Golden 1 Live Music Stage

DJ NESSS brings unmatched energy and instinct to every set, turning any crowd into a dance floor. Known for her flawless mixes and natural ability to read a room, she creates unforgettable moments that keep the vibe alive from the first track to the last.

DJ NESSS brings unmatched energy and instinct to every set, turning any crowd into a dance floor. Known for her flawless mixes and natural ability to read a room, she creates unforgettable moments that keep the vibe alive from the first track to the last.

DJ NESSS brings unmatched energy and instinct to every set, turning any crowd into a dance floor. Known for her flawless mixes and natural ability to read a room, she creates unforgettable moments that keep the vibe alive from the first track to the last.

After an eight year tenure being a music teacher in Sacramento, California; singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jon Wiilde made the jump from his day job to pursue his dreams of being an artist and musician full time. Within the first few weeks of professional dream chasing, videos of him singing snippets of unreleased original music began to go viral on TikTok, and Jon began to grow a budding and loyal fanbase from the app.

In 2024 he independently released an EP called “Directions” where one of the singles “Home Is You” rapidly took off on TikTok, Facebook, and Spotify. Now it’s gained over 100 thousand user generated videos with the song and millions of streams driving in fans to come see him on tour across the U.S. and it has become a staple of Jon’s live show and a fan favorite.

After being a music teacher in Sacramento, California, for eight years, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jon Wiilde took a leap to pursue his dreams of becoming a full-time artist and musician. Within the first few weeks, videos of him singing snippets of unreleased original music went viral on TikTok, and Jon grew a budding and loyal fan base from the app.

In 2024, he independently released his “Directions” EP, with one of the singles, “Home Is You,” rapidly becoming a fan favorite on TikTok, Facebook, and Spotify. Now it’s gained over 100,000 user-generated videos, and millions of streams.

On record, Wiilde showcases an innate ability to meld nostalgia with the sounds of today, all while presenting his songs in a truly personal way. With singer-songwriter roots, hip-hop-driven rhythms, psychedelic textures, and raw, honest delivery, Jon is here to stay.

The artist cites Mac Miller, The Beatles, Kris Kristofferson, MGMT, and Funkadelic as influences. While what the future holds may be unclear, it will be exciting to look out for what comes from Mr. Wiilde.

Passion Pit began as the solo project of singer-songwriter-producer Michael Angelakos. Michael would create music alone in his dorm room in Boston, and then in an apartment in Cambridge where he lived with four other friends in 2006. The songs would be shown to his roommates and friends. Angelakos self-released the Chunk of Change EP, which included the songs “Batty Lashes” and “Tons of Guns,” and sold them for approximately seven dollars at his first show on March 20th, 2007 in the Cabaret at Emerson College. Unfortunately for the few purchasers of the EP, Angelakos had hastily applied a sticker that was meant to be used to label folders, not cds. The rectangular sticker damaged several customers’ computers, but none of them asked for money to repair the computer. He did, however, give them a new disc. He still owes his friend Colin Pratt approximately $250 for the printing and overnighting of the record sleeves.

Ian Hultquist and Adam Lavinsky, who at the time were Angelakos’  friends and frequent collaborators, spent months convincing him to make a band. Months later, he acquiesced, and the band went on to sell out every show they played in Boston. Hultquist, Ayad Al Adhamy, Jeff Apruzzese, And Nate Donmoyer joined Michael as Passion Pit for live performances from there on out. They were named Best New Band by the Boston Phoenix, released a 7” featuring “Sleepyhead” and “Better Things,” (which would replace “Batty Lashes and “Tons of Guns” on the official release of Chunk of Change), and toured with far too much heavy equipment. And little discipline, to boot.

Following the 7” release, in 2008, and after being picked up by Frenchkiss, Chunk of Change was officially released. This release, and its hit “Sleepyhead,” solidified Passion Pit and launched the band into years of success and near-constant evolution. “Sleepyhead” has remained an iconic track, going 3x Platinum; a Passion Pit x Sofi Tukker remix of the song was released in March of 2025 to instant success.

In the spring and early summer of 2008, while working on demos for what would become Passion Pit’s debut album Manners with Grant Wheeler, Matthew Young, and Angelica Bess in Brooklyn–and a three-week Piano’s residency in Manhattan–Michael signed to Sony Music Entertainment for worldwide and Columbia Records for US releases respectively for three full-length records as Passion Pit. The licensing of the initially self-released Chunk of Change gave Michael extraordinary leverage and creative control while working with Sony.

