Music

The Cirque du Trump and rain, rain, rain might be hard to ignore, but there’s some actual entertainment coming to Miami this weekend. The highly anticipated Overtown Music & Arts Festival, which attracted more than 9,000 people last year, returns Saturday, July 15.

Some band names are downright ridiculous: Butthole Surfers, Diarrhea Planet, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, for example. Dinosaur Pile-Up, a British three-piece rock band from Leeds, falls into this category. Frontman, founder, and lead vocalist Matt Bigland named the band, as a sort of joke, after a scene in…

The last presidential election separated the red and blue states, demarcating two very different American lifestyles. There’s the America that wants its big red Solo cups full of something sweet or boozy, its tanks filled with gas, and its guns on its hips. Then there’s the America that dreams of…

If you couldn’t snag a ticket to Ibeyi’s sold-out show last year, you’re in luck. The twin sisters are bringing their Afro-Cuban-inspired sound back to Miami. The Rhythm Foundation announced this morning that Ibeyi will play the North Beach Bandshell October 28. Tickets will cost $30 in advance or $35 the day of the show.

Brazilian musicians have a long history of absorbing American and British musical influences and then spitting out something completely new and different. In the ’60s, Os Mutantes and Gilberto Gil caught a whiff of the psychedelic revolution and birthed their own hallucinatory genre, tropicália. More recently, the Rio de Janeiro…

Seven years before writing his grandest personal statement in The Wall and only a few short months before his artistic arc bent toward the stratosphere with The Dark Side of the Moon, Roger Waters released one of his most intimate songs on Pink Floyd’s 1972 album, Obscured by Clouds. Backed…

From an early age, Busdriver was weened on rap and what he calls “heavy jazz.” His father wrote the 1985 Def Jam biopic Krush Groove. Busdriver emerged as a rap contender when he was “rapping a lot” on the school bus with his friends, he says. His lyrics, inspired by the L.A. riots in 1992, pushed boundaries from the outset. And he was inducted into the famed open-mike workshop Project Blowed at the tender age of 16.

Casey Stephens, AKA DJ Merlyn, is quick to remember at least eight Miami raves busted by police in the underground days of the ’90s. It didn’t matter if the party was permitted, says Merlyn, who has been a staple in the dance music scene since the beginning.

It already feels like the dog days of summer, but you wouldn’t know that by the amount of music packed into the week. Tuesday, the California rockers of Rooney will bring plenty of West Coast vibes to Gramps. Thursday, Lower Dens, along with Ex Reyes and Nick León, will headline Red Bull Sound Select’s last Miami concert at 1306.

This past Friday, the same day it was announced Metallica scored its 12th number one album on the Billboard charts with last year’s platinum-selling Hardwired… to Self-Destruct, the L.A.-based four-piece brought its spectacle of a show to Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium that was as impressive as the fact that people still buy albums versus simply streaming.

McCartney’s electrifying stage presence and willingness to please made his Miami show a hit.

Brian Shimkovitz, one of the world’s foremost scholars and treasure hunters of West African popular music, will DJ at Gramps July 9.