Olive Klug refuses to be put in a box. Working out who you are in front of an ever-growing audience is no small task, but one that the Portland-born, Nashville-based singer/songwriter is up for and thriving.

Olive graduated with a liberal arts degree shortly before the 2020 pandemic derailed their plans of pursuing a career in social work. Though they’d recorded and self-released the 2019 EP “Fire Alarm” from a childhood friend’s bedroom, up until early 2021, Olive categorized their music as either a hobby or a pipe dream, depending on who was asking. However, after being laid off of a teaching job in late 2020, Olive starting working as a barista and decided to commit all of their extra energy to an ever-growing community of fans online.

Olive can’t help but be unapologetically themselves, something their community of fans (dubbed the “Klug Bugs” on Instagram and Discord) appreciate most about them. Their debut LP ranges from a playful Americana romp about “watching all the rules disintegrate” to folk-punk anthem “Coming of Age,” which somehow manages to reference both pop singer Taylor Swift and existential philosopher Kierkegaard in one song, to “Parched”‘s haunting modern ballad about a doomed relationship, to an indie rock closer about learning to take up space as a person with a marginalized identity. Through this no-holds-barred documentation of the struggles of their early adulthood, Klug embraces all their inner contradictions with reckless abandon.

Combining their knack for storytelling with a lilting soprano voice, Klug offers observations with an unflinching honesty. “I’ll stop seeking to find, start saying what’s on my mind,” sings Klug on Out Of Line, the lead single from their 2023 label-debut album, Don’t You Dare Make Me Jaded.

The album takes on the world with visceral and tactile images: it finds them falling in love with reckless abandon, haunted by the ghost of an old lover, waiting for fairies in the backyard of their childhood home. Olive’s work is optimistic, but not naive. Klug emerged into the scene in fraught times: for the folk landscape, for the country, for themself. By combining Golden Age folk references and contemporary narratives with ease, Olive Klug is a singular voice for the future of folk: honest, compelling, often unsure, but willing to try anyway.

2024 finds Olive in Nashville, attempting to stabilize after a 3-year whirlwind of viral niche internet-fame, nonstop touring, and music industry naïveté. Olive’s social work background grounds them in community, a word they keep coming back to when ego proves unfulfilling. After attending Folk Alliance International for the last two years, Olive is excited to solidify themselves as a fixture of the greater folk community and return to what inspires them the most about music; the catharsis and social change that is possible when people come together and share themselves through song.

Julianna Zachariou (zak-uh/ree-yoo) is an independant singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist currently living in San Diego, CA (by way of hometown Sacramento, CA and a five year stretch in Nashville, TN). Julianna’s “sharp, witty and personal” writing, as praised by San Diego Magazine, has earned her over 8 million streams online and thousands of monthly listeners. Her latest full length album, “Hero Of Your Heart” garnered a nomination from the San Diego Music Awards as well as multiple nods from San Diego’s KPBS on radio and in print. If you catch Julianna, you are sure to enjoy a set that “masters a blend of pop, folk, rock, indie and Americana and turns it into something that feels fresh, like it’s just hers.” (J. Evans / KPBS).”

In the decade since Jenny Owen Youngs last released a full-length album, she’s toured the world, co-written a #1 hit single, launched a wildly popular podcast, landed a book deal, placed songs in a slew of films and television series, moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to coastal Maine, and gotten married, divorced, and married again. She’s done everything, it seems, except release another album.

Yet now with her exceptional new Yep Roc debut, Avalanche, Youngs delivers a main course worthy of the wait. Written with a series of friends including S. Carey, Madi Diaz, The Antlers’ Peter Silberman, and Christian Lee Hutson and recorded with producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, The Hold Steady, Cassandra Jenkins, Josh Ritter), the collection is an achingly beautiful exploration of loss, resilience, and growth from an artist who’s experienced more than her fair share of each in recent years. The songs are deceptively serene here, layering Youngs’ infectious pop sensibilities atop lush, dreamy arrangements that often belie the swift emotional currents lurking underneath. The performances, meanwhile, are riveting and nuanced to match, gentle yet insistent as they reckon with the pain of regret and the joy of redemption, sometimes in the very same breath. The result is the most raw and arresting release of Youngs’ remarkable career, a brutally honest, deeply vulnerable work of self-reflection that learns to make peace with the past as it transforms doubt and grief into hope and transcendence.

That kind of range has been Youngs’ calling card from the very start. Born and raised in rural New Jersey, she fell in love with The Beatles at an early age before eventually finding her way to The Cranberries and Elliott Smith in high school. Her self-recorded debut, Batten Down The Hatches, landed a high-profile sync in the Showtime series Weeds and led to a deal with Nettwerk Records, which re-released the album along with her 2009 follow-up, Transmitter Failure. Widespread acclaim and dates with the likes of Regina Spektor, Ingrid Michaelson, Frank Turner, and Aimee Mann followed, but by the time Youngs released her third album, 2012’s An Unwavering Band Of Light, she was ready for a change of pace, moving to LA to focus on writing for other artists and for film and TV. In 2016, Youngs co-wrote Pitbull’s “Bad Man,” which debuted at the 58th annual Grammy Awards; in 2017, she co-wrote Shungudzo’s “Come On Back,” which was featured in the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack; and in 2018, she co-wrote Panic! At The Disco’s smash hit “High Hopes,” which went five-times platinum and broke the record for most weeks atop Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart. Along the way, Youngs also launched Buffering The Vampire Slayer, an episode-by-episode podcast devoted to Buffy The Vampire Slayer that attracted more than 160,000 monthly listeners and led to a book deal with St. Martin’s Press. Youngs recently launched a new series with her podcasting partner/ex-wife called The eX-Files and has a narrative fiction podcast due out next year, as well.

Nemarca is the musical project of artist Anna Reidister.

Anna Reidister is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician located in Boston, MA. Her work explores the intersection of storytelling, character building, and late-stage capitalism through performance, event production, post-digital objects, folk art, and poetry. She aims to expose the absurdity of neoliberalism, imagine new worlds and envision alternate realities. She has performed at Massachusetts College of Art’s Alumni & Founders Day, Club Passim’s campfire. festival, Boston Neighborhood Network’s Community Media Day, and the Winthrop Pride Festival hosted by Senator Lydia Edwards. She holds a BFA from Massachusett College of Art and Design in Interrelated Media and a minor in Creative Writing.