Passion Pit released Manners on his birthday on May 19th in 2009. It sold over 30,000 copies in the first week. With a rapidly-increasing live following, leading to three Terminal Five shows, being a highlighted band on the  Big Day Out Tour in Australia and  New Zealand (where Manners went gold in its first week), and to what many have considered to be among one of the most iconic sunset-slot performances at Coachella in 2010, the band toured for what seemed like forever.

The follow-up, Gossamer, was released in 2012 and landed number four on the Billboard charts in the US, as well as Top 20 in Australia and Canada. Michael and his tumultuous in both his life leading up to and in making Gossamer were painfully portrayed in Pitchfork’s first Cover Story feature by Larry Fitzmaurice. While he was interviewed at a time when he was unwell and doesn’t reflect who he truly is, it was the first time Angelakos opened up about his life with the disorder. His advocacy would later earn him the Didi Hirsch Erasing the Stigma Award in 2013.

“Take A Walk”, Gossamer’s standout single well over 2x platinum and the album itself was officially reported as Gold in 2020. The music video for “Carried Away,” directed by Brewer was a highlight for Michael, as well as the video for “Cry Like a Ghost” directed by the Daniels (The Zebro theme song, a bonus on the EPs in physical form, was form a comedy troupe that included Daniel Schienert, who had Michael score a few projects of his while they both attended Emerson).

Passion Pit’s third album, Kindred, was released in April 2015, landing in the Top 3 in the U.S., and top 30 in Australia and the UK.

Throughout his success and creative evolution as an artist, Angelakos faced the challenges of managing bipolar disorder (or Manic-Depression) amidst a chaotic and taxing industry that any artist, with or without a mental disability, typically finds just as difficult. He became, and continues to be, a leading mental health advocate and dedicates much of his energy to helping others. In 2017, he formed the Wishart Group, an organization created to provide support for musicians’ mental health. Also in 2017, Passion Pit released Tremendous Sea of Love for free via Twitter with the hashtag #weneedscience, to raise awareness for the Wishart Group– a viral campaign that trended worldwide.

Currently, Michael Angelakos is returning to how it all began: working and performing solo, experimenting with his sound and staying true to himself, while challenging conventions and outmolded structures. To that end, Passion Pit’s latest album, Nine Times Your Torch Songs, will be released in iterative phases, and through unique recordings of live performances with additional collaborators, directly to fans. For more information, subscribe to Passion Pit’s Substack at: https://passionpitmusic.substack.com/.

Like falling in love, break-ups start slowly and then happen all at once. For Jade Bird, the end of her relationship gathered pace and crashed into reality in 2022, resulting in the beautifully temperate EP EP Title. It is a short collection of songs that paint the various stages of grief that come with the end of a relationship in devastatingly astute but carefully optimistic strokes.

Bird has always railed against being pigeonholed and wary of collaboration. Having grown up in the UK, she was influenced heavily by Americana and hailed as a powerhouse performer. Even as she was compared to country-folk titans, in those early days she was determined to be fully Jade Bird without any shades of anyone else. Every note had to come from her. But for EP Title, she worked with Alex Crossan, known better as Mura Masa, finding freedom and joy in writing and experimenting with ideas in his modest home studio. Gradually, the songs found form and her emotions tumbled out into notes and melodies, shepherded by Crossan’s unique and encouraging ear.

She had met her ex-fiance when she was just 18. He was a musician and she was newly signed. “It was an unsaid thing that it wouldn’t have worked unless he kind of joined my band and we toured together, so things evolved very quickly,” she says. So for the next few years as Bird’s career took off, they did everything together: recording, touring, writing, everything. “Every cool memory I’ve got musically, he’s in that. The second record is about him.” He was enmeshed in her life in a way that few of us experience. “When you’re in a relationship like that, when it’s good it’s so good. You’ve got support at work, you’re on the road together: it’s this romantic ideal. And when it’s not good, it becomes a bit of a living hell.”

Even as they got engaged and moved together to Austin, Texas, things began to break down. “There’s been so many times I’ve been on stage and I’ve just sort of had a bit of a breakdown, crying or whatever, because the songs are so interwoven into my experience.” Bird began writing the songs that make up the EP just after the hardcore lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic ended. “I think we were all going through something,” she says of those early writing sessions with Cossen. During one of the last writing sessions before the break-up, she wrote the song Burn The Hard Drive, a sultry, sorrowful song. “There’s no good goodbye, no right way to die,” she sings on the chorus before offering a digital Eternal Sunshine solution of destroying all evidence of a relationship. “I listened back to it with Alex and was like, ‘Oh my god this is a premonition of ending my relationship’.”

