These Are the Can’t-miss Acts at Treefort Music Festival 2023 (PREVIEW)

Now in its 11th installment, Boise’s Treefort Music Festival keeps on keepin’ on as the Northwest’s premier little festival that could. Founded in 2012 as the region’s answer to SXSW, both the festival and its host city now toe the line between low-key and loved to death. Treefort’s glory days of raucous punk shows in defunct burrito bars and dusty wedding reception halls are a fading memory as the post-pandemic influx of priced-out West Coasters sands away what few quirks remain in Idaho’s capitol, but it’s still a wild weekend of discovery for music lovers of all stripes.

Treefort has always boasted a diverse set of headliners that appeal to even the most casual concertgoers, but the true heads know that the real excitement is hidden in the undercard. We don’t need to remind you that evergreen acts like Built to Spill, Unknown Mortal Orchestra or Dinosaur Jr. are worth your time, so we’ll focus on a slew of up-and-comers whose minuscule font size on the lineup poster belies their potential to blow your mind. Strap on your most reasonable walking shoes, load up the fanny pack and read on for our recommendations on can’t-miss sets for those who are itching to hear something new. 

Thursday, March 23

Petey – 5pm – Main Stage

Peter Martin, AKA Petey, is a rare example of a Tik Tok star who worked backwards from viral video fame to stately musicianship in no time at all. In his videos, Martin clones himself and engages in hilarious and self-deprecating arguments with said clones. On his records, he makes anthemic party-pop that lands somewhere between the ceiling-punching YOLO-isms of Japandroids and the slick Bruce Springsteen worship of Bleachers. If beer-soaked ballads about the fuckery of wasted youth are your jam, then a heavy half-hour with Petey is a great way to start the weekend.

Amulets – 7pm – Garden Dome

Covid-era Instagram has turned drone/noise musicians into a malevolent trope of sorts, but Portland-based audio/video collage artist Randall Taylor’s project Amulets provides a warm and humanized counterpoint to the mechanized aimlessness of many of his peers. Don’t let the fact that cannabis is still illegal in Idaho stop you from blasting off into space with the celestial tape loops of Amulets. 

Death Valley Girls – 9:10pm – Hound Lot (bus station)

If Kyuss co-founder Brant Bjork commissioned a girl group it would likely end up sounding a lot like Death Valley Girls. Their latest record Islands In the Sky expands on their previous efforts with an infusion of krautrock rhythms and soaring synths that compliment their freewheeling psych flourishes like a cool tallboy on a hot desert night. 

Guerilla Toss – 12am – El Korah Shrine 

Older generations reared on straightforward guitar rock have a difficult time digesting the schizophrenia genreless muck of hyperpop, but Guerilla Toss has proved themselves as a vital outlier and a safe port of entry for even the most stubborn rockists. At its core, their Sub Pop debut Famously Alive is a shameless sendup of the most high five-worthy moments of the guiltiest pleasures of the 80’s, with courageously knuckleheaded guitar riffs and crystalline synths sparring back and forth for dominance in their giddy, overstuffed mixes.

Friday, March 24

Meltt – 5:30pm – El Korah Shrine

Vancover, BC’s Mellt are straight-A students of the festival-ready indie rock institution. Their recent EP Another Quiet Sunday weaves elastic basslines, icy guitar riffs and yearning, reverb-soaked vocals into a joyous patchwork of big tent space rock that would slot perfectly between The Helio Sequence and Local Natives at an outdoor venue at the edge of the civilization. 

Deserta – 7pm – Old School

Remember when every new heavy guitar-based project wasn’t some derivative of the “[genre] plus shoegaze” formula? Remember when M83 was still a curio of the blog rock circuit and not a reluctant figurehead of Big Electro Pop? Matthew Doty does, and his project Deserta functions primarily as a time machine back to an era when gauzy synths and cinematic grandeur were essential ingredients of post-rock rather than its most maligned flourishes. Doty doesn’t need guitars to ‘gaze, but you’ll be better off with earplugs here either way,

Airiel – 9pm – Old School

Under the moniker Airiel, Chicago-based musician Jeremy Wrenn exists in the liminal period between the ascent of shoegaze and its eventual collapse into the growing Britrock movement of the mid-90’s. Fans of Ride, the Smiths and Jesus & Mary Chain will find plenty to love in the small handful of albums and EPs Wrenn has released in the 25+ years the project has existed, and their live appearance is not to be missed considering how infrequently Airiel is reconfigured as a touring act. 

MIKE – 10pm – Knitting Factory

Since bursting onto the underground NYC scene at the ripe age of 18 with his 2017 debut May God Bless Your Hustle, MIKE has been steadily winning over critics at a steady clip with his inspired fusion of Golden Era hip-hop, lo-fi sound collages and subtle flourishes of UK grime. His 2021 album Disco! sidesteps the pitfalls of 90’s fetishization by laying stream-of-consciousness flows over off-kilter beats and dusty samples, though your average obsessive of “Chill Beats to Study To” playlists will certainly get hyped when the instrumental version of the record worms its way onto a bootleg YouTube channel.

