February 2026
There is so much good music being made in Austin that it can be hard to keep up. To help you stay on top of it, we’ve pulled together some of the best new releases from local artists. Here is the new Austin music you need to know from The Opera, Voxtrot, Grandmaster, and more. Hear all of these songs on-air at KUTX 98.9 or online at KUTX.org.
The Opera – “Cinderblock”
Self-Released
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Tyler Dozier has metamorphosed since we last heard from her under the moniker Lady Dan, reemerging as a member of a new 6-piece art-punk featuring producer Ernesto Grey, whose work includes other intrepid ATX sound stylists like Loveme and former KUTX Artist of the Month, Font.
They first hit our airwaves with an unassailably cool industrial darkwave single titled “Thrasher.” Imagine if Trent Reznor produced a dancefloor tune for Goldfrapp – like something you’d hear in an underground goth dance club you suspect may actually be a front for a vampire den. Badass, of course, but The Opera proved in their debut EP that they’re a sophisticated kind of darkness with a repertoire much deeper than music for the hip undead.
On “Cinderblock,” Dozier barks and croons like an Odyssean siren alongside turbulent basslines and guitar riffs that swirl like an intrusive thought loop – it feels a bit like latter-day Unwound, but Dozier brings human passion instead of the Washingtonians’ typically desolate emotive range. Their debut EP, I Want This to Last, is out now, and well, I gotta say I want this to last too because it’s the freshest thing in the Austin air right now.
Grandmaster – “Life Arrow”
Self released
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Former Artist of the Month, Grandmaster, is back with another liturgical beam of space cult funk on Grandmaster II. The group started as a joke played on an online scammer who called themselves “The Grandmaster,” but soon it morphed into an eleven-piece funk band featuring musicians trained at Berklee College of Music, an elaborate cosmic backstory, costumes, and pseudonyms–all the members are called “Zealots,” who serve the Grandmaster at the center of the band.
Their latest LP Grandmaster II is just as, if not more, ambitious and expansive as their debut. It sounds like Earth, Wind & Fire scoring a modern Nintendo game – and if you’ve played a contemporary Super Mario game, you know that’s praise of the highest order. Huge arrangements and virtuoso musicianship with a whimsy-breezy sound. Although their sophomore record leans a little more in the prog direction, a la Alan Parsons Project, like on the single “Life Arrow.” Maybe this is what Steely Dan would have sounded like if Donald Fagan were a millennial gamer?
Voxtrot “Fighting Back”
Self Released
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Genre-definers like Spoon, the Octopus Project, and Explosions in the Sky put Austin, TX, in the foreground of the 2000s indie music explosion, but well over a decade later, another legendary act from the annals of ATX indie rock history has reemerged – Voxtrot.
For those who came of age in those halcyon days of 2000s indie music, Voxtrot was a pillar in many music collections alongside Belle and Sebastian, any band on Elephant 6 records’ roster, and, of course, a sacred copy of Meat is Murder, probably lifted from an older sibling’s CD binder. Which brings a sobering realization: it’s been nearly twenty years since Voxrot released a full-length record — the same span of time, if not longer, than had passed since The Smiths released an album back when we were “nostalgically” listening to them in the aughts. But I digress.
After what Ramesh Srivastava called a “career path [that] was truly one of long, simmering build, explosion, and almost instantaneous decay,” he announced on the band’s website in April of 2010 that Voxtrot was breaking up after they completed their short, seven-date Goodbye, Cruel World tour that wrapped at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom that June, putting a button on one of Austin’s most successful breakout bands of the 2000’s.
In the time since, Ramesh released his debut solo album, The King, in 2014, accompanied by a 100-page hardback book full of his own prose, poetry, and photography. He followed that up with Eternal Spring in 2022, the same year Voxtrot reunited with a secret show in Lockhart that unofficially kicked off a nine-date tour, but what began as a reunion tour has become a full-blown reformation with their sophomore LP, Dreamers in Exile, due out on February 27th, 19 years following their debut.
Almost Heaven – “Fever Trying to Blow”
Self-Released
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Speaking of the early 2000s, if your boogie shoes have been collecting dust since the Rapture was in heavy rotation at every house party, The cowbell-clanging, body-moving “Fever Trying to Blow” is the dance-punk/electroclash resurrection you needed.
The Austin duo, Almost Heaven, seemingly fell from the sky (pun intended), fully realized within the last year, but their trajectory was set years ago when Stefan Barraza was studying at Texas Tech, and a professor gave a guest lecture on the then relatively new graphic design program. The epiphany that he could make a living designing album covers for his favorite artists led to a career in freelance graphic design/videographer work, which eventually landed him in a friend’s studio, where he had another realization: What if he made his own music for his videos?
Now, alongside Austin-native drummer Jaelyn Valero, the duo just got the party started with their debut EP, Raw Cranium.
Money Chicha – “Ojos Rojos”
Released via Distrolux, SL
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KUTX Digital Content Manager Peter Babb put it best after seeing Money Chicha perform in 2016: “Listening to Money Chicha feels a bit like taking a hit of acid, downing a couple shots of tequila, and hopping a plane to 1960s Peru.”
Very few of us were hip to the vintage organ swells and surf-rock guitars of Cumbia’s Amazonian, psychedelic rock cousin, Chicha, until this Grupo Fantasma/Brownout offshoot blessed us with their debut record, Echo en Mexico, back in 2016. A decade later, they continue to expand our minds with every new release.
We do not condone any mind expansion supplements to accompany your maiden voyage with our former Artist of the Month’s new LP ONDA ESOTÉRICA, but the bomb track opener titled “Ojos Rojos,” may steer you towards the appropriate herbal supplement if you are so inclined.
