upcoming live events

1. ORB - 

2. Geelong psych band ORB return after a five year hiatus with new album Tailem Bend. Expanding the band to a four piece and taking their sound into laidback and groovier territories, it feels like a natural progression in their discography. Stoners need not worry though, there is still plenty of fuzz to go round.

3. Sungrater - 
4. Sungrater is a garage and psychedelic rock band from Bend, OR, featuring Andrew Egli (guitar), Rory Isbell (bass), Scott Aycock (drums), and Tarik Rawlings (guitar, vocals). With its members active in various local musical endeavors over the years (Moon Rattles, Bangers, Bony Chanterelle, The Color Study, The Rakes), Sungrater blends various influences from surf rock, acid rock, noisy post-punk, and Middle Eastern music into a dynamic, high-energy sound that is sure to thrill.

1. Deep Sea Diver - 

   In the middle of July 2023 in a Los Angeles studio, Deep Sea Diver mastermind Jessica Dobson took a guitar solo but somehow felt nothing. Just days earlier, her Seattle band played a series of semi-secret shows for devotees at a hometown bar, de facto rehearsals for cutting a new record. The sets had gone well, but, almost immediately, the sessions didn’t. The songs’ essence seemed muddled, Dobson’s conviction lost somewhere in the 1,000 miles between Southern California and the home studio she shares with partner, drummer, and frequent cowriter Peter Mansen. On that first night in Los Angeles, she broke down, wondering what she was doing there, what her band could do to fix it. For the first time ever, Deep Sea Diver retreated, heading home without an album. Did they need to scrap it all, to begin again with new material? Not at all: Following a brief break, Dobson found a renewed sense of self, a trust in her vision for her band and songs and her ability to capture them. After that Los Angeles hiccup, longtime collaborator Andy Park asked Dobson how the new stuff was going over an early fall dinner. She admitted she needed help. In that humbling confession, she soon found ways of working that helped her reimagine and reinvigorate Deep Sea Diver and led directly to the power and brilliance of Billboard Heart, Deep Sea Diver’s fourth album and first for Sub Pop. It is a coup, a triumph over self-doubt in which what first felt like failure became an opportunity to find new freedom, belief, and strength. You can hear it in each of these 11 songs, the beating heart that makes everything here feel like a new anthem for finding your own way forward. The cocksure Bad Seeds swagger of “Shovel,” the tender mercies of “Loose Change,” the serpentine machinations of “Let Me Go,” where Dobson tangles with fellow guitar dynamo Madison Cunningham: Billboard Heart immediately puts Deep Sea Diver in the company of St. Vincent, TV on the Radio, and Flock of Dimes, bands that have found newly ornate and magnetic ways to make indie rock by discarding notions of how it must sound or what it must say. Dobson punches through her past here. As she howls during Billboard Heart’s rapturous title track, she is “welcoming the future by letting go of it.” Exactly three years before Dobson’s galvanizing dinner with Park, Deep Sea Diver issued its third album, 2020’s Impossible Weight, via ATO, the colossal indie imprint that has helped My Morning Jacket, Alabama Shakes, and King Gizzard build careers across the last quarter-century. It was a significant step up for a band that had self-released its first two LPs. The surge of resources resulted in a groundswell of exposure, even a spot on Billboard charts. That success, though, caused Dobson to doubt her impulses, to begin thinking about what an idea’s impact or reception might be as much the strength of the idea itself. During this period of second-guessing, she and Mansen sat near the wide windows of their Seattle living room, with her on piano as he hammered a guitar nearby. “See in the Dark”—a song about coveting your own notions, despite the occasional sense they’re slipping away—emerged in that single sitting, its gothic elegance and pop grandeur proffering a blueprint for what else could come. That moment of domestic creation proved essential for several reasons. Before Impossible Weight, Dobson and Mansen wrote many of Deep Sea Diver’s songs together; this was a return to that bond, which carried over to more than half of Billboard Heart. What’s more, the pair began recording more at home, too. They borrowed microphones and a small clutch of essential gear to capture guitars and vocals in their basement. When talks later began in earnest with Park following the Los Angeles debacle, Dobson began revisiting those earlier recordings, realizing that she had captured so much of that ineffable spark at home, where the atmosphere was of her own design. Mansen and Park helped convince her these weren’t just good enough to use but riveting in their realness. These early versions became templates and blueprints to build upon and frame, plus a way for Dobson to believe again in the material and, most important, herself. And from end to end, the material on Billboard Heart is astonishing. The title track is the one song Deep Sea Diver actually finished in Los Angeles. It’s a radiant and magnificent thing, the billowing synths of member Elliot Jackson and tunneling pedal steel of guest Greg Leisz pushing up an anthem for fearlessly advancing into the future, as best you can. “Emergency” links hardcore’s famous vim to electroclash’s instant allure, Dobson’s italicized voice racing like a gust of wind. Her brief guitar solo at the end is an all-timer, a few hiccupping notes suddenly moving like a sports car in terrifyingly tight corners. Tender and vulnerable, “Tiny Threads” is a sweeping anthem for anyone trying to hold anything together—life, love, themselves. “If it haunts me, let it haunt me,” Dobson sings softly over a stillness framed only by bass and noise. She lets her guitar careen into feedback, then steadily sculpts it into something tuneful. It’s a lifetime of anxiety and sublimation, crystallized into 10 seconds. Billboard Heart feels that way at large. For a minute there, Dobson let that mix of art and commerce we call the music industry cloud her judgment and interfere with her impulses, a common enough story for anyone whose decades of work suddenly yield success. She found her way out of that wormhole by embracing newness, whether that meant practicing songwriting as if it were collegiate homework, believing in her skills recording at home, or playing bass herself because the band had blown so much money during those aborted Los Angeles sessions. (N.B. The big but elastic bass lines are a consistent highlight here, so: good choice.) Mostly, she let go of the fear that comes when we think about our jobs, no matter what they are, and remembered that making music is less work than a way of reckoning and playing with the world, of healing and finding other ways forward. Billboard Heart emerged when Dobson trusted her instincts, a personal breakthrough that prompted an artistic one. It is, in turn, the best Deep Sea Diver album yet, a defiant and brilliant exclamation mark at the end of a long period of wandering.

