Atlanta shows – Rad/ATL

March 23, 2026March 24, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows

‘Benjamin Smoke’ screening at The Plaza Theatre on Wednesday, March 25

Twenty Six years after directors Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen released the documentary film Benjamin Smoke, the story endures, capturing a ghost in the grain of Atlanta’s underground music and mythology.

Shot throughout the 1990s in Cabbagetown, the film traces the ragged, incandescent life of Benjamin (born Robert Dickerson), a poet, drag performer, and frontman for the bands Smoke and the Opal Foxx Quartet.

What unfolds is a collage of moments—equal parts beauty and abrasion. Cohen (Fugazi Instrument) and Sillen’s lens drifts through cluttered streets, dimly lit stages, and unhinged conversations, capturing a figure who existed in defiance of permanence. Benjamin’s world is one of contradictions: confrontational yet vulnerable, self-destructive yet searching, rooted in the decaying edges of a city then teetering between neglect and reinvention.

The screening also serves as a reunion of sorts for those who orbited that era. An introduction by Film Love’s Andy Ditzler and Bill Taft (Smoke, Opal Foxx Quartet, Hubcap City, W8ing4UFOS) sets the stage, followed by a post-show discussion featuring Taft along with friends and cohorts Clare Butler, Rosser Shymanski, Laurie Stevens, and Tom Zarrilli.

For anyone who remembers—or longs to understand—Atlanta in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, this event offers a chance to sit with a life lived in fleeting moments, without apology. It’s also a chance to explore the beauty and unease of a scene that refuses to stay buried.

Wednesday, March 25. $16.49 (adult). $13.50 (seniors, children, and military) 7 p.m.

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March 20, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows

Soleil Moon Frye’s ‘Werewolf in the Waves’ premieres at the Atlanta Documentary Film Festival March 19-22 at Synchronicity Theatre

Soleil Moon Frye. Photo by Amanda Demme.

The 21st Atlanta Documentary Film Festival returns to Synchronicity Theatre March 19–21, bringing a weekend of nonfiction storytelling that draws from the full spectrum of human experience. It’s a festival that’s hand-curated for Atlanta audiences—intimate, unvarnished, and driven by voices that linger long after the credits roll.

This year’s slate casts a wide net, pulling together films that examine identity, memory, and the fragile architecture of human connection. The centerpiece takes place on closing night with Werewolf in the Waves, the latest from director Soleil Moon Frye.

Frye is best known as the former child actress who played the title role in Punky Brewster on NBC from 1984 to 1986. More recently, Frye’s diaristic approach in Kid 90 resonated with critics and audiences alike, its unguarded intimacy doubling as a time-capsule portrait of youth, memory, and the cost of growing up in public.

With Werewolf in the Waves, Frye once again turns the camera inward, tracing her reconnection with childhood friend Seth Binzer—better known as Shifty Shellshock of the band Crazy Town—during the band’s attempted comeback tour. Shot largely on an iPhone, the film reveals a more painful narrative, as Binzer struggles with relapse. The result is an unflinching look at addiction’s pull and the emotional wreckage it leaves behind.

Frye will introduce the film’s premiere Sunday night. Afterward, she will take part in a 45-minute Q&A session.

Werewolf in the waves screens on Sunday, March 22, at 7:05 p.m.

Check out the rest of the weekend’s schedule and line up here.

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March 17, 2026March 18, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows

An evening with Marc Ribot at the Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End on Friday, March 20

Marc Ribot is a shape-shifting guitar player whose style dissolves the boundaries between genres as quickly as it defines them. When Ribot takes the stage at the Garden Club on Friday, March 20, expect nothing less than a musical séance performed on six strings.

Ribot’s solo work stretches across a body of stark, deeply personal recordings, ranging from interpretations like Plays the Works of Frantz Casseus to the haunted drift of Silent Movies, and his latest release, 2025’s Map of A Blue City.

Ribot’s live sets rarely settle into anything so fixed. Rather, they unfold in real time: fragments of melody, bursts of free improvisation, and ghostly echoes of everything from Haitian classical music to downtown New York noise. It’s a language that Ribot has spent decades refining alongside collaborators like Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant, and John Zorn, helping shape records that are as strange as they are timeless.

That restless spirit traces back to Ribot’s early days studying under Frantz Casseus and cutting his teeth in New York’s late-’70s underground before surfacing as a defining voice in projects like John Lurie’s the Lounge Lizards. Since then, he’s become a connective thread between worlds, jumping from avant-garde jazz to roots music, film scores, and beyond.

On Friday night, Ribot will perform solo on acoustic and electric guitar, stripping everything down to instinct and possibility. It’s an all-seated, first-come affair—fitting for a night that rewards close listening. With Ribot, the only certainty is that nothing will unfold quite the way you expect, and that’s exactly the point.

