INDY Selects: What to Do in the Triangle This Week

It’s already been a long week. Take the day off early on Friday, and make a trip to The Cary Theater for the Sundance Institute’s 2025 Indigenous Film Tour. Ranging in settings from dystopian futures to the struggles of millennials present, this 98-minute program features seven films, six from this year and one from 2024. The films run a wide gamut: In one, the short animated Inkwo for When the Starving Return, a “gender-shifting warrior uses their Indigenous medicine, Inkwo, to protect their community from an unearthed swarm of terrifying creatures”; in another, the documentary short Tiger, director Loren Waters follows “Indigenous artist and elder Dana Tiger, her family, and the resurgence of the iconic Tiger T-shirt company.” Films are presented with subtitles. –Sarah Edwards

North Carolina duo (in music and in marriage), Sarah and Austin McCombie, might just be the biggest go-getters in Americana music. Since 2019, they’ve released four albums at a steady clip—the most recent, Be Real With Me, was released in 2025—and have garnered a dedicated following.

It’s that relationship with fans that sticks out as especially impressive: Chatham Rabbits has a Patreon, through which fans can support the music by attending potlucks, overnight campouts, concerts, and more on the McCombie’s farm. Through it all, in keeping with the most recent release, Chatham Rabbits do keep it real, with songwriting that touches on everything from family history to friend breakups. At this Wake Forest Listening Room show, the band’s performance will also feature an audience Q&A. –SE

Join a celebration honoring the contributions of American Indian communities across the state this November,with the American Indian Heritage Celebration and community partners, the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs and the North Carolina American Indian Commission, as well as members of the state’s eight recognized tribes. The festival will highlight traditional and contemporary artistic, historical, and cultural contributions in the state through hands-on activities, take-home craft kits, presentations, and storytelling. A virtual education day will be held on Friday, followed by Saturday’s in-person festival. Activities for the celebration will take place in the East Building and on Gipson Plaza; the event is free, and parking is available in the three main museum parking lots. –Kennedy Thomason 

Celebrate the birthday of the human rights activist and author Pauli Murray with a front lawn festival. The multiracial Black and LGBTQ+ Durhamite was an accomplished legal scholar and a central character in the women’s and civil rights movements. In honor of their birthday—and to celebrate another year of fighting the good fight—enjoy a live set by local D.J. Gemynii and a performance from Durham’s Queer Circus, reimagining Murray’s iconic acrobatic photographs. Local vendors and community partners will also be part of the celebration. Entry into the inaugural exhibit of Murray’s childhood home will be free in honor of the celebration. –KT

To the extent that it ever had a clearly defined hip-hop heritage, the Triangle region—and North Carolina at large, for that matter—has hewed much closer to beats-and-rhymes fundamentalism than to the woozy, synthetic sounds that undergird much of contemporary underground rap. It’s a perception that goes beyond the usual suspects of Little Brother, Rapsody, and J. Cole: even DaBaby, few people’s idea of a “conscious rapper,” shares more stylistic DNA with Nas and Big L than he does Playboi Carti. But with artists like Carti and NBA YoungBoy now at the stadium-packing helm of hip-hop, the sonic mores of the state have shifted accordingly. 

No regional promoter better defines the turn than the indefatigable crew at InThaFest, whose slate of shows on consecutive nights this weekend in Raleigh (two at The Portal HQ, one at Transfer Co. Ballroom) could double as a crash course on the Soundcloud era-indebted sounds that are spilling off the internet and into real life more freely than any other vein of indie hip-hop today. With sosocamo and BigBabyGucci, Friday night’s show combines one of the state’s biggest breakout artists of the year with a long-tenured NC progenitor of high-volume, low-inhibition experimentalism, while Saturday and Sunday (the first of which is fully sold out) showcase who—particularly if you ask someone under 25—might be Charlotte’s next major star in the making.

The music video for TopOppGen’s “Cute Like Aspen”—kicked off by the lyrics, “yeah, i was on pain relievers cutting my wrist / ‘Cause’ i was just tryna feel sum”; algorithmically amplified by the presence of this apparently famous “Aspen” girl who I know nothing about—might be as Gen Z emo-rap as it gets. It’s also been viewed more than two million times in the past six weeks. This weekend, if you want to better understand what the excitement is about, you don’t have to go very far. —Ryan Cocca

Honorable Mention: No Skips #34 (featuring Stevie Wonder’s “Songs In The Key of Life”) on Monday 11/24 at Hunky Dory; Carolina Soul $3 Records Day for Third Friday (11/21) 

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