Best KEXP Live Performances to Watch When You Feel Like Ass, Part 2
Live music is the best balm for feeling like ass.
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We love Tiny Desk, obviously. Live on KEXP is a different beast in the same forest of in-studio performances filmed and disseminated on YouTube for the music-hungry masses. While Tiny Desk feels like you are in someone’s living room, Live on KEXP feels like you are in someone’s basement at a house show that will become a local legend.
For nigh-on 30 years, the Seattle radio station has been dutifully introducing musicians the world over, and the result is a vault of thousands of live performances for you to enjoy.
While Tiny Desk is light and airy, musicians pared down to their essence, KEXP is guttural and loud, with musicians pouring their fucking lungs out against the studio’s signature glittering backdrop.
Here is part two of the best KEXP live performances to lift you up when you feel like ass. Are you like, “Um, part two?! What about part one?!” Calm down, it’s right here.
Florence and the Machine
What good is a Live on KEXP list without Florence and the Machine?! Like, c’mon.
Back in 2010 when the indie folk band to end all indie folk bands was just three years old, and the KEXP studio looked like a cubicle with string lights nailed to the wall, Florence and the Machine performed songs from their debut album, Lungs.
The performance is both timeless and contextual, capturing a specific, fleeting optimism of the mid-aughts. Welch’s signature could-awaken-the-dead-but–in-a-good-way vocals fill the bland studio, and one can easily imagine she is singing in a secluded, sparkling cave off the north Atlantic.
M83
We swear this entire list isn’t a desperate love letter to era-defining millennial bands. M83 is made up of a rotating cast around core member Anthony Gonzalez, and the version that showed up to perform at KEXP in 2024 had six musicians armed with their weapons of choice: saxophone, synth, drums, violin, guitar, bass, and vocals. The result is a tangle of notes that smash together and rise into an orb of sound that is electric and soothing. This performance is a testament to what M83 does best: capturing the somehow nostalgic feeling of driving to meet your friends in your busted-up spaceship with the city lights sparkling beneath you, your heart and the sky swelling with possibilities.
Aurora
This Aurora performance comes from live from Icelandic Airwaves, perhaps the coolest fucking musical festival out there, in 2021. Aurora was a razor’s edge from blowing up, and a handful of lucky assholes witnessed this live show at Kex Hostel in downtown Reykjavík. The eponymous lead singer looks like she sprouted up straight from the Earth, singing ancient melodies that touch an innate joy in all of us. The musicians backing her up weave their instruments perfectly around her omnipotent and ethereal vocals. Even through the ol boob tube, the music grabs you in a pleasant stranglehold, and one can only imagine what it felt like to be there in person.
Mdou Moctar
Nigerien shredder Mdou Moctar has graced KEXP several times over the years, and while you can’t go wrong with any one of his performances, we are linking you to his 2018 performance. Moctar’s guitar playing paired with his silky, soothing vocals in his native language of Tamasheq is absolutely mesmerizing. This might be our favorite iteration of rock n’ roll to ever grace our ear holes.
Angine de Poitrine
Angine de Poitrine might be our favorite masked band of all time. The French-Canadian rock duo performed for KEXP just five months ago and already has one of the most viewed performances in the show’s history. The costuming doesn’t come off as a gimmick – it pairs perfectly with their musical sensibilities and elevates the experience as they expertly take listeners on a winding math rock journey into the absurd. Your first reaction will be “what the fuck!?” but after a few moments, you’ll be like, “Nothing has ever made more sense than this.”