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For Spike Slawson, frontman and lead singer of the San Francisco-born punk rock group Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, a live show is akin to an obstacle course. Slawson and the group don’t much care for easy-breezy despite their stage prowess. Instead, they appreciate a degree of difficulty. A challenge. That’s where the fun, the reward, and even the humor reside, both for the musicians and the audience—whether they know it at first or not. In many ways, this is the basis for the band’s new live album, ¡Me First and the Gimme Gimmes Blow It… at Madison’s Quinceañera.

When it comes to Gary Clark Jr.’s style as a musician, some have said the 40-year-old Austin, Texas-born guitar player is schizophrenic. But he thinks of his versatility in a less-dramatic and more generation-appropriate manner. 

Clark Jr. released his latest LP, JPEG RAW, in March, and is on an extensive U.S. tour that will place his eclecticism on full display. Clark Jr. thinks of himself as “an iPod Shuffle.” The musical devices were all the rage in the Aughts, before the age of the do-it-all iPhone. They allowed the ear to be awash in sounds with the push of a button. Whereas listeners once had to rely on radio or individual vinyl records, the postage stamp-sized Shuffles offered space for hundreds of tracks of any type. Clark Jr. has built off a similar penchant for sonic diversity—indeed, he embodies it.

Beginning in the 1980s, Mike Burkett—a.k.a. Fat Mike—has been pouring his energy into punk rock. He co-founded the beloved band NOFX in 1983 and the San Francisco-based record label Fat Wreck Chords in 1990. Ever since, he’s been signing bands, playing shows, writing books, creating documentaries, and he even started a company that makes panties for straight men. Most recently, in 2023, he co-created the Las Vegas-based Punk Rock Museum. Earlier this year, Vegas decreed April 1 to be Punk Rock Day (what Mike calls a “punk proc,” short for punk proclamation). It all comes together to mark the culmination of a life dedicated to the music he says saved his life.

Nathaniel Rateliff is still curious after all these years. The singer/songwriter who made his bones in Denver and is now a globally famous artist, is still on the hunt for good songs—even if he is at something of a strange crossroads.

In one way, Rateliff has never been more successful. Ever since 2015 when “S.O.B.,” the single with his band The Night Sweats became a phenomenon, he’s been growing his footprint. He’s played Saturday Night Live, earned praise from Robert Plant and placed songs in major movies and HBO television shows. He’s played late-night TV and toured the world.

But at 45, Rateliff is still evolving. He’s dealing with his relationship to drinking, he’s coping with the realities of death and divorce, and confronting the pressures of stardom. And these are all the subjects of the new Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats LP South of Here, out Friday (June 28).

Parisalexa, co-writer of the newest K-Pop hit “Supernova” from the group aespa, doesn’t like to fly. But when the Los Angeles-via-Seattle songwriter/performer was invited on a trip to South Korea to collaborate on music, she took the chance. “A 15-hour flight across the world didn’t seem super exciting to me,” she says, “especially with people I didn’t necessarily know super well.”