*SOLD OUT* Apocalypse, Never! Tour Nick Shoulders / Kassi Valazza at Trout Lake Hall

**Tickets Presale release Wednesday April 8 at 10am!**

Friday, August 7th, 2026

$28 Advance // $35 Day Of Show
6pm Doors / 7pm Show
All Ages

NICK SHOULDERS

Refugia Blues, the fifth album from Nick Shoulders, is a record of big ideas and small, intimate moments.

These nine songs are rooted in the stylings of Southern traditional music. Sparse, timeless, and unamplified, they’re older than the sounds Shoulders saluted on albums like 2023’s All Bad, with its loud, whooping anthems for roadhouses and sweaty dancehalls. Here, Shoulders isn’t shouting over a band. He isn’t bringing a crowd to its feet with dance-ready tempos. Rather, he’s exploring another side of his craft by stepping up to a ribbon microphone as a solo performer, delivering each song with acoustic instruments and a voice that’s equal parts country croon, Appalachian yodel, and high-lonesome field holler. As he explains it, Refugia Blues isn’t just a call to action; it’s a call to rest, too.

“This is my Nebraska,” he says, nodding to Bruce Springsteen’s lo-fi acoustic record from 1982. “Some people listen to Bruce for the E Street Band and the big radio hits, but I like the intimacy and rawness of Nebraska instead. I’d like to think of Refugia Blues as a little window into the heart, as opposed to the drumbeat of a revolution.”

Even so, Refugia Blues resolutely pushes for change. Shoulders’ interpretation of American roots music has always been more progressive and punky than the trucks-and-beers conservatism that passes for modern-day country, and he isn’t checking his activism at the door anytime soon. Refugia Blues does dive into personal territory, from “Bored Fightin'” (a self-effacing look at Shoulders’ reputation as a left-of-center radical) to the heart-on-sleeve love song “Tatum Spring,” but it balances the micro with the macro, too. Topics like climate collapse, radical anthropology, generative disruption, and southern identity run throughout the record, adding weight to Shoulders’ melodies, balancing his witty humor with topical weight. The purpose, he says, is to utilize his music as “a Trojan Horse that can be accepted by people who don’t hear anything to challenge their sense of comfort and superiority. That’s always been the goal — to say what needs to be said, but to intersperse it with joy, humor, and melody.”

It’s a balance that Shoulders has struck in the past, but never so nakedly alone as he does on the opening track, “Apocalypse Never.” He wrote the a cappella ballad in the front seat of his band’s shuttle bus, taking a hard look at each passing town, noting all the “individualized apocalypses” — houseless encampments, impoverished communities, barren cornfields — that unfolded on the other side of the windshield. “Our world has been through countless apocalypses,” he says. “The refusal to give in to the direness of our circumstances, while still acknowledging it, is key to surviving this moment in our history.”

For Shoulders, singing isn’t just a passion; it’s practically a birthright. Born to a musical family with deep roots in Arkansas, Appalachia, and Louisiana, he grew up listening to old-world folk music, black gospel, and other sounds that existed long before genres were even invented. “My vocal style is rooted as much in growing up in mountainous Arkansas and having to shout across vast distances to greet my neighbors as it is in my family’s very old way of singing,” he says. “The way I sing is older than capitalism. Being part of this tradition isn’t meant to be regressive; it’s meant to be liberating. There were time before cash registers and factories, where people sang like this when they sowed their corn, and I’m trying to embody that.”

Refugia Blues was recorded in a home studio outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Tracked to analog tape in two inspired days and laced with light touches of guitar, banjo, and fiddle, the album explores the slower, softer textures of Shoulders’ music without pulling any punches. On his bare-boned cover of Randy Travis’ “Diggin’ Up Bones,” he slows down the uptempo classic to a warbling waltz. On “Deux Hurry,” he taps into his inner Roger Miller, using wordplay to make light of the darkness that lives within all of us. On “Hill Folk,” he nods sympathetically to the southerners who’ve witnessed their cultural inheritance become commodified and commercialized over the past half-century. And on the brave, bold “Dixie Be Damned,” he sings about “manifest destitution” and the sickness of contemporary American consciousness, packaging everything into a three-and-a-half minute country gem that’s as tuneful as it is topical.

By bridging the gap between past and present, Shoulders speaks pointedly and poetically about today’s problems, even as he nods to styles that existed long before the 21st century. “When you listen to the origins of country music in the ’20s and ’30s, you’re hearing the voice of southern rural dissent against coal companies, repression, and depression,” he says. “The old ballad singers of the Ozarks were conduits for current events, documenting not only their own lives, but also dispossession and economic strife on a much bigger scale. Being part of that great stream of rural protest music is something I’m trying to tap into. I want to say things that feel timeless, deep, and rooted, but also touch on topics like endless war and a government collapsing into dictatorship. I want to be part of that tradition of dissent.”

At once academic and accessible, Refugia Blues isn’t just a deep dive into southernness, but also into Shoulders himself. Released during an era of big-budget country-pop smashes, it stands tall as something else entirely: a raw, resolute version of American country music, punctuated with humor and heavy insights, stacked high with songs that go down easy but linger in the minds of those willing to invest the time.

