Prior to the first South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival (SXSW) in 1987, Austin was more or less just a bigger Texas town whose honky-tonks were like those in the rest of the Lone Star State—full of bands playing 12-bar blues, ZZ Top-style rock, and various country tunes of the day. Twenty-eight years on, it’s doubled in size and is touted as “The Live Music Capital of the World.” SXSW has no doubt been a big part of that growth. Each year it welcomes more than 50,000 attendees, 2,000+ musical acts from scores of countries, and over $300 million in revenue, making it Austin’s highest revenue-producing event. When the music portion of the festival is in full swing, as it was March 17–22, at any time of day you can walk through and find bands performing in hotels, warehouses, parks, museums, or posh theaters.
Although the unity and collaborative spirit amongst musicians and like-minded sponsors and audiences make SXSW an utterly unforgettable experience, if I had to describe the six music-filled days in three words, they’d be: expensive, exhausting, and invigorating. And that holds true whether you’re an attendee or one of the musicians playing the festival. To get on the bill, you and your band need to have either already created quite a buzz in the industry—in which case you’ll play a few sold-out gigs—or be like most of the official SXSW bands and perform two or three times a day for either $250 ($100 for solo acts) or a free pass to the rest of the event. Those in the latter camp go through a rigorous audition process and, if accepted, must pay their own way there—including travel, accommodations, and gear storage and handling. Total SXSW band expenditures tend to range from a few thousand dollars up to 10 grand. But for those who make the trek on their own dime, it’s all worth it for the small hope of being the next big SXSW discovery.
This year, most media outlets were in a frenzy over the performances of established bands such as Spoon, the Damned, Courtney Barnett, and Angel Olsen—for very good reason, of course—but we had our eye on up-and-coming acts. It was tough to narrow down our picks, but we’re confident the five bands here are ones to watch in the coming weeks, months, and years. They weren’t just mind-blowingly amazing in their energetic performances—they were distinct in musicianship, tone, and execution.
The Ghost Wolves
Before I could see who was onstage at Cheer Up Charlie's on March 18, I was sure I’d find a drummer flanked by at least two or three guitarists plugged into an assortment of distortion pedals and raging amps. But after pushing my way through the crowded room I found only guitarist/singer Carley “Carazy” Wolf and her husband, drummer/vocalist Jonathan “Little Hammer” Wolf. Wearing a white leather vest, white patent-leather pants, and white cowgirl boots that contrasted with Jonathan’s all-black Western attire, Carley kicked her legs in the air, threw herself on the ground, and used her vintage Harmony Silhouette H19 and blaring amp stacks (two Music Man HD-130s driving 2x15 and 4x12 cabs) to produce some of the most corpulent, room-filling distortion I’ve ever heard. In fact, the Ghost Wolves revived my confidence in two-piece bands. Even when she switched to a ’60s Teisco with just one string, Carley maintained a heavy low end that perfectly complemented Jonathan’s vehement pounding. Although the Austin-based duo is still fairly new and has a couple of structural things to tighten up, in my book the Ghost Wolves win the award for most badass, face-melting tone.YouTube It
Mother Falcon
Comprised of as many as 20 musicians onstage at one time, Mother Falcon has been taking over the Austin scene for the last few years. I’d seen them perform before but––to be frank––they never quite blew me away until I heard them in a quiet room at St. David’s Episcopal Church. Maybe it was the feeling of entering a sanctuary away from the franticness of 6th Street. Maybe it was the pleasant acoustics of the wood-paneled walls. Whatever it was, Mother Falcon swooned me with its haunting mixture of pop vocal melodies mingled with brass and woodwind instruments, a string section (cello, viola, violin, and double bass), acoustic and electric guitars and bass guitars, drums, keyboard, accordions, and lap-steel. What’s remarkable about all this is how it adds up to an elegant conversation rather than a conglomeration of melodies.Led by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Nick Gregg (who often plays an Alvarez flattop), guitarist Claire Puckett (who primarily plays a single-cut nylon-string and a 12-string dreadnought), and accordionist/pianist Tamir Kalifa, Mother Falcon is banded by hints of eeriness, extreme dynamic changes, and an undertone of bubbly guitar riffs. One of my favorite things about the performance was simply witnessing how so many musicians worked together to deliver a cohesive and cinematically powerful sound.
