best new band

Watch Local Bands Perform in Willamette Week’s Office for the Second Edition of Our Morgue Sessions

To showcase the wide range of sounds coming out of this city, we created the Morgue Sessions, a series of intimate live sets from this year’s Best New Band finalists. Each set was filmed in our office’s morgue, the archive room where every WW issue goes to die.

Every Ballot Submitted for the 2019 Best New Bands Poll

Each year, we ask local music industry insiders to vote for the musicians they’re currently most excited about (and who haven’t placed in any of our previous Best New Band polls). And each year, we publish every ballot in order to maintain transparency.

Chanti Darling’s Debut Album Is a Dance-Fueled Vision of the Future

At Chanti Darling shows, dancing is essentially an act of communion. “I want to give people the opportunity to engage with the music on a more intimate level,” says Trü from behind a pair of impossibly dark shades in a Belmont bar on an impossibly hot day. “I set the intention [of dancing] very clearly. You’re on a date with them basically—you’re trying to woo them into fully engaging with you. I guess it is an act of charming.”

Check out Photos From Willamette Week’s Best New Band Showcase

This year’s Best New Band issue produced the most demographically and stylistically diverse list ever. So it makes sense that our accompanying showcase, featuring three of the finalists and held at Mississippi Studios on March 17, was also the most eclectic we’ve ever put on.

Willamette Weekend: Boxing Outside of a Bar, Portland’s Best New Bands and 10 Other Things to Do and See in Portland, March 16-18

Want to watch Irish people and American people beat the tar out of each other, in celebration of the greatest of Irish-American holidays? The Kells Smoker amateur boxing competition comes but once a year, in a tent by Kells Irish. There will be blood. (Actually, there probably won’t be.)

Here Is Every Ballot Submitted for the 2018 Best New Band Poll

Every year, in the spirit of transparency—and to make it perfectly clear that Best New Band is a poll, not an arbitrary list—we publish the ballots of every Best New Band voter.

The Members of Sávila Explore Their Mexican Heritage, and Their Place Within American Society, Through the Rhythms of Cumbia

In truth, Savilá is a band that can’t be neatly packaged into a brand or traced to a curated set of influences. But rather than feeling like some inaccessible, abstract mass, their music feels like a warm embrace—the communal equivalent of self-care.

Willamette Week