First Avenue’s Best New Bands of 2021 on January 7, 2022 at First Avenue has been rescheduled and will take place on March 4, 2022. All tickets purchased for the original date will be honored. If you prefer a refund and bought tickets from AXS online, sign into your account to request a refund via the AXS app, or request a refund via the AXS Request Form. Otherwise, refunds are available at your original point of purchase. Please note: Refund requests for this show must be submitted by February 4, 2022.

Effective immediately, all concerts and events at First Avenue and associated venues will require either proof of a full series of COVID-19 vaccination, or proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken in the prior 72 hours. More info HERE.

Doors open at 6:30PM | Show starts at 7PM | 18+ | $12 Advance | $15 Day of Show

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Formed in 2020 in the wake of the COVID pandemic, quarantined siblings Austin and Taryn joined forces under their family name "Durry" to write and produce a small collection of songs. Inspired by their shared childhood experiences in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Durry embraces a nostalgic yet honest look at the past, and boundless hope for the future. Combining Austin's music experience with Taryn's fresh new perspective makes for an innovative take on familiar sounds. In the summer of 2021, Durry exploded on TikTok and beyond with a demo of their track "Who's Laughing Now". Now with the attention of the larger music industry, Durry is poised to explode onto the world stage with their debut album, Suburban Legend.

EVV is a Minneapolis-based musician that does not claim a genre. Drawing influences from blues, jazz, and rock, Evelyn Speers is one that is years in the making - and they are only getting started - being noted as an “artist to watch for this year” by Ear Coffee’s Wes Muilenburg. EVV released their debut three-song EP, Homebody, on December 18, 2020, including a remastered version of their second single “Dead to Me”, which was originally released in March of 2020. With each song, EVV sings about heartbreak and their experiences as a black femme in today's society. EVV hopes to inspire young femmes to pursue the music that inspires them and to let their voices be heard.

These three pieces of toast—Zak Khan on guitar/production, Clara Wicklund on vocals/bass, and Andreas Fenner on vocals/keys—are multigrain babes: Acoustically-rooted, leavened by jazz, and baked to a perfect Honeybutter golden brown.

With the velvety romance of old cinema, they mix Brazilian guitar, honeyed vocals, and homemade percussion to make music that’s earth-bound and timeless. Their songs are dreamy and familiar: set in Minnesota’s harsh landscape, where the trio’s songwriting takes place, they’re warmth and sugar on a cold winter day. Eat them for breakfast.

Kokou Kah is a True Fusion Liberian-American artist; a term coined from mixing their American culture and Liberian heritage within their music. Kah grew up listening to Tupac & Bob Marley with his late uncle, and Liberian pop music whenever around his maternal grandmother. Every beat you find Kokou on will make you want to dance and his lyrics will take you into a journey of his life not far removed from yours no matter the depth of his traumas and joys.

Feeling detached from her previously released work as years lapsed, Duluth, Minnesota’s Sarah Krueger set out to Hive, a small studio nestled near the river in her hometown of Eau Claire, WI. In the course of two separate sessions, (the first on the cusp of a long winter, and the second on the fringe of summer’s swell), Krueger assembled a cast of collaborators to help flesh out a collection of songs that would later become the catalyst for Lanue. Culled from the title of a poem that found its way to Krueger from a thrift store shelf, Lanue comes to us as a project that stands firmly in front of a fresh creative backdrop and boasts a more developed taste and sincerity than Krueger’s previous releases — both a welcome departure and anticipated return.

When Papa Mbye was a teenager he’d go to the park, set up shop, and draw caricatures for willing passerby. It was a hustle, but the mischievous exaggeration also provided a much-needed valve. He had been raised to be quiet and dutiful since his family had immigrated from The Gambia/Senegal to North Minneapolis when he was two years old. But Papa was an eccentric at heart; an artist. He eventually turned his efforts inward, creating his own extended cartoon universe full of irreverent characters that were something like if the child of Kara Walker and Jean-Michel Basquiat was the creative director of Mad Magazine.

He had grown up listening to the music his parents played, like the Senegalese artist N’dongo Lo, and supplemented it with '80s alt-rock, 2000s pop, UK Drum and Bass and increasingly the sound coming from the burgeoning DIY Rap and R&B scene in the Twin Cities. Rapping was a natural progression for a cartoonist within his generation and with his sensibility. After all, it’s a culture full of larger-than-life personalities crafting exaggerated superhero-esque backstories, and a genre whose musicians are often more than just musicians but auteurs aspiring to aesthetic world-building through illustration, clothing, and film.

That breadth of influence is on display on MANG FI, Papa’s post-everything, shape-shifting debut EP completed not more than a year after he laid down his first track. Over six songs, his vocal and production tendencies go every which way, from the middle of the mosh pit yelps and chest-thumping shit talk to distorted melodramatic electro garbles and breezy loverboy crooning. It’s disjointed art-rap, impressively walking the jagged edge between the familiar and the esoteric. Like the best caricature artists do, Papa Mbye pays homage to the source material, while showing us something we’ve never seen before.

VIAL thrives on uneven odds. It’s what their indie-punk anthems shout for best: subverting the male gaze by ignoring it altogether, creating DIY-or-die communities that proclaim the future is queer, and dialing into a sound that nods lovingly to non-male fury past and present. Sophomore LP LOUDMOUTH has plenty of landmarks for embarrassing unremarkable losers. Head to “Planet Drool,” a world populated by dry sarcasm and sci-fi synths, where hell breaks loose on macho dudes. “Mr. Fuck You” is a kiss-off without the cushion, a slamming rocker with a relentless double-time outro. While venom is spat through most of the album’s runtime, VIAL finds time for “Thumb,” a fuzz-pop moment sporting a melody that snugly coils around a worried heart, and the trickles of new-wave giving “Something More” more brightness than bite.

Producer Henry Stoehr (Slow Pulp) approaches the band’s core tenacity with an open heart, unleashing energy informed by guts, not necessarily genre. After all, this is an album that begins with a track like “Ego Death,” a venomous punk track that dips in and out of carnivalesque pacing. With LOUDMOUTH, the quartet reclaims what it means to be ringmaster. And in VIAL’s three-ring circus, they have no room for clowns.