Photo Credit: Cristian Sigler
After two long years away, SXSW is (fingers crossed) finally set to make its IRL return to Austin this March.
At least we’re presuming it’ll go ahead as planned. After all, with plenty of artists starting to postpone/cancel tourdates again and festivals like Sundance moving to a fully online format this year, nothing is guaranteed.
On the other hand, yesterday’s announcement of this year’s Coachella lineup would seem to be a hopeful sign that things might be looking up by the time SXSW rolls around. Or just a sign that everyone’s in denial. Either way, there have been a whole bunch of acts announced for SouthBy so far, so as a further sign of hopefulness and/or self-delusion, today we start our annual tradition of profiling acts we’re excited about (potentially) seeing this March. After all, it’s what we here at the Panic Manual do around this time of year, so why break with tradition at this point?
We start things off with a look at one of my favourite Austin based acts of the last few years – Blushing. The band’s sound encompasses everything that’s great about shoegaze and if you don’t care to take my word for it, they’ve even got the seal of approval from Miki Berenyi of Lush/Piroshka fame, who guested on the band’s previous single “Blame”, taken from their forthcoming album Possessions. Or I guess you could also just listen to their latest single “The Fires” below. Your choice.
Possessions is out Feb 18th on Kanine Records.