Writing has always been a way to talk things through with herself. “I think that was me getting it out on paper, getting it out through music and telling myself the things I couldn’t do in a more matter of fact way.” With Cossen’s help, she interrogated the emotions the song had thrown up, feeling her way through the memories of times when she didn’t have a voice or a safe space to express what she’d been feeling during the dying days of an intense relationship. “Before I knew it, that was the exact concept for the EP, which was honing in on every little piece of the break up.”

Though a sad, reflective kind of EP, it begins on a hopeful note with Breaking The Grey, the final stage of grief when you realize you’re going to be okay. “It’s about getting out of a bad spot,” Bird explains. “I often find in a room, there is a level of empathy, where I find myself worrying what the room is going through and I think with Breaking The Grey we were all feeling the murkiness of the pandemic, the clouds of that – so the chorus was about finding our way out of that while the verses are more personal.” Over a jaunty piano line, she sketches out tiny scenes of a different kind of grey – “The look on your face as you hold me close, your feelings have changed”. “There was a purity to the process,” she recalls. “I could get super in my head as a writer, zigzagging past my feelings. But with Alex, he was just like ‘It doesn’t matter what this is for, we’re just creating’. So it allowed me to tell stories that are different to my usual kind of ‘rage’ narrative – it’s a lot more vulnerable.”

It’s quite a departure for Bird, much gentler than her previous two albums and with more twisting, mesmerizing riffs than the hard strums that have become a kind of trademark. “Rage became a huge point of contention for me – I grew up in a high conflict household so I think my albums have been about getting that out – but with Alex, for some reason, that wasn’t what was coming out. It’s a little different. I think it’s exploring the emotions before the rage,” she says, before adding with a grin: “I’m saving the rage for the album.”

You can still hear the fire of classic Jade Bird though – C’est La Vie has a huge stadium-worthy chorus that is solely Bird and her guitar. But there is no song more markedly unusual for her than You’ve Fallen In Love Again, twinkling gently across a winding bass line with otherworldly synths popping in and out of focus. “I think we tapped into the dissociative mood I was in – I felt like I was hovering above myself,” she says. The song suggests a fear of finding herself back in an unhealthy relationship, the trap of falling in love. “I think that is probably the most relatable feeling, as opposed to the heartbreak. I needed to be free.”

It’s a short, reflective record, one that seems to send Jade Bird off on a new trajectory. Life has taken a turn too. She relocated to LA, started seeing someone new and has been embracing more pastimes outside of her career – at just 26 she’s already been a working musician for almost a decade. Even as her most collaborative work yet, EP Title sees her finally feeling like herself. It’s been a transformative time: and from the darkness, light has come.

Spoon, Austin’s most esteemed rock ambassadors, have released ten albums to date including a string of five straight top 10 records: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007), Transference (2010), They Want My Soul (2014), Hot Thoughts (2017), and Lucifer on the Sofa (2022).

Lucifer on the Sofa earned the band its first-ever GRAMMY nomination (Best Rock Album) and was praised by Rolling Stone as “The best thing they’ve ever done.”

Hailed by TIME as “one of the greatest American rock bands”, Spoon topped Metacritic’s chart as the single most critically acclaimed band of the aughts.

In 2019, Spoon released Everything Hits At Once: The Best of Spoon, which was praised by NPR as a “convincing argument for Spoon being one of their era’s most distinctive and excellent rock bands.” That same year, Fender released the Britt Daniel Signature Telecaster Thinline as part of their artist signature electric guitar series – highlighting the enduring influence of Daniel’s precision-punk style that has helped fuel Spoon to become what the Guardian calls ‘one of the finest bands of their generation.’

The War on Drugs have steadily emerged as one of this century’s great rock and roll synthesists, removing the gaps between the underground and the mainstream, between the obtuse and the anthemic, making records that wrestle a fractured past into a unified and engrossing present. Led by Adam Granduciel, The New Yorker called them “the best American ‘rock’ band of this decade” in support of their album, A Deeper Understanding, for which they won the 2018 Grammy for Best Rock Album and were nominated for a BRIT Award for International Group of the Year.

2020 saw the release of LIVE DRUGS featuring live interpretations of songs throughout their career, including off their 2014 breakthrough, Lost In The Dream. Co-produced by Granduciel and Shawn Everett, their fifth studio album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, “chips away some of their hazier edges in favor of sharper melodies, broadening the borders of the meticulous yet joyously simple sound [Granduciel] has perfected” (Pitchfork, Best New Music). It landed on numerous 2021 best albums of the year lists and garnered a second GRAMMY Award nomination (Best Rock Song) and BRIT Award nomination. The band headlined Madison Square Garden in support of its release.