Treefort Music Fest 2015 was an absolute whirlwind. In their biggest and unarguably most successful year yet, the festival had non-stop fantastic musical curation throughout the entire long weekend. Waking up each morning with a gnarly hangover, the only admirable thing to do was to pop into Big City Coffee for a heartstopping breakfast burrito and a few cups of coffee while checking out the festival schedule to figure out your show and drinking route for the day, then, hit the ground running. Check out our photo recap, including shots of Viet Cong, Foxygen, Built To Spill, Yahct, And And And, Aan, The Domestics, Bed., Wooden Indial Burrial Ground, Grandparents and more. Photos by Drew Bandy, Adam Smith, Jessica Pierson and Grahame Bywater.

Rough and tumble, that’s what Rugaroux is. And it’s a style and sound in short supply these days in this town; we’re all about the pretty, but what about the gritty? That’s why we’re liking the first material from Rugaroux, a new Austin punk band in the classic vein of fierce and ferocious guitars over a relentless, fist-shake-ready beat. Rugaroux is, by the way, a term that refers to a mythical and revered wolf/human hybrid beast from ex-pat French cultures as found in French Canada and Louisiana, the latter of which it is said to stalk through, roaming the swamps and fields. That Rugaroux the band has a Louisiana connection then makes complete sense, and that their two tracks “Deadly Dance” and “No Desire” come at you all vicious and biting is also fully fitting for their feral name. In a thoroughly punk way, they’re almost wholesome, by which we mean they do a punk’s heart good, hitting all the right, nostalgic feels but putting their own, new twist on the style. In other words, just what you want to hear from a contemporary punk band. Let’s hope this wolf-creature gets howling on a few more new tracks soon, and in the meantime, listen to their first go at recording below.

Toronto’s goth-stained band Bloody Diamonds latest single 'Skin and Bones' is hard hitting rock n’ roll! Wild and wailing,'Skin and Bones' is a hardcore power ballad with monster vocals. It carries a heavy riff over a memorable lyric that has us head banging! Currently on tour catch Bloody Diamonds Friday 4/3 @ Bovine Sex Club. Go to their FB and see if they’re coming your way.

Upon first listening to Ripped by Future Spa, I was immediately faced with two questions: why the hell did this band wait until now to send this to The Deli (it was released in June of 2014) and why the hell have I not heard these songs before? Surf-punk, lo-fi garage rock--I could list more random sub-genres, but no one would be interested in reading them anyway. These guys have a great sound--wicked loud, wicked fast rock n’ roll. If Raw Power isn’t a collective band favorite of theirs, I would be very surprised. They’ve got a show coming up at Club Bohemia on April 25, which will probably be pretty rad. They'll be accompanied by Miami Doritos, Greasy Hearts and Dinoczar. You can check out the details here.

-Dan McMahon (@dmcmhn)

The term “Poser Pop” shows up sometimes in the words Austin’s future-leaning Your Plastic Toys have written about themselves. Check their online shit, and you’ll see those two words more than once, those two descriptors that aren’t really a genre as such, but more a stance by Your Plastic Toys on their own place in music. In our estimation, the idea is that Your Plastic Tree poses at pop, refusing to make the standard plays while still fully playing a pop game. They are as art-aware as they are pop-aware as they are experimentally on point, and their music is at once a serious approach to pop music making and a bit of a mockery of the pop that’s already out there (in the fine tradition of acts like Talking Heads, The Fugs, or the very contemporary PC Music label out of the UK). A band that views the pop rulebook through half-broke virtual reality goggles.

In that same vein, you’ll also see a lot of abstractions and hyper-modern shit on Your Plastic Toys’ various web profiles, like glitchy saturated pixel-heavy images created by the band itself, short thoughts and quotes decoupled from their source and presented as something to be considered on their own, and not a single clear photo of the band to be found. This digital obfuscation of the band, its image, its motives, its views, evokes a highly modern feeling of existing in a never ending swirl of bit-noise and net fuzz, and it’s exactly what Your Plastic Toys’ sound is like.

On the just-released album OOO, shoegaze-gone-modern swells and currents of sound layer over tight digital beats and the vocals are threaded in and out heavily tweaked and disaffected, sometimes even disdainfully so (to great effect, it must be made clear). Your Plastic Toys comes through like a band seen and heard through a diabolical storm of TV snow on a channel that’s shakily fading in and out of a 1990s tube TV in a busted up apartment with a courtyard pool in the summer. It’s music that rides on that bright burning edge of culture just curling out from the future and into the present, and that throws back a tech-addled vision of what it sees to those still lingering in the cultural past. Take a listen to one of Austin's most forward-thinking bands below, and inject their entire new album here.