$30 (adv. + fees). $35 (door + fees). 8 p.m. The Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End.

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February 23, 2026February 24, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows, New music

Anna Jensen’s ‘Let’s Go Dancing’ celebrates the songs of Kevn Kinney and Drivin N Cryin at The Sun ATL April 10-May 23

Artwork for Edwin McCain’s cover of Drivin N Cryin’s ‘Rush Hour.’ By Anna Jensen.

On Friday, April 10, The Sun ATL premieres “Let’s Go Dancing: Artwork celebrating the songs of Kevn Kinney and Drivin N Cryin.” The show features a colorful and deeply personal collection of works by Anna Jensen, who transforms music and songwriting into a visual language.

Cover art for Puddles Pity Party’s single by Anna Jensen.

Running through May 23, the show draws from a sprawling series of six LPs and dozens of online singles featuring artists playing Kinney’s songs from his solo releases and his work as the lyricist and frontman with Drivin N Cryin.

Jensen conceived, curated, and produced “Let’s Go Dancing” via Tasty Good Records. She is also married to Kinney. The show features roughly 75 of her acrylic paintings, each one created as a direct response to the cover songs that appear throughout the series, performed by artists such as Abe Partridge, Amy Ray Band feat. Emily Saliers (of the Indigo Girls), Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish, Fang of Gore (a Gang of Four), Gordon Gano (of the Violent Femmes), Peter Buck and Mike Mills (of R.E.M.), and dozens more.

The cover art for Abe Partridge’s single by Anna Jensen.

Varying in size and mood, the paintings function as emotional translations—snapshots of how a photograph, a story, a lyrical phrase, a chord change, or a simple melody lands in Jensen’s imagination.

The show is a traditional gallery presentation and a map of devotion. Each canvas is tethered to a song, and each song becomes a jumping-off point for color, gesture, and abstraction steeped in Southern punk rock imagery. The cumulative effect mirrors Kinney’s catalog: wide-ranging, deeply felt, and guided by instinct rather than rigid structure.

The six week span of the exhibition will feature live performances by some of the artists who contributed to “Let’s Go Dancing,” giving immediate life to the songs that inspired the paintings. It’s a full-circle moment—music inspiring art, art reframing music, and community binding it all together.

Check back soon for details.

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January 31, 2026January 31, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows

Michael Almereyda’s 1994 film ‘Nadja’ screening in 4k at The Plaza Theater on Thursday, February 19

On Thursday, February 19, Plazadrome digs deep into the ’90s art-house underground with a screening of Michael Almereyda’s sleek and chilly 1994 vampire film Nadja.

The film takes shape as a soft, postmodern reimagining of Dracula’s Daughter (1936), transplanting familiar nocturnal lore—alienation, desire, and immortality—into 1990s Brooklyn.

This screening features a newly released 4K restoration (Arbelos and Grasshopper), the highest quality presentation Nadja has received yet—an ideal excuse to revisit a film that has long existed in the margins.

Before the lights go down, Videodrome’s Jordan Kady will offer a short video introduction that digs into the film’s famously fraught production history. Chief among the hurdles: the sudden departure of actor Eric Stoltz just days before shooting was set to begin, which resulted in the film’s financiers bailing on the project. Executive producer David Lynch stepped in and personally financed the film, a rare act of filmmaker solidarity.

Stylistically, Nadja is as striking as it is unconventional. Almereyda’s use of the Fisher-Price PXL2000 aka Pixelvision toy camera in select scenes gives the film a ghostly, degraded texture, nodding to the expressionist techniques of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu, while firmly rooting it in the DIY aesthetics of the ’90s.

Composer Simon Fisher Turner’s haunting score adds to the film’s hypnotic pull, while the film’s soundtrack—featuring music by My Bloody Valentine, Portishead, Verve, and Spacehog—anchors Nadja firmly in its era. As Kady puts it, “Almereyda once described the film as ‘sucking the blood out of all other vampire movies,’” reconstituting centuries of lore into something singularly stylish and deeply strange. Three decades later, these sensibilities still feel radical and irresistibly seductive. Nadja is a must-see on the Plaza Theater’s big screen.

$16.49 (+tax). 9 p.m. The Plaza Theater, 1049 Ponce De Leon Ave NE.

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January 26, 2026January 27, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows

Che Arthur, Five Eight, and Victory Hands play Waller’s Coffee on Wednesday, January 28

Multi instrumentalist Che Arthur is a Chicago-based artist touring in support of his fourth and most recently released solo album, Describe This Present Moment (Past/Future Records). Having recently wrapped up a month-long European tour doing live sound and opening for Bob Mould, Arthur brings a modern take on raw hardcore velocity, and intense punk songwriting to Waller’s Coffee on Wednesday, January 28.

For this show, Arthur is joined by Athens indie rock stalwarts Five Eight and Atlanta post-punk statesmen Victory Hands.