    

   Morpho - 

   Morpho is the Chicago-based project of guitarist and songwriter Kristyn Chapman, whose debut EP Morpho Season arrived in late 2024 via Hit the North Records. The record quickly drew acclaim for its emotional depth and expressive guitar work, with The Alternative calling it “a warm and lively show for indie rock’s next best thing.”

    

   Since the EP’s release, Morpho has grown into a dynamic live band featuring drummer Tony Mest and bassist Dove Hollis. The set is constantly evolving — raw, expansive, and full of tension in all the right places. Kristyn also tours as a multi-instrumentalist with Deep Sea Diver, and that on-the-road energy has made its way into Morpho’s sound: louder, freer, and made to be felt in the room.

    

   Morpho is in flight this fall, with shows planned along the West Coast and Pacific Northwest.

    

Get ready for ROUND TWO, featuring 22 MORE NEW FILMS!

After two decades of bringing independent, genre-bending, jaw-dropping adult short films to the masses, these days the HUMP! Jury receives way too many incredible, festival-worthy submissions each year to narrow them all down into one feature-length presentation. That means we get to bring you not just one new annual lineup, but TWO all-new annual HUMP! lineups – each stuffed to the max with the hottest, kinkiest, funniest, and most creative adult short films from around the globe.

The second half of 2025's selections are coming (and coming hard), this fall with 22 brand new shorts that are simply too delicious to miss! The quality, the creativity, the completely no-holds-barred themes... no spoilers, but we're about to rock. your. world.

Come join the resistance by supporting fully inclusive, sex- and body-positive art that encourages conversation and asks audiences to embrace themselves, and each other, exactly as they are. Come have a great time doing it. Come get some more

