Read more about this year’s Hopscotch Music Festival here.
Thursday, September 9
Wednesday | Moore Square Park, 5:15 p.m.
Few of the many acts reviving and evolving ’90s indie rock balance heft and delicacy like Asheville’s Wednesday. On this year’s Twin Plagues, the bands drifts toward shoegaze with the reverberating weight of their guitars and bass, while allowing space for Karly Hartzman, whose vocals are both softly sonorous and impishly slacker.
Sarah Shook & the Disarmers | Moore Square Park, 7 p.m.
Shook and her band are no strangers to Hopscotch, and they’re not hard to find playing around the Triangle, give or take a pandemic. But her bluntly poetic lyricism, and the group’s overall vibe, which zeroes in on the no-fucks-given ethos that connects outlaw country and old-school punk, fits the festival’s boundary-averse chaos so well.
Caroline Polachek | City Plaza, 9:30 p.m.
Just the kind of left-of-center pop singer you’d expect at Hopscotch, Polachek realizes that bop-able rhythms and attractive melodies often do best when presented in vigorous contrast with off-beat textures. Her 2021 single “Bunny Is a Rider” clicks and layers and percolates under her enrapturing vocal, catchy despite (and because) of its anxious sonic shifts.
Friday, September 10
The Dead Tongues | Moore Square Park, 7:00 p.m.
Another Hopscotch regular, but one that keeps showing up in different ways, from the blearily striding folk-rock of Ryan Gustafson’s early songs, through to the experimental folk minimalism of his more recent recordings as The Dead Tongues. This year’s beautiful single “Pawnshop Dollar Bills,” finds the songwriter continuing to draw resolve from the universality of broken feeling.
Makaya McCraven | City Plaza, 7:45 p.m.
“Why don’t you leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and sweat?” These words are heard in the intro to “Frank’s Tune,” the lead single from MaKraven’s upcoming Deciphering the Message. But it’s more about finding rhythms and grooves that convert them into affirming energy for the drummer and jazz explorer par excellence.
Flying Lotus | City Plaza, 9:30 p.m.
Flying Lotus’ restless experimentalism has pushed hip-hop boundaries for so long it’s easy to take it for granted. The producer, DJ, and rapper pulls in sleek but percussive Eastern influences on his 2021 score for the Netflix anime series Yasuke with the same mix of brazen creativity and heartfelt reverence he brought to the heady and nervy jazz inflections of 2014’s essential You’re Dead!
Saturday, September 1
Bowerbirds | Moore Square, 5:15 p.m.
Bowerbirds haven’t played locally since Phil Moore rebooted the project with this year’s becalmyounglovers, which maintains the stark, elemental indie-folk aesthetic while focusing on raw emotions from the departure of his bandmate and romantic partner, as well as a general unease with the state of the world. We can all relate to at least half of that, right?
Colin Stetson | City Plaza, 6 p.m.
Since playing Hopscotch in 2012, Stetson has parlayed his uniquely moving, and frequently haunting, saxophone techniques into becoming a film soundtrack guru (yes, that’s his transfixing score in Hereditary). Maybe that’ll help you imagine visuals to ground you as you take in his mystifying textures and melodic loops. Or maybe it’s better to get lost.
Archers of Loaf | Moore Square Park, 8:45 p.m.
A Mount Rushmore act for North Carolina indie rock, the Archers indulge some nostalgia in the covers and singles they released these past couple of years—looking back to ’90s halcyon days with propulsive intent on 2020’s “Raleigh Days,” for instance. But their sound remains sharply and distinctly angled, and inexhaustibly purgative. So: bring on the reminiscence.
Animal Collective | City Plaza, 9:30 p.m.
Animal Collective’s arrival here feels like Hopscotch coming full circle. Panda Bear, the colorfully contorting electro-pop act’s most acclaimed member, was among the headliners at the event’s first outing in 2010. And while it’s been a long time since the band’s 2009 apex of popularity and artistry, the album Merriweather Post Pavilion, their hypnotic, watery vibe remains very much intact on their score for the 2021 film, Creston.
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