KASSI VALAZZA

“Sometimes it takes four or five tries to realize something just isn’t working,” says Kassi Valazza. “I wrote this after my thirteenth try.” She’s referring to the song “Roll On” specifically, but the stagnating pull of repeating patterns—and the brutalizing work of breaking them—inform every song on her new album From Newman Street. “In songwriting and in life, you can’t keep expecting the same thing to work every time.”

Valazza grew up between Prescott and Phoenix, Arizona. She penned her first song at age ten but in those early efforts to perform, found herself halted by stage fright of a clinical level. “I’ve gone to therapy for it,” she says, half-laughing. She didn’t stop writing music but she let less paralyzing means of expression lead the way, eventually enrolling in arts school for painting, an illustrative instinct that inevitably reveals itself in her vivid songwriting. It wasn’t until she relocated to the Pacific Northwest as an adult that Valazza picked back up the proverbial—and actual—guitar.

“Zach Bryson was kind of like the honky tonk ambassador of Portland when I got there,” Valazza says. “He was so welcoming and encouraging.” She discovered an inspiring, supportive artistic community, a less rigid relationship with musical output, and then—vocal nodules. “It was actually kind of the best thing that could have happened, because I learned about the crossover of physical and mental that takes place in performance.” Recovery entailed recognizing the reflexive functions of the voice in response to anxiety; as is the case throughout the human body, stress reactions can be damaging. “Because I suddenly understood what was happening with my voice, I could handle it, wield it. I felt more confident.” Valazza recorded an album with Bryson in an old-house-turned-studio. It was an informal, friendly endeavor, though not at all small. “I think probably thirty people contributed,” she says. “I listen back to that album and I think ‘this was me learning how to do this.’ I can hear that moment in time.”

Valazza’s debut Dear Dead Days fused the Southwest’s rustic romance with the Pacific Northwest’s rocky realism and garnered Valazza a cult following. She landed a deal with Fluff & Gravy, a label known for launching earthy, emerging treasures like Anna Tivel and Margo Cilker, and toured with folk favorites including Melissa Carper and Riddy Arman. Her sophomore album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing followed, a glimmering set of sonic talismans among Ann Powers’ Favorite Songs of 2023 for NPR and Bandcamp’s Best Country Music of 2023, with praise from KEXP, Uncut, MOJO, and Brooklyn Vegan to boot.

By the time Valazza was ready to record her third album, she had spent a decade in Portland—and that, she realized, was enough. “As someone with anxiety, I always want to know what’s going to happen,” she says. “But knowing can be limiting. Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, that’s growth. That’s what this album’s about, really.”

On “Weight of the Wheel,” a weepy slide guitar underscores Valazza’s listless lament: All things look the same / From the pillow on my bed / I’m stressed out I’m far away / There’s dizzy dancing in my head. The song sounds like urgency, grief, surrender, and embrace—all at once. It’s feeling like some kind of fight to outgrow / The way I fear slowing down before I’m old. By 2022, that dizzy demise of cyclical living had set Valazza still—in a basement apartment there in Portland. “You’re going to be a different person after every album,” she says. “And you have to keep moving forward.”

Sights set on Nashville, Valazza landed in New Orleans. “It wasn’t the plan. I spent three months there between tours, and it just kind of happened.” The bright newness of The Big Easy illuminated fresh inspirations and unexpected love. But it also cast a stark light on Valazza’s sense of self; in a new place, you can see more clearly what you want to be, as well as what you haven’t been. “I discovered the less likeable parts of myself in that time,” Valazza says. Album standout “Your Heart’s a Tin Box” encapsulates precisely this, with a cynical-yet-sunny likeness to Joni Mitchell and lyrical acuity: I moved down to New Orleans / Thinking love would reappear / But people tell you everything / but what you wanna hear / You relied on fixated company / Now you’re drowning in your ego’s gluttony. The patterns of her Portland life had stalled Valazza. It wasn’t the city’s fault so much as the natural consequence of complacency, the stagnance that comes with too much of the same. Valazza knew she was due for a personal evolution, and when faced with those innate, bristling pangs of change, could soothe herself with that certainty.

The track sequence on From Newman Street is audibly intentional—from a deep lull and dull itch, to a barbed clash with cognitive dissonance, to humble submission, and an ultimate, open-armed acceptance of new life. Poetically enough, half the songs on the upcoming album were written in Portland, the other half in New Orleans. Valazza returned to her former hometown to record with Matt Thomson at Echo Echo Studios, and titled the release From Newman Street in tribute to an apartment she lived in deeply and left with heavy heart. The album is as much a fond farewell as it is a fervent step forward.

Valazza made the official move to New Orleans in February of 2024. “Coming from placid, wintry Portland straight into Mardi Gras—I would not recommend it.” She recalls the time with humor, grace, and sensitivity for her past self, qualities that shine through the album. “I’ve always been a believer that music is only good if it’s really raw, really honest—probably coming from a place of hurt,” Valazza admits. “But I’m trying to embrace chaos these days, and bring a little more light into my life.”