If you have never seen a show at Surly’s festival field, this is your chance. Courtney Barnett will be taking over the beautiful on Saturday, July 21st. Since the release of her debut full-length Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Courtney Barnett has been celebrated as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in indie rock, a singer-writer who mixes deeply insightful observations with devastating self-assessment. Rolling Stone praised her as “one of the sharpest, most original songwriters around—at any level, in any genre… a self-strafing humorist á la Lena Dunham who’s also a Dylan-style word ninja”. She’s a critical darling with an adoring fanbase to match. Barnett’s electric live shows have seen her grace the stages of the biggest festivals of the world, playing to adoring audiences across 5 continents.
Barnett has won 4 ARIA Awards, the prestigious Australian Music Prize and APRA’s Australian Songwriter Of The Year Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy and a Brit Award and also won The USA Independent Music Association’s Libera Award. She’s topped it all off with a performances on The Ellen Degeneres Show, three appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and the season finale of Saturday Night Live.
2017 saw the release of the wonderful album Lotta Sea Lice, a collaboration album with Kurt Vile and a gorgeous place-holder while we await the release of her second full-length in 2018 (Tell Me How You Really Feel, due out on May 18). Courtney is the founder of Milk! Records, a label based in Melbourne, Australia through which she releases her own records and those of Jen Cloher, Fraser A. Gorman, Jade Imagine, Loose Tooth, East Brunswick All Girls Choir and more.
Opening up the show will be Julien Baker. Julien Baker’s solo debut, Sprained Ankle, was one of the most widely acclaimed works of 2015. The album, recorded by an 18-year-old and her friend in only a few days, was a bleak yet hopeful, intimate document of staggering experiences and grace, centered entirely around Baker’s voice, guitar, and unblinking honesty. Sprained Ankle appeared on year-end lists everywhere from NPR Music to The AV Club to New York Magazine’s Vulture.
With her new album, Turn Out The Lights (out Oct 27 via Matador Records), the now 21-year-old Baker returns to a much bigger stage, but with the same core of breathtaking vulnerability and resilience. From its opening moments — when her chiming, evocative melody is accompanied by swells of strings — Turn Out The Lights throws open the doors to the world without sacrificing the intimacy that has become a hallmark of her songs.
Lucy Dacus will get the night started. Lucy Dacus is done thinking small. Two years after her 2016 debut, No Burden, won her unanimous acclaim as one of rock’s most promising new voices, Dacus returns on March 2 with Historian, a remarkably assured 10-track statement of intent. It finds her unafraid to take on the big questions — the life-or-death reckonings, and the ones that just feel that way. It’s a record full of bracing realizations, tearful declarations and moments of hard-won peace, expressed in lyrics that feel destined for countless yearbook quotes and first tattoos.
Tickets are still available here.
Remaining Tour Dates
07/10 – Toronto, ON @ Danforth Music Hall
07/11 – Ottawa. ON @ Ottawa Bluesfest
07/12 – North Adams, MA @ Mass MoCA
07/14 – Columbus, OH @ Newport Music Hall
07/15 – Louisville, KY @ Forecastle Festival
07/17 – St. Louis, MO @ The Pageant
07/18 – Kansas City, MO @ The Truman
07/21 – Minneapolis, MN @ Surly Brewing Festival Field
07/24 – Washington, DC @ The Anthem
07/25 – Brooklyn, NY @ Celebrate Brooklyn!
07/28 – Newport, RI @ Newport Folk Festival