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Bomba Estéreo
Founded in Bogotá in 2005, Bomba Estéreo likely has the biggest international following of any band on this list, and their 2015 SXSW performance definitely deserves mention. The compositions created by vocalist Liliana Saumet, guitarist Julián Salazar, bassist Simón Mejía, and their new drummer and percussionist (names were unavailable at press time) reverberate throughout your entire body. Song topics range from political to personal, and all are complemented by energetic beats, soulful bass melodies, and mesmerizing visuals.Even at 1 o’clock in the morning, fans bounced into each other, screaming and singing along with Saumet while the rest of the band grooved on its mélange of cumbia, electronic, and pop sounds. The band fed off the crowd’s energy, giving all they had right back to us. Quiet waves of intimacy would then fill the venue before things built back up to another adrenaline-fueled crescendo. Salazar, who primarily plays a Tele or Mustang through clean-toned Fender Twin or Super-Sonic combos, provides much of the band’s cumbia influence, but his deft use of delay-soaked arpeggios adds a modern feel to the soundscape. Meanwhile, Mejía provides effortlessly solid, melodic bass lines while triggering a multitude of audio samples. If I could, I would see Bomba Estéreo a million times over.
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La Luz
Over the past few years there’s been a resurgence of West Coast bands influenced by 1960s garage and surf rock a la Dick Dale and the Beach Boys. Bands like Shannon and the Clams, and Guantanamo Baywatch, but at the top of that list is La Luz––a Seattle-based quartet featuring guitarist/vocalist Shana Cleveland, bassist Lena Simon, keyboardist Alice Sandahl, and drummer Marian Li Pino. I caught La Luz’s SXSW performance on a depressingly rainy Saturday afternoon on the outside stage of the Panache showcase at Spider House Café & Ballroom, but the gloomy weather didn’t affect the band or the audience. Excited listeners crowded around the stage, smiling and dancing the entire show.La Luz grabbed the attention of passersby, too, with a captivating blend of graceful, period-correct harmonies, haunting keys, and, of course, incisive solos awash in twangy spring reverb. But the band’s influences seem to span a range of genres beyond the surf and garage labels––from doo-wop to straight-up pop. Cleveland’s Strat-and-Princeton riffs were alternatingly raucous and tender, Simon’s Hofner-through-Ampeg bass lines were simultaneously solid and sinewy, and both had fun with their bandmates by doing little choreographed dances, laughing at each other, and making jokes we all wished we were a part of—and yet there wasn’t one thing sloppy about this amazing show.
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Hikes
Twenty-three-year-old Nathan James Wilkins has been leading and producing heavy hitters under the moniker Hikes for as long as he’s been playing guitar—a whopping four years. Initially a drummer in the Fayetteville hardcore scene, Wilkins has turned into an incredibly innovative math-rock guitarist. His techniques range from standard barre chords to tapping, complex fingerpicking, and creative harmonic use in open tunings. Wilkins, who favors Tele-style guitars, is the kind of player whose jaw-dropping intricacies make you wonder whether he’s a prodigy or just extremely dedicated. Of course it’s not just Wilkins who powers Hikes. Co-guitarist Will Kauber (who often plays a Fender Bullet Deluxe, as well as a Jazzmaster), bassist Colin Jenkins (who prefers Fender Jaguar and Danelectro basses), and drummer Chris Long bring the same intense energy that resonates so well with audiences.As I entered Javelina––a small Austin bar that’s become quite a hot spot––on the last night of SXSW, I encountered a crowd of sweaty headbangers singing along to Hikes. Many seemed like they were ready to jump onstage at any moment. For much of the show I was completely transfixed by the effortlessness of Wilkins’ playing up and down the neck, so to be honest, it wasn’t until the final moments of the set that I began to realize how intricate the rest of the band members’ playing was, too. Like a game of Tetris or a 1,000-piece puzzle, Hikes is engaging and challenging, yet often quite subtle in its nuance.
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Submarine Pickups boss Pete Roe at his workstation.
