Road trips!
Two destination festivals announced initial lineups today, so go on and fire up ye old Google Flights. First up, the Pitchfork Music Festival, taking over Chicago’s Union Park from July 20 to 22, has been slowly revealing its first batch of performers via a hand-painted mural in Wicker Park.
We’ll save you from having to watch the livestream as each artist is painstakingly added to the wall: dance darlings Tame Impala will be joined by acts that range from R&B long-timer Raphael Saadiq of Tony! Toni! Toné!, to Irreversible Entanglements, the woke free jazz outfit that just opened for Lightning Bolt in a Times Square multiplex. Other artists include Lucy Dacus, This Is Not This Heat, Japandroids, and DRAM. The festival is promising an especially Chicago-centric lineup this year, hence Melkbelly, Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society, and Ravyn Lenae. Fingers crossed Steve Albini’s Chitown-based band, Shellac, will play a rare show? (They’re returning Primavera Sound, in Barcelona, this year.) Expect more announcements in the coming weeks; in the meantime, you can check out the lineup and score tix here.
The SXSW festival, which hits Austin, Texas next month, has already unveiled its music headliners, including NYC’s own A Place to Bury Strangers, which releases a new album April 13. The comedy portion of the festival runs March 9 to 17, and should be pretty great. This year there’ll be a Bernie Sanders Town Hall, featuring our favorite (sorry, Larry David) Bernie impersonator James Adomian; tapings of podcasts such as Comedy Bang! Bang!, Doug Loves Movies, and Maltin on Movies; some improv shows led by UCB’s Matt Besser; a performance by Dave Hill and Phil Costello’s viral black metal band Witch Taint plus a reading of the over-the-top emails to record labels that made them famous; plus some appearances by the stars of Comedy Central’s Corporate and Adult Swim’s Joe Pera Talks With You. Participating comedians include Jim Gaffigan, Jo Firestone, Horatio Sanz, Bill Hader, Godfrey, Jermaine Fowler, Matteo Lane, Nick Thune, Nick Offerman, Sean Patton, and more. Click over here for the schedule.