10,000 Maniacs
10,000 Maniacs put Jamestown, New York, on the national music map. Founded in 1981 in this small Chautauqua County city near the Pennsylvania border, the band became one of the most important acts of the college rock and alternative rock movements of the 1980s and early 1990s, led by the singular voice and lyrical intelligence […]
Every Time I Die
Every Time I Die was Buffalo, New York’s most ferocious musical export of the 21st century — a metalcore band that spent 24 years pushing the boundaries of heavy music with wit, fury, and relentless creative ambition. From their formation in 1998 to their acrimonious split in early 2022, the band released nine studio albums […]
Post Malone
Austin Richard Post was born on July 4, 1995, in Syracuse, New York — a detail that tends to surprise fans who associate him with Texas or Los Angeles. Post Malone, as the world knows him, spent his first nine years in Central New York before his family relocated to Grapevine, Texas, where his father […]
moe.
moe. was born in 1989 at the University at Buffalo when Chuck Garvey and Rob Derhak were asked to play a friends’ Halloween party. That first gig — loose, improvised, fueled by the anything-goes energy of a college house show — set the template for one of America’s most enduring jam bands, a group that […]
X Ambassadors
X Ambassadors are an alternative rock band forged in the classrooms and practice spaces of Ithaca, New York — a small college town in the Finger Lakes region that has produced an outsized share of creative talent. Brothers Sam Nelson Harris (vocals, guitar, saxophone) and Casey Harris (piano, keyboards), along with childhood friend Noah Feldshuh, […]
Gym Class Heroes
Gym Class Heroes emerged from Geneva, New York — a small Finger Lakes town that became an unlikely incubator for one of the 2000s’ most successful rap-rock crossover acts. The band formed in 1997 when frontman Travis “Travie” McCoy met drummer Matt McGinley in their high school gym class at Geneva High School. Guitarist later […]
State Champs
State Champs launched out of Albany, New York, in 2010 and within a decade became one of the biggest names in pop-punk — a genre they helped revitalize at a time when many critics had written it off. Founded by vocalist Derek DiScanio and guitarist Tyler Szalkowski, the band built their following the old-fashioned way: […]
Drug Church
Drug Church is Albany, New York’s most important contribution to the current wave of American post-hardcore — a band whose sharp, aggressive sound and Patrick Kindlon’s acerbic lyrical wit have made them critical darlings, festival headliners, and one of the most respected acts in contemporary punk since their formation in 2011. What started as a […]
Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon was born on April 28, 1953, in Rochester, New York. Though her family relocated when she was young — her father was a UCLA professor — Rochester holds the distinction of being the birthplace of one of alternative rock’s most consequential figures. From Art to No Wave Gordon grew up in Los Angeles, […]
Bob Dylan (Woodstock Period)
Bob Dylan did not create Woodstock’s music scene, but he made it mythic. The most influential songwriter of the twentieth century spent the better part of five years in the Catskill Mountains, and the work he produced there — during a period of intense privacy, recovery, and reinvention — reshaped the trajectory of American popular […]