With four years alongside one another on the road and in the studio, Hard Working Americans embody the grit, grind and salt of the earth vibe their name implies. Some call them a super group. I call them the sum of their parts, and hot damn do those parts work well together.

Potions and Poisons is the fourth album of original music from Head for the Hills, the Colorado based post-modern bluegrass outfit of Adam Kinghorn, Joe Lessard, Matt Loewen and Sam Parks. There’s no reinvention of the wheel here--no computer programmed banjo rolls or digitally arpeggiated fiddle lines. Instead we find Head for the Hills at the peak of their powers of musical alchemy, building little worlds of sound from the detritus of bluegrass, jazz, hip hop, folk and soul.

J Boog (Jerry Afemata), a reggae singer of Samoan descent was born in Long Beach and raised in Compton, CA. He is the youngest of seven brothers and one sister who come from hard-working parents that relentlessly instilled a strong cultured household.

Gasoline Lollipops is a Colorado band that combines the sincerity of dirt-floor folk with the energy and rebelliousness of punk. It's an all-new incarnation of alt-country that’s both high-energy and heartfelt, like the American highway's soundtrack. This year marked the release of the GasPops' debut full-length album, Resurrection, and the band’s first-ever vinyl release, Soul Mine, will be released at the Fox Theatre in Boulder on Saturday, December 16. 

Redefining the possibilities of modern music, The Russ Liquid Test fuses the raw vitality of classic funk and the inventive sound design of electronic production. Songwriter/producer and renowned brass specialist Russell Scott heads up the New Orleans-based band. Guitarist Andrew Block and drummer Deven Trusclair round things out, with each providing a distinct musical background deeply rooted in the New Orleans jazz scene. Their debut EP 1984 featured an eclectic array of guest collaborators such as Mr.

Cigarettes After Sex front man Greg Gonzalez had a clear vision for his band’s debut album, a gorgeously cinematic work released via Partisan Records on June 9th, 2017. After the phenomenal online break-out success of 2015’s reverberant beauty ‘Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby’ from the early Cigarettes EP (‘I.’) from 2012, the Brooklyn transplant (originally from El Paso) wanted to project his worldview on to a bigger screen, a broader canvas. As Greg explains, “This is like the novel or feature-length version of Cigarettes.

Boulder, for so many years, has been a hotbed of music activity. It is known around the country as having one of the most influential music scenes in America; particularly if you’re a fan of newgrass, jambands, electronic, and everything in between. Some of Boulder's longest standing bands have merged traditional American jazz, blues, rock-n-roll, and bluegrass with electronic music and other genres. One example that comes to mind is The String Cheese Incident.