Originally formed in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chokecherry is a force to be reckon with and has been rocketing towards stardom just 5 days after their launch of the single ‘Glass Jaw’. Their music genre falls into shoegaze and punk rock; shoegaze, is aptly named for guitarists staring down at their effects pedals. Soon to be moving to New York to pursue their music career, Union Street Festival is honored to have them perform before headed to the big apple.

A country songwriter from Brooklyn’s indie underground, Dougie Poole blurs the lines between genre and generation on his third solo album, the Rainbow Wheel of Death. Rooted in sharp songwriting, Poole’s golden baritone, and the organic sounds of a live-in-the-studio band, it’s a classic-sounding record for the modern world, stocked with songs that make room for everything from old-school synthesizers to contemporary storytelling. 

Once hailed as the “Patron Saint of Millennial Malaise” for his sardonic wit and topical, tongue-in-cheek songwriting, Poole broadens his reach here. He fine-tunes his genre-bending approach to country music, too, with the Rainbow Wheel of Death reaching far beyond the genre’s boundaries for new sounds and unexpected textures. “High School Gym” builds a bridge between 2020s lo-fi textures and 1980s pop vibes, while “Must be in here Somewhere” — whose narrator sits at a lap top, searching through “Every Server Burning in North Carolina” for a digital souvenir of a long-lost relationship — mixes modern concerns with classic country instrumentation. If records like 2017’s Wideass Highway and 2020’s breakthrough release the freelancer’s blues told stories about uninspired millennials languishing in dead-end jobs and no-good relationships, then the rainbow wheel of death focuses on more universal issues like mortality, love, and the passing of the time.

False Bottom Band is a seven pc. string band hailing from Half Moon Bay, CA. Their musicals styles range from Old-Time Roots & Bluegrass – to Blues, Rock, Country and beyond. False Bottom Band will take you from foot stompin’ euphoria to heat string pulling gospel-like harmonies with a relaxed, west coast vibe. Hailing from a wide range of musical backgrounds and influences, each member brings something different to the table. They blend it all together and let it simmer in a fresh, unique, West Coast Americana pot.

Lyrah is a singer and songwriter based in LA. Many of her songs have been inspired by her time living in San Francisco, and her cloud like euphoric music has become a globally recognized through collaborations and through being featured on HBO and in Buick’s latest commercial.

“My whole life I wondered what I could make if I actually gave music my complete attention – and this is it,” says Lyrah (who pronounces her stage name “lee-rah”, like the former Italian currency). “With everything that I make, I want it to feel like a soundtrack for someone’s life moments. And with this EP, I chose songs that live in their own relatable, cinematic world.”

Mint is a San Francisco band that has been ripping it up for a few years with their fusion of shoe-gaze, surf punk, and post rock. Their music exhibits their ability to create a calming, reverb-soaked environment that is simultaneously pulsing forward.

New Diplomat is an American Indie – Electronic / Synth Pop band out of San Francisco, California. Made up of members from countries all over the world, they formed in 2011 and gathered a significant local and national following. In 2018 New Diplomat influenced by their long relationship with Indie Electronic Acts, Underground and Progressive House takes a break from live performances to focus on writing new material in this new direction. Joining forces with UK drummer Carlos Rodrigues and San Francisco DJ/Multi-Instrumentalist/Sound Engineer Conn Cianci-McGraw New Diplomat’s new lineup is currently recording and mixing with London based producer and DJ Ewan Pearson (The Rapture, Jagwar Ma, Delphic, M83, Depeche Mode)

From deep pocket New Orleans funk to desert-infused surf reverberation, Sean Carscadden knows how to make his six-string guitar reach through space. The wingmen in his trio – Gator Nation’s drummer Mikey Cannon and Cliff Hugo, the trail-blazing bassist for Supertramp and Ray Charles – bring a thoughtful flow to the rhythm they put under each of Carscadden’s bending notes and blue-eyed soul singing.  Carscadden is a three-time winner of the North Bay Bohemian Norbays Award for Best Americana Artist and three-time winner of the Sonoma Index Tribune’s People’s Choice Award for Best Local Performer.

Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson like to joke that they are delusional about Sour Widows, the Bay Area band they started seven years ago that is just now releasing its entrancing and powerful debut LP, Revival of a Friend. After all, during those seven years, Sinaiko, Thomson, and Sour Widows have survived a litany of tragedies and tribulations. Sinaiko lost a partner to accidental overdose just before the band began. Thomson’s mother was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which she lived with for four years before passing away in June 2021. As they prepared to enter Oakland’s Tiny Telephone in 2023 to make an album partly of songs about navigating those losses and the lives they shaped, more troubles mounted, including a traumatic breakup and Thomson’s father’s sudden cancer diagnosis. Looking back, they can only laugh at these hurdles and wonder if they should have taken them as signs—to stop, to start over, to succumb to the hardship.

Absolutely not: Sour Widows has served as an essential outlet for Sinaiko, Thomson, and drummer Max Edelman, a way to process real-time woes so as to transmute them into something beautiful, useful, real, and lasting. It has been an anchor, too, keeping them lashed to reality as the world roiled around them. Revival of a Friend is their collective testament to that process, an hour-long lesson in endurance that is years in the making. Inspired by the folk singing of their youth, the grit and grace of Joni Mitchell, the slowly spiraling dazzle of Duster and Bedhead, and the steady angularity and sudden snarl of Slint, Revival of a Friend fully recognizes the arbitrary cruelty of individual existence and finds that some of the best ways beyond it are to share harmonies, a tangle of electric guitars, or a song that simply imagines hope somewhere on the other side. Methodically built over many years with longtime friend and trusted drummer Max Edelman, this is a poignant and gripping record about the pain of growing up and getting on with it.

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