The Seattle band Smokey Brights released a new album called Dashboard Heat this fall. The band is playing The Crocodile in Seattle on December 11. Emily Fox caught up with the band to hear about how the songs on the new album reflect the loss of a parent to cancer, the overturning of Roe v Wade and an ode to Seattle’s Northgate Way.

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Say She She’s album, Cut & Rewind is one of the most played albums on KEXP in 2025. Emily Fox speaks with the trio about how they met sharing a wall in a New York apartment building, their reflections on women’s rights in their song She Who Dares and about the racist history of Chicago’s 1979 Disco Demolition Night that shows up in their song, Disco Life.

“Let's take what happened at Comiskey Park where people were really just finding an excuse to burn black records, black musicians' records. Got nothing to do with disco, nothing to with genre,” Piya Malik says.

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The Montreal based and Anishinaabe-led band, Ribbon Skirt talks about their album, Bite Down and new EP, PENSACOLA. Frontwoman Tashiina Buswa talks with Emily Fox about how indigeneity comes up in her music, especially the song “Off Rez” and shares stories about her life and family, including how her mother was saved from the mass adoption of indigenous children known as the “Sixties Scoop.”

“You’re never really free, even if you're told you're free as an Indigenous person,” Buswa says. “It's why we are always saying land back. There’s been so much that has been stripped away and so much that won't ever be given back, but all we can do is just keep demanding and keep fighting for that freedom or that to have our rights to exist in this land is like that's the only thing that we can keep fighting for.”

photo credit: Ani Harroch

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