Still, we think we know what pickups should sound and look like. Lucky for us, there have always been plenty of pickup builders who aren’t so convinced. These are the makers who devised the ceramic-magnet pickup, gold-foils, and active, high-gain pickups. In 2025, nearly 100 years after the first pickup bestowed upon a humble lap-steel guitar the power to blast our ears with soundwaves, there’s no shortage of free-thinking, independent wire-winders coming up with new ways to translate vibrating steel strings into thrilling music.
Joe Naylor, Chris Mills, and Pete Roe are three of them. As the creative mind behind Reverend Guitars, Naylor developed the Railhammer pickup, which combines both rail and pole-piece design. Mills, in Pennsylvania, builds his own ZUZU guitars with wildly shaped, custom-designed pickups. And in the U.K., Roe developed his own line of hexaphonic pickups to achieve the ultimate in string separation and note definition. All three of them told us how they created their novel noisemakers.
Joe Naylor - Railhammer Pickups
Joe Naylor, pictured here, started designing Railhammers out of personal necessity: He needed a pickup that could handle both pristine cleans and crushing distortion back to back.
Like virtually all guitar players, Joe Naylor was on a personal tone quest. Based in Troy, Michigan, Naylor helped launch Reverend Guitars in 1996, and in the late ’90s, he was writing and playing music that involved both clean and distorted movements in one song. He liked his neck pickup for the clean parts, but it was too muddy for high-gain playing. He didn’t want to switch pickups, which would change the sound altogether.
He set out to design a neck pickup that could represent both ends of the spectrum with even fidelity. That led him to a unique design concept: a thin, steel rail under the three thicker, low-end strings, and three traditional pole pieces for the higher strings, both working with a bar magnet underneath. At just about a millimeter thick, rails, Naylor explains, only interact with a narrow section of the thicker strings, eliminating excess low-end information. Pole pieces, at about six millimeters in diameter, pick up a much wider and less focused window of the higher strings, which works to keep them fat and full. “If you go back and look at some of the early rail pickups—Bill Lawrence’s and things like that—the low end is very tight,” says Naylor. “It’s almost like your tone is being EQ’d perfectly, but it’s being done by the pickup itself.”
That idea formed the basis for Railhammer Pickups, which began official operations in 2012. Naylor built the first prototype in his basement, and it sounded great from the start, so he expanded the format to a bridge pickup. That worked out, too. “I decided, ‘Maybe I’m onto something here,’” says Naylor. Despite the additional engineering, Railhammers have remained passive pickups, with fairly conventional magnets—including alnico 5s and ceramics—wires, and structures. Naylor says this combines the clarity of active pickups with the “thick, organic tone” of passive pickups.
“It’s almost like your tone is being EQ’d perfectly, but it’s being done by the pickup itself.” —Joe Naylor
The biggest difficulty Naylor faced was in the physical construction of the pickups. He designed and ordered custom molds for the pickup’s bobbins, which cost a good chunk of money. But once those were in hand, the Railhammers didn’t need much fiddling. Despite their size differences, the rail and pole pieces produce level volume outputs for balanced response across all six strings.
Naylor’s formula has built a significant following among heavy-music players. Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan is a Railhammer player with several signature models; ditto Reeves Gabrels, the Cure guitarist and David Bowie collaborator. Bob Balch from Fu Manchu and Kyle Shutt from the Sword have signatures, too, and other players include Code Orange’s Reba Meyers, Gogol Bordello’s Boris Pelekh, and Voivod’s Dan “Chewy” Mongrain.
Chris Mills - ZUZU Pickups
When Chris Mills started building his own electric guitars, he decided to build his own components for them, too. He suspected that in the course of the market’s natural thinning of the product herd, plenty of exciting options had been left unrealized. He started working with non-traditional components and winding in non-traditional ways, which turned him on to the idea that things could be done differently. “I learned early on that there are all kinds of sonic worlds out there to be discovered,” says Mills.
Eventually, he zeroed in on the particular sound of a 5-way-switch Stratocaster in positions two and four: Something glassy and clear, but fatter and more dimensional. In Mills’ practice, “dimensional” refers to the varying and sometimes simultaneous sound qualities attained from, say, a finger pad versus a fingernail. “I didn’t want just one thing,” says Mills. “I wanted multiple things happening at once.”
