CVC’S UNDERGROUND RUNDOWN 005: Roller Dome, King Black Acid, Weirdo Boy, SKORTS
Updated: 43 minutes ago
Somewhere between the fuzz, feedback, and late-night transmissions, you'll find musicians building entire worlds out of whatever they've got lying around. Some are wrestling with the state of the world, others are out chasing dragons, and a few seem perfectly content blowing out speakers before anyone can ask what happened.
This round takes us on a crooked trip through the underground, from Boise gloom-rock and Portland psychedelic experiments to Salt Lake City's outsider art-rock and Brooklyn's theatrical noise scenes. Four strange stops on a map drawn in spilled ink, distorted guitars, and questionable late-night decisions. Pack light, leave your expectations at the door, and prepare for a few unexpected detours.
Roller Dome — Still Feral, Still Feeling Everything
Boise's Roller Dome aren't exactly in the business of making nice, and Still Feral sounds like the soundtrack to a perfectly good evening going completely off the rails. Their second full-length barrels forward on thick basslines, snarling guitars, and a restless undercurrent of '90s alternative-rock angst, while Gia Trotter's soulful vocals emerge from the wreckage like the only functioning radio in a town that's lost its mind.
Layers of keyboards give the whole thing an even stranger, more expansive dimension, balancing the brute force with moments of genuine tenderness. It's a beautiful mess of heaviness and heart, and Roller Dome aren't about to clean up after themselves.
But beneath the distortion, there's a record wrestling with something much heavier than volume. Trotter writes about love and loss beyond the boundaries of personal relationships, looking outward at a world that seems determined to give everyone another reason to feel hopeless.
With songs like "Took Care (For Tristan)," the band finds a moment of tenderness in the middle of all that noise while "Empathy" takes a harder look at the exhaustion of saving space for all the darkness we carry around. Roller Dome understand that staying angry isn't enough. Sometimes you have to make room for love without pretending the world isn't falling apart.
The group's steadily built its presence throughout the Northwest, becoming a familiar face at Treefort Music Fest and sharing stages with Spoon Benders, Death Valley Girls, Cloakroom, and Pink Fuzz. Trotter also co-created We Came to Eat, a 2024 vinyl compilation celebrating femme-led rock bands from across the Northwest through My My Records.
Still Feral feels like a reminder that remaining wild doesn't mean abandoning your capacity to care. Sometimes it's the only thing keeping you alive.
FFO: L7, Witch Mountain, Electric Citizen
King Black Acid — Feeding Your Head, A Daily Dose
For nearly four decades, Daniel Riddle has been exploring the stranger corners of psychedelic music, starting with bedroom recordings in late-'80s Portland and eventually building King Black Acid into a shape-shifting collective of musicians.
What began as a solo recording experiment grew into something considerably bigger, blending space rock, experimental electronics, dreamlike soundscapes, and cinematic alternative rock into a world that's entirely its own.
Their latest full-length, Telling Secrets In A Crowded Room, arrives through Cavity Search and Mazinga Records with ten new songs that sound like they belong somewhere between a midnight Adult Swim bumper and a particularly vivid lucid vision.
There's a cinematic quality to the record, but it never feels too concerned with following a script. "Creator Kid" leans into the project's more atmospheric instincts, while "Never Let 'em Touch Your Weed" takes a decidedly less serious detour, trading cosmic introspection for a little stoner-rock mischief.
Riddle's history runs deep through Portland's underground. His earlier incarnation, Hitting Birth, emerged from the city's industrial-punk scene, while King Black Acid eventually developed its own following through experimental performances and releases on Cavity Search Records. The project even contributed music to The Mothman Prophecies, alongside appearances across film and television soundtracks.
What makes King Black Acid interesting isn't simply longevity. It's the ability to keep mutating without losing the strange, hypnotic character that started the whole thing. Nearly four decades after those bedroom tapes, Riddle is still finding new ways to make the walls breathe.
FFO: The Flaming Lips, Moses Gunn Collective, Gengahr
Weirdo Boy — Fever Dreamin' With Ghosts, Shamans, and Corporate Demons
Salt Lake City's J.P. Whipple operates somewhere between experimental rock, dark folk, surreal songwriting, and the kind of trippy Americana that sounds as if it was salvaged from some signal found outside the atmosphere.
Under the name Weirdo Boy, Whipple has assembled The Home Team Always Wins, an eight-track debut that unfolds across four acts: The Dream of America, Demons. Shamans. And the Epstein Class, The Undertow, and Ghosts.
It's an ambitious framework for a record that seems equally interested in the paranormal and the painfully ordinary. Warped samples, synthesizers, microtones, distorted guitars, human voices, and fractured electronic textures collide with lyrical references to propaganda, economic inequality, technology, spirituality, and the strange machinery of modern life.
The album's world isn't particularly interested in separating the mystical from the political. Ghosts, algorithms, shamans, corporate greed, and the underclass all occupy the same increasingly distorted landscape.
On "Your Ghost Walked In," Whipple explores the idea that love can leave something behind that even death cannot sever. His description of a silver cord connecting lovers across time feels like the perfect entry point into the project's haunted universe.
Whipple is also the songwriter behind Tycoon Machete, performs in drag with The Erin and John Show, and releases Americana music under his own name. The Weirdo Boy persona gives him another space to follow his more experimental instincts without worrying too much about where the music is supposed to land.
There's a wonderfully strange outsider quality to this project. It doesn't feel particularly concerned with fitting into a scene, chasing a trend, or making itself easy to understand.
Exploring inner realms is one of the best ways to make sense of a fractured world until something new starts coming through.
FFO: Nick Cave, Gary Wilson, David Lynch
SKORTS — Let's Shake The Marquee
Brooklyn's SKORTS have spent the last few years proving that a rock band doesn't need to reinvent the wheel to make a hell of a lot of noise. The quartet formed after vocalist and guitarist Alli Walls made what she describes as a romantic gesture to music, leaving Denver for New York City in 2021. A chance meeting with guitarist Char Smith at a local guitar shop eventually led to a series of demos, followed by bassist Emma Welch and drummer Max Berdik completing the lineup.
Their 2025 debut, Incompletement, captured the band in full flight: gravelly guitars, roaring vocals, post-punk tension, and enormous melodic hooks that occasionally threaten to knock the ceiling down.
Recorded live across three Brooklyn practice spaces with producer Teddy O'Mara, the record managed to bottle some of the physical energy that made SKORTS a growing presence in New York's underground.
SKORTS are opening another chapter with Muse and the Marquee, a six-track EP arriving November 13.
The recently released single "Bad Habit" offers a different perspective on the band's sound. Where earlier tracks like "Headrush" and "Amy" lean into heavier guitar-driven territory, "Bad Habit" drifts into dreamier melodies and softer textures. The band describes the EP as an extension of Incompletement, with songs ranging from heavy doom to something approaching dreamy grunge-gaze.
That willingness to swing between extremes is exactly what makes them unique. SKORTS can deliver chest-rattling riffs and breaks one moment and pull back into something intimate the next without losing their identity. Their music feels built for rooms where the crowd's packed shoulder to shoulder with the amplifiers working overtime, and nobody remembers what they're supposed to be doing tomorrow.
FFO: Deap Valley, Sonic Youth, Spoon Benders
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