Five Eight is still riding high after touring the Southeastern U.S. from Austin to Asheville to Tampa with their critically-acclaimed feature length documentary film, Weirdo: The Story Of Five Eight. The group’s ninth studio album, Help A Sinner, is due out in March via Static Era Records.

Victory Hands is prepping to record their upcoming release, a “watergatefold” double LP titled Cavett. The album builds upon VH’s theme of crafting lyrics using transcripts taken from disgraced former U.S. President Richard M. Nixon’s nefarious recordings of conversations about his enemies in the media—journalists! The release date for Cavett (as in Dick) remains TBD, as the album is currently being recorded. Come get a sneak peek at the songs.

If you can’t make it out for the the show at Waller’s, you can catch Che Arthur in Athens on Jan. 30 at Normal Bar with David Barbe of Sugar and Mercyland.

Check out Sugar’s latest single, “Long Live Love” below.

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January 26, 2026January 26, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows, New music

Club Silencio brought the music of David Lynch to The Garden Club at Wild Heaven on Friday, January 23

Meghan Dowlen of Club Silencio. Photo by Jeff Shipman.

On January 23, The Garden Club at Wild Heaven transformed into a darkened threshold between worlds as Club Silencio paid loving tribute to the music of David Lynch’s films and television series. Billed as a celebration of what would have been Lynch’s 80th birthday, the atmosphere ebbed and flowed with a deep knowledge of just how much this music breathes, trembles, and rumbles.

The night began with a Morphine cover dubbed Cure For Pain, which found saxophone player Ben Davis joined by bass player and vocalist David Railey, and drummer Robbie Nelson paying homage to Cambridge, Mass’ once great low rock trio. The group’s set was a well-balanced counterpart to Club Silencio, crafting an atmosphere that was both fun and foreboding while channeling Morphine’s slow-burning fusion of jazz, blues, and alternative rock in songs such as “You Look Like Rain” (featuring Matt Coleman), “Cure For Pain,” and “Honey White.”

Club Silencio drew from the haunted lullabies and skronking unease of soundtracks from films such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Inland Empire, and, of course, Twin Peaks. Vocalist Meghan Dowlen brought a commanding presence to the stage, her voice equal parts torch song and apparition, while the band—Jeffrey Bützer on guitar, TT Mahony playing keys, saxophone player Ben Davis, bass player Matt Steadman, guitarist Henry Jack, and drummer Sean Zearfoss—proved deeply fluent in Lynch’s cinematic language of mood, menace, and overdrive. “The Pink Room” and Julie Cruise’s “Rocking Back Inside My Heart” from Twin Peaks laid the ground for the band to show off some of it’s own flare while taking on the Lynchian hits: “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)” from Eraserhead, Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” from Blue Velvet, and Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” from “Wild At Heart.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The evening peaked for me when I was unexpectedly invited to sit down on the stage with Bützer, Davis, and Dowlen while they serenaded me with the painfully sincere “Just You” a.k.a. James’ sappy acoustic love song from Twin Peaks. It was just a few days after my birthday, and for as much trash as I talk about James’ character, the situation was hilarious. Davis nailed those exaggerated high notes with a devotion to the bit—trusting the audience to follow his lead, never spelling anything out—pushing past sincerity and into something beautifully, mischievously funny. After all, humor has always been an integral part of Lynch’s films as well.

Lynch once said that “music is a ‘magical’ tool that can convey emotions and moods faster and more directly than film.” Club Silencio understands this instinctively, and honored the notion by trusting atmosphere, feeling, and form above all else.

Check out a gallery of images from the show below. All photos by Jeff Shipman.

The setlist
“Pink Room” / “Ghosts of Love”
“In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)”
“Love Letters”
“Blue Velvet”
“I’m Waiting Here”
“That Magic Moment”
“Just you”
“Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”
“Wiked Game”
“Into the Night”
“Song to the Siren”
“Sycamore Trees”
“Locomotion”
“In Dreams”
“Falling”

Check out more releases featuring Club Silencio’s players

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January 17, 2026January 17, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows

Club Silencio: A Celebration Of David Lynch’s Birthday at The Garden Club on Friday, January 23

CLUB SILENCIO. Photo courtesy Jeffrey Bützer

“Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song and there’s always music in the air.”
— The Arm

On Friday, January 23, at The Garden Club at Wild Heaven, Club Silencio pulls back the red curtain to revel in the music of David Lynch’s cinematic universe.

For this celebration of what would be Lynch’s 80th birthday, Club Silencio features some of Atlanta’s finest players delving into the moody tones and skronking beauty of sountracks from Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Inland Empire, and of course, Twin Peaks. Finding balance in that precarious space between the tangible world and wandering deep inside the dreamlike qualities of Lynch’s works, each number lingers in the air where silence and space are as important as rhythm, melody, and dissonance—much like the films they accompany.