1. Circle Jerks emerged from the punk underbelly of LA’s South Bay in 1979. After serving as a co-founder and lead vocalist of Black Flag during the recording of its essential Nervous Breakdown EP, Keith Morris joined forces with former Redd Kross guitarist Greg Hetson to form what would become Circle Jerks, along with bassist Roger Rogerson and jazz drummer Lucky Lehrer. Unlike much of the unapologetic hardcore that seeped through the cracks of American suburbia, the music of the Circle Jerks was thoughtfully steadfast, yet relentless and ferocious in nature. Bringing together a potent, articulate rhythm section with earnest yet oftentimes derisive lyrics and themes, the band was thereafter heralded as a leader of the pack - and a force to be reckoned with. Plowing forward with a relentless, tooth-cutting work ethic and a rousing stage presence, the band would soon find itself headlining shows at LA’s 5,000-capacity Olympic Auditorium and emblazoned in cult video classics like Decline of Western Civilization, Repo Man, New Wave Theatre, and The Slog Movie. Over the decades, Circle Jerks would release six studio albums, including the acclaimed Group Sex (1980) Wild in the Streets (1982), Golden Shower of Hits (1983), Wonderful (1985), and IV (1987), where they would become a major headliner during the alternative music explosion of the 80’s and 90’s. During hiatuses, Morris fronted bands like OFF! and FLAG, while Hetson played guitar in Bad Religion. Bassist Zander Schloss (The Weirdos, Joe Strummer) has been a member since the 1980’s and veteran drummer Joey Castillo (The Bronx, QOTSA, Danzig, BL’AST!, Wasted Youth) completes the lineup as its newest member.

1. Elton Dan Seeks to Carry the Candle for Experiencing the Live Concert Experience of Elton John

   From his teenage years learning classical music on piano, Elton Dan Gasser always held Elton John as his greatest influence.  Through decades of improvising and singing on thousands of stages from bars to cruises to amphitheaters – Dan thrives on playing live, and jumps at every gig offered him - Dan developed an ability to shine and to share that spotlight energy with the people who came to listen.  He always added Elton John songs when the band was strong enough to pull it off.  In 2015, with the popularity of tribute bands on the rise, Dan finally decided to do his destiny and lead a project paying homage to the greatest songbook in rock music. Thus Elton Dan and The Rocket Band was formed.  

   
   

    “Elton John is my all-time favorite artist and primary inspiration for playing music,” Elton Dan says. “There’s a lot to it.  It’s not a challenge to play and sing, but the diversity from album to album is a rich tapestry of influences including blues and especially country music.”  “I play his music every day, not only to get better also to be enriched and to learn more of his compositions.” 

   
   

   At an Elton Dan concert, you will be enveloped into the magic of Elton’s music through a multimedia production, over-the-top costume changes, the incredible musicianship of the Rocket Band and the high-energy performance that Elton Dan brings to the stage like Elton John of the days past.  “So much energy and pure joy!”, “Fantastic costumes and production!”, “Mesmerizing,” are a taste of the comments from their fans.  “I want our shows to be a true tribute to the greatest musical artist ever,” Dan says.  “When someone attends one of our shows, I don’t try to imitate Elton. Rather, I want the concertgoer to be immersed in the full experience.” 

   
   

   Maybe Dan’s greatest talent is his love of people and ability to share the spotlight such that the audience feels like they are the rock stars!  Fans now follow The Rocket Band around the country, flying or driving in and meeting up with Dan and the band.

   
   

   “I do love to interact with people before, during and after the shows, I feed on it,” Elton Dan says.  “Seeing people become empowered, validated, even healed through a live music event is transformative in my life.”  “We embrace ALL people to come and celebrate and be emboldened by the soundtrack of our lives that Elton and Bernie have left to us.  It’s a tremendous honor and brings me great passion.” 

   
   

   Dan’s philanthropic work extends beyond the stage, and he seeks to participate in humanitarian causes.  Elton Dan and his band have helped raise over $300,000 for the Dream

   Factory, which gives terminally or critically ill children their biggest wish. They also have raised over $170,000 for Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, a facility dedicated to treating the medical needs of children. Elton Dan performed with Danny De Los Reyes of the Zac Brown Band for the children at Children’s Mercy Hospital. “I want to honor not only Elton but also his generous legacy and the culture he stands for,” says Elton Dan.

   
   

   Elton Dan has attended 17 Elton John concerts around the globe, including being front and center during Elton’s final live shows in North America at Dodger Stadium this past November.  Dan has interacted with David Furnish, Elton John’s partner.  As done last year, on Elton’s birthday, March 25, Dan will video the audience singing “Happy Birthday” to Elton and send it to David for Elton to enjoy.  It’s just another example how Elton Dan finds ways to make his concerts an even greater event to empower and celebrate people.