Pons
Pons is a constantly changing/growing experimental project started by Sam Cameron and Jack Parker in North Carolina directly after we graduated high school in 2018. After releasing a couple of demos, playing some shows as a two piece, and relocating to Burlington, Vermont, we added our percussion player Sebastien Carnot to the live lineup in 2019. Our recorded music and live set are extremely different from each other in terms of arrangement and presentation of the songs, but most people describe our music as being no wave/noise rock adjacent. There are also a lot of influences from glam rock, tribal/percussion music, and psychedelic music as well. Pons is all about fighting expectations and striving for constant evolution. Trying to be on the road as much as possible is also definitely part of our M.O.
Heartstrings
Ice Nine Kills: Pick Your Poison
Ice Nine Kills craft anthems full of passion and precision. The band’s theatrical bombast created a community of self-described “Psychos” and launched the type of pop culture lore celebrated in their songs. They make timeless and timely music, mixing metalcore, melody, and punk with power. Hard-rock-meets-horror tracks like “Hip to be Scared,” “Funeral Derangements,” “A Grave Mistake,” and “The American Nightmare” demonstrate their unapologetic fascination with fright and cult classic curiosities, unleashed with inescapable melodic hooks, heavy riffs, and clever twists of phrase. Led by Spencer Charnas, Ice Nine Kills spread cavalier carnage with a knowing smile. Their densely catchy songs on their breakthrough albums, The Silver Scream and The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood, propelled them to death-defying new heights. In 2022, they toured with Slipknot. Metallica handpicked Ice Nine Kills to join them on their M72 World Tour in 2023, 2024, and 2025. The horror community Spencer grew up loving has embraced his band in return. INK’s “A Work of Art” (featuring System Of A Down’s Shavo Odadjian) plays in 2024’s Terrifier 3, a No. 1 box office smash that became the highest-grossing unrated film ever. The mischievously gory music video features Art the Clown himself – actor David Howard Thornton – and Terrifier franchise stars Catherine Corcoran and Leah Voysey, alongside Shavo and SiriusXM radio host Jose Mangin. Long before he graced the covers of Rock Sound, Metal Hammer, Revolver, and Outburn, Charnas began his career at a battle of the bands while still in high school. Known simply as “Ice Nine” from 2000 to 2006, Spencer persevered through lineup and stylistic changes as a teenager and young adult. The No. 1 Billboard Hard Rock Album The Silver Scream (2018) mercilessly chopped down the doors, announcing Ice Nine Kills’ arrival as an unrivaled force of unnatural nature. Helpless teens, unhelpful authorities, supernatural forces, masked killers, and “final girls” abounded. Each piece focused on a different horror classic, paying loving homage to Freddy, Jason, Michael, Pennywise, and more. Naturally, there’s always a sequel. The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood imagined a world where Charnas is the chief suspect in his fiancé’s murder. His musical and visual work with Ice Nine Kills is the primary evidence. The album expanded the lore of The Silence, a new slasher for the ages. Loudwire hails Ice Nine Kills as “one of the most unique acts in metal right now.” Visionary trailblazers and multimedia raconteurs, INK hosts a thrilling world for a growing legion of devoted true believers with immersive shows, captivating videos, and an inventive band- and-fan community. Ice Nine Kills blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction, skewering Hollywood in the process, stabbing with a satire to rival Patrick Bateman. As the song “Welcome to Horrorwood” declares: “Stardom’s just an afterthought for all those stabbed in the backlot, piled up and left to rot.” “So, how’s this for an establishing shot?”
The Widdler & SFAM
8th House Production & Sioux Sound Collective are extremely proud to present our third and final event together before festival season. The Widdler & sfam are headed to town to join us on May 31st, at The Waiting Room in Omaha, Nebraska! We wanted this to be as special for you as it is for us — so we’ve joined forces with the Champion Sound crew (Minneapolis) to bring out their Void Acoustics rig. 🔥 It’s going to be a night filled with quality, hi-fidelity music. Filling out the rest of the bill, we have Buzz Junior coming from STL for direct support duties. Shawn Who is making his way down from Minneapolis for a special closing set. Finally, we have RÜGER and Glava joining us for a local support b2b to open up the night.
Paisley Fields
Paisley Fields is touring in support of his most recent release Limp Wrist (Don Giovanni records) which is an exploration of where rural queerness intersects religion. Paisley’s family were devout Catholics, and he served as the official church pianist in his parish throughout his teens, playing every Sunday. Paisley’s music is a celebration of his queer identity and rural roots, with influences drawn from his experiences growing up in Iowa. This connection through music has not only resonated with listeners but has also earned accolades, such as his track “Burn This Statehouse Down,” which was highlighted by NPR music critic Ann Powers as one of her favorite songs of 2023. http://www.thepaisleyfields.com https://www.instagram.com/paisleyjamesfields/ https://www.facebook.com/ThePaisleyFields/ Jeremy Mercy & the Rapture Orphans Americana / roots / country / soul from Omaha https://www.facebook.com/MercyRapture/ https://jeremymercy.com/ https://jeremymercy.bandcamp.com/ Benjamin Charles Freeman (aka Tumbleweed) country / outlaw country / experimental from Omaha https://www.facebook.com/BenjaminCharlesFreeman https://benjamincharlesfreeman.bandcamp.com/
PRHYME – SOLD OUT
Cut from the same cloth as the Omaha music scene that birthed them in 1997, PRHYME are a raw, alt-rock band forged in friendship. After a decade-long hiatus, the original trio of Mike Otepka, Dan Peters, and Zak Olsen reignited the fire in 2023, adding Joe Pietro and Scott Irvine to the fold. Now, with a sound honed by years of experience and a renewed sense of purpose, PRHYME are back to deliver a sonic assault that’s as explosive as it is infectious.