Mills wanted something that split the difference between a humbucker’s fullness and the Strat’s plucky verve, all in clean contexts. But he didn’t want an active pickup; he wanted a passive, drop-in solution to maximize appeal. To achieve the end tone, Mills wired his bobbins in parallel to create “interposed signal processing,” a key piece of his patented design. “I found that when I [signal processed] both of them, I got too much of one particular quality, and I wanted that dimensionality that comes with two qualities simultaneously, so that was essential,” explains Mills.
Mills loved the sound of alnico 5 blade magnets, so he worked with a 3D modeling engineer to design plastic bobbins that could accommodate both the blades and the number of turns of wire he desired. This got granular—a millimeter taller, a millimeter wider—until they came out exactly right. Then came the struggle of fitting them into a humbucker cover. Some key advice from experts helped Mills save on space to make the squeeze happen.
Mills’ ZUZUbuckers don’t have the traditional pole pieces and screws of most humbuckers, so he uses the screw holes on the cover as “portholes” looking in on a luxe abalone design. And his patented “curved-coil” pickups feature a unique winding method to mix up the tonal profile while maintaining presence across all frequencies.
“I learned early on that there are all kinds of sonic worlds out there to be discovered.” —Chris Mills
Mills has also patented a single-coil pickup with a curved coil, which he developed to get a different tonal quality by changing the relative location of the poles to one another and to the bridge. Within that design is another patented design feature: reducing the number of turns at the bass end of the coil. “Pretty much every pickup maker suggests that you lower the bass end [of the pickup] to compensate for the fact that it's louder than the treble end,” says Mills. “That'll work, but doing so alters the quality and clarity of the bass end. My innovation enables you to keep the bass end up high toward the strings.”
Even Mills’ drop-in pickups tend to look fairly distinct, but his more custom designs, like his curved-coil pickup, are downright baroque. Because his designs don’t rely on typical pickup construction, there aren’t the usual visual cues, like screws popping out of a humbucker cover, or pole pieces on a single-coil pickup. (Mills does preserve a whiff of these ideals with “portholes” on his pickup covers that reveal that pickup below.) Currently, he’s excited by the abalone-shell finish inserts he’s loading on top of his ZUZUbuckers, which peek through the aforementioned portholes.
“It all comes down to the challenge that we face in this industry of having something that’s original and distinctive, and also knowing that with every choice you make, you risk alienating those who prefer a more traditional and familiar look,” says Mills.
Pete Roe - Submarine Pickups
Roe’s stick-on Submarine pickups give individual strings their own miniature pickup, each with discrete, siloed signals that can be manipulated on their own. Ever wanted to have a fuzz only on the treble strings, or an echo applied just to the low-register strings? Submarine can achieve that.
Pete Roe says that at the start, his limited amount of knowledge about guitar pickups was a kind of superpower. If he had known how hard it would be to get to where he is now, he likely wouldn’t have started. He also would’ve worked in a totally different way. But hindsight is 20/20.
Roe was working in singer-songwriter territory and looking to add some bass to his sound. He didn’t want to go down the looping path, so he stuck with octave pedals, but even these weren’t satisfactory for him. He started winding his own basic pickups, using drills, spools of wire, and magnets he’d bought off the internet. Like most other builders, he wanted to make passive pickups—he played lots of acoustic guitar, and his experiences trying to find last-minute replacement batteries for most acoustic pickups left him scarred.
Roe started building a multiphonic pickup: a unit with multiple discrete “pickups” within one housing. In traditional pickups, the vibration from the strings is converted into a voltage in the 6-string-wide coils of wire within the pickup. In multiphonic pickups, there are individual coils beneath each string. That means they’re quite tiny—Roe likens each coil to the size of a Tylenol pill. “Because you’re making stuff small, it actually works better because it’s not picking up signals from adjacent strings,” says Roe. “If you’ve got it set up correctly, there’s very, very little crosstalk.”
