From a Fort Greene basement to Saturday Night Live, Geese are the most recent New York band to cross from independent obscurity to mainstream fame.
From SummerStage and Celebrate Brooklyn to Pier 17 and Hudson Yards, the 2026 summer rock and indie festival calendar across Manhattan and Brooklyn.
From Verboden in May to Khatsahlano in July, the Vancouver festival calendar for rock and indie in 2026.
An explorer's guide to the small clubs and music halls keeping Boston's indie scene alive in 2026: The Sinclair, The Middle East, Lizard Lounge, Brighton Music Hall, O'Brien's Pub, and The Lilypad.
A song written at Wesleyan in 2005 as a deadpan parody of the rock-star fantasy spent the next twenty years becoming the most efficient delivery vehicle for that fantasy in pop. The production didn’t fail the irony. It made the irony unkillable.
A federal radio quota, a small Toronto label, a Montreal recording studio in a former garment loft, and a juried prize designed to ignore sales numbers, four pieces of infrastructure that turned a mid-sized country into the gravitational center of English-language indie. The pieces still exist. The result no longer does.
The city has the venues, the schools, the rent and the reputation. What it does not have is geography, a single arts ministry, or a stable bylaw. A diagnosis of why the most-mythologized indie scene in North America still spits out a handful of breakouts per decade.