Florist
On Jellywish Florist invite listeners to question everything — to imagine a world where magic, surrealism, and the supernatural are our companions in day-to-day life. It dares to present a realm of possibility and imagination in a time that feels evermore prescriptive, limiting, and awful. The album finds Florist exploring life’s big questions without offering silver linings, morals, or definitive answers. Instead, the band asks perhaps the most difficult of questions: Is it possible to break free from our ingrained thought cycles and pedestrian way of life? That, Florist posits, may be the only way to be truly happy, fulfilled, and free. Singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Emily Sprague says that the record is purposely complicated. “It’s a gentle delivery of something that is really chaotic, confusing, and multifaceted,” she explains. “It has this technicolor that’s inspired by our world and also fantasy elements that we can use to escape our world.” “We enter an observational fever dream about floating through liminal space between lifetimes, individual perceptions. There is reflection on our connectedness in joy and suffering through the wish for a peaceful place for our spirits to live and land,” Sprague explains. “‘Have Heaven’ establishes the world of the album to be not quite always lucid, but rather a perspective that is blended into the worlds of the magic and death realms swirling around us. The chorus is a chant that pleads for a better symbiosis between these worlds, and between our earthly forms trying to survive alongside each other, bound to the systems we must exist within.” Jellywish is an exercise in multidimensional world building. The album’s panoramic cover art, which looks like something out of a Henry Darger volume, wraps the music in a collage of color that presents as science fiction-adjacent, hinting at something mysterious, fantastical, and mythological. Inside the album’s jacket, however, are tender and catchy sonic meditations on life’s most knotty subjects: life, death, earth, reality, relationships, joy, and pain. Taken together, Florist offers an acute sense of the band at this moment, one that worries about the world and its place in it. In contrast, it also presents an alternative to the doldrums of day-to-day life, and the necessary suggestion that very different things may be true at the same time. With Jellywish, Florist offers a complex album in a time that is anything but simple. In mining the chaos and wonder of physical and spiritual worlds, the band holds a mirror to itself to the great benefit of all. It tells us that we are not alone, and challenges us to believe in magic.
Worry Club
Worry Club is the moniker of Chicago-based indie musician Chase Walsh. Walsh integrates dreamy synth-pop guitar and muted percussion into gritty and unflinching lyricism. He looks depression and heartbreak dead in the face with his poetry, packaging these difficult subjects into truly gorgeous songs.
Season To Risk
This pioneering Kansas City band has survived fire, flood, tornadoes, and van crashes and lived to talk about it. Season to Risk play a genre-bending mix of heavy indie rock. Singer Steve Tulipana’s captivating stage presence quickly got the band noticed in the early 90s and signed to Columbia (Sony), with vocals in the lineage of Nick Cave and David Yow of Jesus Lizard. The band changed direction with each release, quickly pivoting away from the grunge and nu metal wave, showing a surprisingly diverse range of influences and interests, gradually adding darker noise and synthesizer. Reviews ranged from “the next Soundgarden” (1st record) to “metal for recoveringindie rockers” (2nd record). In 1993, they were selected to perform as a futuristic punk band for the club scene in the film “Strange Days” about the Y2K apocalypse, but their song was cut from the soundtrack for being “too noisy”. Burned and Submerged A series of disasters has tested Season to Risk as if God herself wants their music destroyed. The band blew through a dozen vehicles while touring relentlessly through the 90s, suffering near-death accidents along the way, cracked engines, careening backwards downhill in Seattle with no brakes, and a rollover on an icy stretch of Minnesota highway. They also suffered line up changes with the loss of several early drummers leaving at pivotal moments in the band’s career. No less than four members have left the band to join their alt rock cousins Shiner, also from Kansas City. Tim Dow played drums on early Season to Risk songs but left before the recording of the eponymous debut record. Current Shiner rhythm section Paul Malinowski and Jason Gerken left after the 2nd album “In A PerfectWorld”. And noise guitar prodigy Josh Newton joined Shiner after the 3rd album “Men Are Monkeys. Robots Win.” Season to Risk’s first two album masters burned in the Sony/Universal warehouse fire of 2008, which also claimed 150,000 other master tapes from John Coltrane to Nine Inch Nails. The band’s recording studio was totaled in a flash flood which almost claimed the lives of guitarist Duane Trower and drummer David Silver as they tried to save equipment while muddy water submerged their recording console and ruined the building in 15 minutes. The tape masters for their third album and other clients’ projects were lost in the flood, along with their touring RV, their studio investment, and their morale. Trower built a new recording studio, Weights and Measures Soundlab, and eventually remastered the synth-drenched album years later. Multiple PersonalitiesBass player Billy Smith and guitar/synth wizard Wade Williamson joined their ranks in 1999 to complete their 4th album “The Shattering” with producers Jason Livermore and Bill Stevenson (Descendents /Flag). After touring for that record, the band took a breather and worked on other projects through the 2000s, often together, releasing many albums with differing musical styles as Roman Numerals, Thee Water MoccaSins, Olympic Size, Sie Lieben Maschinen, and CoNoCo. 1-800-MELTDOWN is a return to their noise rock roots, released by Init Recordson limited-edition neon green vinyl for Record Store Day 2025.
The Criticals
The Criticals are a Nashville based rock band formed by Parker Forbes and Cole Shugart. The Criticals have proven themselves a powerful and fierce duo — one with both a diverse musical appetite in songwriting and a whiplash live show that’s drawn sellout crowds in major US markets including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The band recently released their highly regarded EP Front Door Confrontations and continued a steady diet of raucous live shows across the country. The band are now set to release a handful of singles leading up to their debut album release on Fantasy Records in 2025.