Lynch was unafraid to examine the outer limits of Americana from every angle, especially when that vision exposed somehting dark lying just beneath the surface. Club Silencio honors the beauty, dread, and strange familiarity that’s baked into Lynch’s vision.

The ensemble includes vocalist Meghan Dowlen, guitar player Jeffrey Bützer, pianist TT Mahony, alto saxophone player Ben Davis, bass player Matt Steadman, and guitar player Henry Jack, and drummer Sean Zearfoss—all of whom are well-versed in conjuring Lynch’s cinematic language of emotion and atmosphere.

$17.28 (advance). $22.54 (day of). 7 p.m. (door). 8 p.m. (music). 1010 White St. SW.

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January 13, 2026January 14, 2026 RadATL Atlanta shows

West End Fest: West End Motel celebrates Brent Hinds’ birthday at Eyedrum Friday, January 16

WEST END MOTEL: Brent Hinds (left) and Tom Cheshire. Photo by Chad Radford

West End Fest is the kind of gathering that Atlanta does best: a celebration of community, history, and one of the city’s most enduring creative forces, Brent Hinds. For decades, the guitar player, songwriter, and restless spirit whose work with Mastodon, Fiend Without A Face, Four Hour Fogger, and West End Motel shaped the heavy-fisted country, punk, hardcore, surf, and metal outer limits of Atlanta’s musical identity.

Hinds died in a motorcycle accident in August 2025. West End Fest celebrates his birthday kicking off at 3 p.m. with a full roster of music, toasts, and eulogies—equal parts heartfelt and hilarious—setting the tone for a day that’s as much about storytelling as it is about volume.

By 6 p.m., the amps are on and the music rolls through the evening, wrapping up by 11 p.m. with plenty of time for reconnecting, reminiscing, and raising as many glasses as one can muster with friends old and new.

The Night the Sky brings their expansive heft to the stage. Michael Rudolph Cummings (of Backwoods Payback) taps into raw, road-worn intensity. Ironbound, Lefty & His Right Hand Men, and the almighty W8ing4ufos add their own distinct flavors to the mix, before Black Daniels teams up with Kevn Kinney (of Dryvn N Cryin) for what’s sure to be a memorable collaboration. West End Motel closes out the night, grounding the celebration exactly where it belongs.

At its core, West End Fest is about honoring a creative lifer and the scene that grew up around him—a reminder that Atlanta’s music culture thrives in shared spaces, long drunken conversations, and nights like this one.

The Night the Sky
Michael Rudolph Cummings (of Backwoods Payback)
Ironbound
Lefty & His Right Hand Men
W8ing4ufos
Black Daniels & Kevn Kinney
West End Motel

SOLD OUT (but try your luck on the day of the show. A few tickets might open up). 3 p.m. Edyedrum Art & Music Gallery.

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December 29, 2025December 29, 2025 RadATL Atlanta shows, Podcasts & Interviews

A Sunday chat with Faith No More’s Roddy Bottum at Criminal Records February 15

Roddy Bottum has spent much of his life sculpting a soundtrack for cultural upheaval, whether playing keyboards with Faith No More or channeling emotionally resonant pop with Imperial Teen. On Sunday, February 15 at 4 p.m., Bottum brings that same sense of reflection and revelation to Atlanta for a conversation about his new memoir, The Royal We, hosted by Criminal Records and A Cappella Books.

The Royal We is Bottum’s coming-of-age and coming-out story, capturing a city—and a self—on the verge of transformation. Bottum traces his journey from growing up gay in Los Angeles to finding community, purpose, and creative ignition when he moved to the Bay Area. There he co-founded Faith No More, and cranked out era-defining numbers such as “We Care A Lot,” “Epic,” and “Midlife Crisis.”

Bottum’s memoir is far from a standard rock tell-all. While there are brushes with celebrity status—encounters with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, the chaos of playing arena-sized shows, and stacks of gold records piling up—the gravity comes from his unflinching accounts of addiction, loss, and survival amid the AIDS crisis. Written with clarity and honesty, The Royal We is a personal reckoning and a cultural document, mapping how resilience is built from within.

Bottum is joined in conversation by yours truly, Atlanta music writer Chad Radford (Atlanta Record Stores: An Oral History). Our talk will be followed by a book signing. It’s ok to bring CDs, LPs, or whatever personal items you’d like to have signed, but definitely pick up the book. Copies will be for sale at the event. It’s the reason he’s here, and it’s a must-read for fans of Faith No More, students of queer cultural history, or anyone drawn to stories of survival and self-invention. The conversation promises an intimate look at an artist—and an era—that reshaped all that alternative rock music could be.

Free to attend. Sunday, February 15 at 4 p.m. Criminal Records, 1154 Euclid Ave NE A, in Little 5 Points.

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