Remember that one year, when production personnel screwed up the stage plot at our SXSW event? Actually, that has happened a couple of times–once in 2012 at what’s now Fairmarket, when Fun. saved our collective ass by playing a partly a capella set to keep a Thursday evening alive. Flash forward six years to SXSW ’18, when our day party was delayed by a couple of hours due to another prduction snafu. Mt Joy leapt into action by playing a busking set in the middle of Buffalo Billiards’ floor while engineers sorted the sound onstage; once that was complete, Louisville’s White Reaper maintained the momentum, kicking off the plugged-in portion of the day with a blistering set that’ll always give them a special place in our heart.
That’s relevant here because White Reaper is back in 2019, with a brand new major label debut album set for later in the year. This week brought a first taste of new White Reaper material, with the release of new song “Might Be Right.” Still present: the band’s lower-case guitar hero flair and pop sensibility layered through a thick coat of garage, with perhaps a little more of the production polish associated with their fellow Kentuckians Cage The Elephant. Check out the new one:
White Reaper is tentatively set for a 10/22 Austin date at Barracuda.