With his Submarine Pickups, Roe began by creating the flagship Submarine: a quick-stick pickup designed to isolate and enhance the signals of two strings. The SubPro and SubSix expanded the concept to true hexaphonic capability. Each string has a designated coil, which on the SubPro combine into four separate switchable outputs; the SubSix counts six outputs. The pickups use two mini output jacks, with triple-band male connectors to carry three signals each. Explains Roe: “If you had a two-channel output setup, you could have E, A, and D strings going to one side, and G, B, and E to the other. Or you could have E and A going to one, the middle two strings muted, and the B and E going to a different channel.” Each output has a 3-position switch, which toggles between one of two channels, or mute.
“I’m just saying there’s some unexplored territory at the beginning of the signal chain. If you start looking inside your guitar, then it opens up a world of opportunities.” —Pete Roe
This all might seem a little overly complicated, but Roe sees it as a simplification. He says when most people think about their sound, they see its origin in the guitar as fixed, only manipulatable later in the chain via pedals, amp settings, or speaker decisions. “I’m not saying that’s wrong,” says Roe. “I’m just saying there’s some unexplored territory at the beginning of the signal chain. If you start looking inside your guitar, then it opens up a world of opportunities which may or may not be useful to you. Our customers tend to be the ones who are curious and looking for something new that they can’t achieve in a different way.
“If each string has its own channel, you can start to get some really surprising effects by using those six channels as a group,” continues Roe. “You could pan the strings across the stereo field, which as an effect is really powerful. You suddenly have this really wide, panoramic guitar sound. But then when you start applying familiar effects to the strings in isolation, you can end up with some really surprising textural sounds that you just can’t achieve in any other way. You can get some very different sounds if you’re applying these distortions to strings in isolation. You can get that kind of lead guitar sound that sort of cuts through everything, this really pure, monophonic sound. That sounds very different because what you don’t get is this thing called intermodulation distortion, which is the muddiness, essentially, that you get from playing chords that are more complex than roots and fifths with a load of distortion.” And despite the powerful hardware, the pickups don’t require any soldering or labor. Using a “nanosuction” technology similar to what geckos possess, the pickups simply adhere to the guitar’s body. Submarine’s manuals provide clear instruction on how to rig up the pickups.
“An analogy I like to use is: Say you’re remixing a track,” explains Roe. “If you get the stems, you can actually do a much better job, because you can dig inside and see how the thing is put together. Essentially, Submarine is doing that to guitars. It’s allowing guitarists and producers to look inside the instrument and rebuild it from its constituent parts in new and exciting ways.”
In continued support of their 3x GRAMMY-nominated album Dark Matter, Pearl Jam will be touring select U.S. cities in April and May 2025.
Pearl Jam’s live dates will start in Hollywood, FL on April 24 and 26 and wrap with performances in Pittsburgh, PA on May 16 and 18. Full tour dates are listed below.
Support acts for these dates will be announced in the coming weeks.
Tickets for these concerts will be available two ways:
- A Ten Club members-only presale for all dates begins today. Only paid Ten Club members active as of 11:59 PM PT on December 4, 2024 are eligible to participate in this presale. More info at pearljam.com.
- Public tickets will be available through an Artist Presale hosted by Ticketmaster. Fans can sign up for presale access for up to five concert dates now through Tuesday, December 10 at 10 AM PT. The presale starts Friday, December 13 at 10 AM local time.
earl Jam strives to protect access to fairly priced tickets by providing the majority of tickets to Ten Club members, making tickets non-transferable as permitted, and selling approximately 10% of tickets through PJ Premium to offset increased costs. Pearl Jam continues to use all-in pricing and the ticket price shown includes service fees. Any applicable taxes will be added at checkout.
For fans unable to use their purchased tickets, Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster will offer a Fan-to-Fan Face Value Ticket Exchange for every city, starting at a later date. To sell tickets through this exchange, you must have a valid bank account or debit card in the United States. Tickets listed above face value on secondary marketplaces will be canceled. To help protect the Exchange, Pearl Jam has also chosen to make tickets for this tour mobile only and restricted from transfer. For more information about the policy issues in ticketing, visit fairticketing.com.
For more information, please visit pearljam.com.