Delicate Steve – 11pm – Egyptian Theatre

Treefort mainstay Steve Marion, aka Delicate Steve, is technically a purveyor of instrumental guitar rock, but his George Harrison-esque approach to noodling brings a lyrical element to a medium that’s constantly relegated to the background. Marion has been tapped by marquee acts like the Black Keys and Paul Simon as a rocksteady co-conspirator who’s no stranger to singing through his 6-string when words would ultimately fail, and his 2022 album After Hours glides effortlessly between pastoral country rock, slinky 80’s balladry and golden hour slow-burners that sound excellent on a patio at sunset.

Saturday, March 25

Drugdealer – 2pm – Main Stage

It felt like just yesterday when 70’s AOR was as unfashionable as a dacron pantsuit, doomed to remain in your grandparents attic until the inevitable estate sale unearths it and ships it off to the incinerator. Like said pantsuit, Michael Collins’ music under the name Drugdealer is breezy, cheesy, and surprisingly on-brand for these uneasy times where an escape from all things cool and modern is exactly what the doctor ordered. Fans of the HBO series High Maintenance will feel right at home with his disarmingly sincere approach to smooth and sunny guitar rock, which is the perfect soundtrack for an afternoon of vape hits and frantic vibe realignments of your tiny studio apartment.

Seance Crasher – 5pm – Basque Center

At a time when most Portland bands were employing synths as adjuncts rather than the main ingredient, scene lifer and synth wizard Kevin Rafn was going all-in on the most endearingly corny keyboard sounds he could find. Fast forward almost a decade to the Golden Age of Post-Irony and you’ll find Rafn’s project Seance Crasher in peak form on their recent single “Keeping Me Up,” which goes straight to pleasure centers that are well-worn by 80’s teen movie melodrama and modern throwbacks alike. 

TEKE::TEKE – 7pm – Bandshell

Your chilled-out Khruangbin-inspired playlist would need a few sharp left turns to find its way to TEKE::TEKE, but the DNA of everyone’s favorite background-friendly guitar trio and this chaotic septet from Montreal isn’t radically different at the end of the day. Fusing elements of American punk, southeast Asian psych and spastic noise-pop, TEKE::TEKE is a powerhouse on stage that’s sure to turn heads amidst a field of indie-adjacent rule-followers. 

Zeta – 12am – El Korah Shrine

Like 9/11 or the assassination of JFK, the day At the Drive-In abruptly disbanded is a day elder emo kids remember in painstaking detail. The subsequent splintering into the bland alt-rock of Sparta and the obtuse acid jazz of The Mars Volta was equally frustrating, but what if there was a third way? A path in which the latter made good on their promise of using their punk ethos as a guardrail against indulgence, rather than a springboard into unapproachable wankery? Enter Zeta, a Venezuelan collective that has equal footing in the worlds of jazz, punk, Afrobeat and hardcore. If Fugazi openly endorsed drum circles it’s reasonable to assume a band like Zeta would’ve landed in our laps sooner, but either way we’re all better off now that they’re here.

Sunday, March 26

Help – 8pm – Hound Lot (Bus Station) 

Prior to turning full-blown punker, Ryan Neighbors spent a decade behind racks of keyboards, briefly with Portugal the Man before starting his own synth-pop group Hustle and Drone. Based on the tone and content of the songs he writes as the frontman of Help, it sounds like he’d had enough of the posturing and the bullshit of the boys club of a scene he’s been circumnavigating this whole time. Based on the groups merch, which is emblazoned with slogans “Class Warfare Now” and “New Portland Sucks,” he’s had enough of the influx of douchebags and the yawning class divide in Portland as well. The jury is still out on whether or not shit-starting noise-punk songs that rarely break the 90-second mark can inspire change or throw a wrench in the gears of neoliberalism, but that won’t stop Neighbors and co. from trying!

Protomartyr – 10:10pm – El Korah Shrine

Detroit’s Protomartyr initially caught fire after their 2015 album The Agent Intellect fused itchy, uneasy post-punk with the bizarre anti-singing of frontman Joe Casey, a balding, blazer-clad everyman whose stage presence and vocal tics suggest he was wrongly terminated from a monotonous government desk job about an hour before he grabbed the mic. The quartets 2020 album Ultimate Success Today bolsters this relentless gimmick with some of their strongest songwriting yet, with Casey doubling down on both the unhinged ranting and the surprisingly tender and astute riffs on modern life that really pop when the group unleashing the whole thing in a live setting. 

Related Content

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter