-down, look no further: Wilby’s soft, poignant, folk-tinged self-reflection is exactly what the doctor ordered. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Keep scrolling for more great stories.