For Dallas-born folk singer-songwriter Anjimile, who grew up in a conservative Christian family with immigrant parents from Malawi, life wasn’t always easy to figure out. Their journey as a young adult, trans man, while simultaneously battling addiction, resulted in the brutally honest 2020 album, Giver Taker, which the artist deemed to be full of prayers. A few years later came The King, his most defiant and intense record to date, which helped Anjimile deal with the complex emotions that stem from existing as a Black, trans person in the current political climate. And though that album felt like one filled with curses, the latest addition to their discography, titled You’re Free to Go, appears to be “an album of blooming.” As Anjimile puts it, “a lot of the themes are related to transformation and/or growing pains… a blooming spring is a beautiful thing but it’s also a disruption to the status quo.” 

As his voice deepened and grew in confidence, Anjimile discovered “a newfound level of comfort”, both in singing and composing his music. And though he appeared on Soundcheck before, he returns with a new sonic palette and stories, encapsulating moments of acceptance and eagerness to let love in.  (- Sırma Munyar)

Set list: 1. Rust and Wire 2. The Store 3. Waits For Me

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Elizabeth Ziman, who performs as Elizabeth and the Catapult, is a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn. Over the past twenty years, she and a slowly rotating cast of musical friends have released six LPs, full of songs that offer a neat, often unexpected blend of the witty and the vulnerable. Her latest release is called Responsible Friend, "about slowing down in a world that keeps accelerating. It’s a commitment to friends, family, and self, at a time when everyone seems to be carrying more than they can reasonably hold" (Bandcamp). Elizabeth and the Catapult play in our studio. 

Set list: 1. 50/50 2. When the Doctor Needs A Doctor 3. I Love You Still

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On this episode of Soundcheck, revisit a special live performance and interview from our archives, recorded in 2019. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, host of the podcast Aria Code, and MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens collaborated with Italian pianist and percussionist, Francesco Turrisi on there is no Other: twelve songs that explore the connections between European, Arabic, African-American, and Mediterranean sounds with an opposition to "othering" and “a celebration of the spread of ideas, connectivity, and shared experience” (Nonesuch Records).

The duo’s artistic cross-pollinations and discoveries draw from Italy, Ireland, Iran, Africa, and Brazil, among other places, and reflect the history of the movement of both people and instruments (with particular attention paid to both the trans-Saharan and the trans-Atlantic slave trade). Giddens and Turrisi have mentioned in interviews that audiences probably won’t be thinking about how cultures meet, collide, and create new forms. But perhaps as the players weave their magic, the result might also be that the music will start deep and productive conversations about migrations. Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, along with bassist Jason Sypher, join us in-studio to perform some of these songs. – Caryn Havlik

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The London-based art rock band, Mary in the Junkyard, is getting ready to release their debut album after four years of trying to make sense of strange things in life through music. “I think that life is very surreal,” says the vocalist of the group, Clari Freeman-Taylor, as she explains why she enjoys “writing about things that may be a little bit unsettling”. Nothing about the order of life is rehearsed, so why should their music be? Their practice relies heavily on their songwriting and arranging rituals where they carefully piece each layer of sound together. But preparations for live performances are enforced with a spirit of spontaneity, which, as the viola and bass player Saya Barbaglia points out, is a big part of their sound. 

The duo blurred the rigid lines of classical music together as they grew into their teenage years with rock music. They traded hours of sight-reading for jam sessions that led to endless scraps of ideas. Those ideas would eventually become fully fleshed-out songs with the addition of drummer David Addison to the band. 

Mary in the Junkyard’s upcoming LP, Role Model Hermit, carries hints of Freeman-Taylor and Barbaglia’s classical music background, as dense string arrangements pop up every now and then. But in our studio, the trio reveals the core of each song they perform: raw, skeletal, dark, and light, all at the same time. (- Sırma Munyar)

Setlist: 1. New Muscles 2. Myrtle 3. Blood

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Bassoonist Joy Guidry is a versatile improviser, performance artist, and composer of experimental ambient electronic music, who has founded her own record label, Jaid Records. While she is classically-trained, she has also listened deeply to some of the spiritual jazz of Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Shabaka, and Nala Sinephro, and collaborates widely, most recently at the Park Avenue Armory in New York with Jessie Cox, Tcheser Holmes, and Scott Li. Her latest album Five Prayers, is a collection of works for bassoon with electronics, in which the Houston-born musician and sound architect takes inspiration from the spirit of the Black church and atmospheric sounds of ambient music. Joy Guidry performs in-studio. 

