Cold blue

Taylor Swift

• Thank You Scientist

• Tesseract

• Panzerballett

• Ado

Knower - pretty fucking sweet music with a good sense of humor.

Evade the Eye. Excellent guitar work, good songwriting. Genre: instrumental prog metal

In general, Parliament/Funkadelic has a ton of artists within its scope worth exploring. George Clinton is probably the most famous among them, but there’s also Eddie Hazel, Bootsy Collins, Gary Shider and his son Garrett Shider, Fred Wesley, and a lot more.

I also recently discovered a Japanese artist called Masaki Ueda who seems criminally unknown.

Way too many to list but I’ll throw one out. Do you like Radiohead, REM, The National, Pixies, Frank Turner, or Dinosaur Jr.? Well, they (or their lead singer) all love Mark Mulcahy’s music enough to have recorded a cover song for the tribute album when Mark’s wife passed.

Mark led the band Miracle Legion, released some solo work, and led the band Polaris (not the metal band from Australia), best known as the band from the show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Also noteworthy: Miracle Legion toured and released an EP with The Sugarcubes, aka Bjork’s band.

Song recommendations: The Backyard, All For The Best by Miracle Legion - Hey Sandy, Saturnine by Polaris - Taking Baby Steps, The Fiddler, Hey Self Defeater by Mark Mulcahy.

Album recommendations: Drenched by Miracle Legion, Music from The Adventures of Pete & Pete by Polaris, and Fathering by Mark Mulcahy.

Kamaiyah

Destiny Potato. They released one spectacular album.

Jukebox the ghost. Criminally underrated, they’d have been as big as queen or muse if they had the right publicity and timing.

The Tallest Man on Earth. Probably the best modern folk artist, but not as well known as he should be.

Aimee Mann. One of the best songwriters of the 90s and 2000s. Popular, but not as much as she should be.

Placebo.

Talk Talk. Spirit of Eden is one of the greatest albums ever made, but not many people know about it.

Ozric Tentacles

The Revivalists are an incredible bluesy rock band, but everything of theirs on the radio is their blandest stuff. They really excel with live performances and amazing instrumentals.

“It Was a Sin” builds slow but gets really high energy by the end

“Soul Fight” has a top notch saxophone solo

Here’s a full concert at Red Rocks

There’s a really underrated band from Vancouver called Slightest Clue that just put out an album. Alternative/punk and very fun

Nick Drake.

Years ahead of his time and while he gets a lot of recognition posthumously in certain music circles, he didn’t have any hits during his life, or even any hits after, so the average Joe hasn’t heard of him.

All three of his albums are fantastic, though Five Leaves Left is my favorite.

Amigo the Devil - Cocaine and Abel, Perfect Wife, Murder at the Bingo Hall, Hell and You, Hungover in Jonestown… If one of these songs doesn’t grab you, I don’t think we can be friends

Froglord - The Mystic Toad, Wednesday, Army of Frogs

Snakemother - they only have one ~40 minute album, listen to it from start to finish. The first 5 minutes or so are pretty different than the rest so give it a chance.

Edit: came back to add Hippie Death Cult, my fave songs are Hornet Party, Nice to Know You, and Arise which is from the new album Helichrysum - worth giving the whole thing a listen as I think it’s their best work to date