Set list: 1. Georges 2. Dear June 3. You've Done What You Can

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Imagine the tropical grooves of Colombia and Mexico in an avant-garde setting. That’s the ethos of Ruido Tovar; the new collaborative project between Eblis Alvarez of Meridian Brothers and Camilo Lara of the Mexican Institute of Sound. 

Before releasing their debut self-titled record together, both Alvarez and Lara were known to experiment with electronics, fusing modern sounds with music styles that are typically considered traditional. Alvarez put a spin on cumbia and salsa with his band Meridian Brothers, while Lara pushed the electronica movement in Mexico forward with his project, the Mexican Institute of Sound. 

Coming together as Ruido Tovar, the duo joins the Soundcheck host, John Schaefer, with their pocket-sized effects pedals and compact synthesizers to perform some new songs from their new record and discuss their journey in music thus far.  (- Sırma Munyar)

Setlist: 1. El Campeon 2. Concorde 3. Ritmo Babilonia

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British singer and songwriter Paris Paloma, a very sharp and thoughtful young artist who considers grief, politics, creativity, love, art, Greek mythology, and power structures in her music and in interviews, has opened for Florence & the Machine, played Glastonbury, and lent her voice to the Tolkien universe. She has built a community – her fairies –over the past few years, from her first EP, 2021’s cemeteries and socials (you want dark? Folk-horror-pop? She’s got you) to what will be her latest album, The Fatal Flaw, due out in September 2026. [View the artwork for the single “Good Boy”]

Paris Paloma offers the anti-AI song  “Miyazaki”, about the unstoppable human need to create – and yes, named after the legendary Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki. Plus, she plays an intimate version of her feminist anthem, “Labour”, (which she played with the Resistance Revival Chorus on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2025), in-studio. 

Set list: 1. Labour 2. Miyazaki 3. Stem the Flow

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The New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas have built their considerable reputation on a high-energy, exuberant blend of R&B, funk, hip hop, spoken word, gospel, and pop. Listeners may recall how the band first introduced themselves to the public radio community in 2017 by winning the NPR Tiny Desk contest, and have since been awarded a GRAMMY. Their new album is called The Last Balloon, and it completes a trilogy that began with Green Balloon in 2019 and Red Balloon in 2022. Tank and the Bangas play a few fizzy-lifting, playful, and cathartic songs from the Last Balloon, in-studio. 

Set List: 1.Move 2. No Invite 3. Whole World

Photo of Tank and the Bangas by Jeremy Tauriac

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Nottingham post-punk duo Sleaford Mods have built their career on going against the grain, challenging the British class system, capitalism, and pop culture. They’d tear it all down if they could. Vocalist Jason Williamson and producer Andrew Fearn are known for their relentless streams of expletive-laden takedowns of social and political hypocrisy, but they’re also catchy in their own minimalist, not suitable for a workplace way. Sleaford Mods’ latest album is called The Demise of Planet X, and they perform some of these danceable and ferocious rants, in-studio.

Set list: 1. I Don't Rate you 2. Megaton 3. Elitist G.O.A.T.

Photo by Ewen Spencer/Courtesy of the artist

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Emma Hospelhorn is known as a flutist when she goes by her full name, especially as a member of Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente; the acclaimed collective that brings experimental chamber music to the masses. But when she steps into the universe of her solo project, Em Spel, she writes and sings surreal, beguiling songs that fall somewhere in between dream pop, art rock, and folk music. 

The multi-instrumentalist has a new album out, titled Bird or Snake, in which she occasionally breaches the constraints of tonality and uses layering techniques to texturize the organic elements that define her sound. The pandemic carved out enough space in Hospelhorn’s busy schedule for the creation of new Em Spel songs, some of which she performs live with her band for this episode of Soundcheck. (- Sırma Munyar)

Setlist: 1. The Poet 2.Sea Wall 3.Geographic

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The Klezmatics have never been just a klezmer band. From their beginnings 40 years ago, they’ve fused klezmer music, rooted in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, with the sounds of jazz, psychedelia, Latin music, punk energy, gospel fervor, global rhythms, and even ambient music. They’re also a band whose music rises to meet the moment, from their debut album Shvaygn = Toyt, silence equals death, released during the height of the AIDS epidemic, to their latest album, which is a 40th-anniversary statement called We Were Made For These Times. It uses music as activist art to speak to questions of immigration, labor, and belonging - answering with urgency, care, faith, community, and collective action, (Bandcamp liner notes). The Klezmatics play some of these anthemic songs of resilience and joy, in-studio. 

Set list: 1. Un du akerst  2. Elegy for the Innocents 3. Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)

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