This week, our music critics recommend everything from euphemism-wielding hard rock veterans (Diamond Head), to the latest indie pop pride of Australia (San Cisco), and from The Stranger's favorite still-gigging Scientologist (Beck) to two free festivals: TUF and Linda's. Follow the 24 links below for ticket links and music clips, and find even more options on our complete music calendar, or check out our arts critics' picks for this week.

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MONDAY

Kevin Morby and Shannon Lay
Kevin Morby’s music has a way of sneaking up on you. After playing in buzzy NYC bands in the ’00s (Woods, the Babies), the Kansas City–raised artist went solo and has released four albums of ambling, patient songwriter material since 2013. It’s subtle, spacious music that draws from Laurel Canyon folk, early 1970s songwriter fare, and (that old standby) CSN&Y. But in the modern indie landscape, his contemporaries are artists like Cass McCombs, Kurt Vile, and Angel Olsen—songwriters whose work is easier defined through personal idiosyncrasies than genre constraints. Morby’s drawling, weary baritone and pleasantly meandering songs are the mark of an artist who doesn’t clamor for the listener’s attention, but gradually invites her in. ANDREW GOSPE

TUESDAY

Idina Menzel
Broadway success and unbeatable singer Idina Menzel will encircle Marymoor with her larger-than-life voice and star presence on her 2017 world tour. This is part of the Marymoor Park Summer Concert Series.

TUESDAY-WEDNESDAY

Otis Taylor Band
My introduction to Otis Taylor was his third album, 2001’s White African. He’s from Colorado, but he took hill-country blues to heart, droning wickedly and refusing to change chords, except exactly where it would break the listener’s mind. He sang in the voice of a black man framed for a murder, lynched, doomed to roam railroad tracks and the wilderness alongside them as a ghost, trying in vain—and already losing hope—that anyone would ever hear. Well, that cost me a few winks. The new album is called Fantasizing About Being Black, so his humor is still obstinately corrosive, and over the years he’s added drums, trumpet, a few other not-strictly-blues touches. But he’s still singing about death. About running, running, and don’t look back unless you want to see your last muzzle flash. ANDREW HAMLIN

WEDNESDAY

Actress, as_dfs, Raica, Bardo:Basho
Actress (aka UK electronic-music producer Darren Cunningham) has spent the last 13 years subverting conventions and baffling even the most advanced techno heads. With a deftness few can match, Actress submerges his tracks in a mysterious miasma and stealthily blurs genre elements, while intentionally undercutting rhythmic fluidity in order to keep the dance floor off-balance. It’s a courageous approach that left most at Actress’s 2013 Decibel Festival show vexed. His new album, AZD, sounds like his most up-tempo and danceable, but it still reveals an artist constitutionally unable to sound typical. If Eraserhead had a club scene, something that sounds like AZD would be soundtracking it. In a world of interchangeable techno artists, Actress goes out on a precarious limb—and then flips the bird to the uncomprehending. DAVE SEGAL

Latrice Royale: Here's to Life
Drag superpower Latrice Royale is back with a new show called Here's To Life, with piano accompaniment by Christopher Hamblin. If you aren't aware, Royale (aka Timothy Wilcots) spent time in prison after a hard childhood and became a minister in 2013, so she's rather unique even for a queen with a RuPaul season under her belt.

Lætitia Sadier Source Ensemble, Heather Trost
Whether she’s operating under her own name or as part of a group, there’s no mistaking Lætitia Sadier’s velvety voice and retro-futuristic aesthetic. In French or English, her enunciation is precise, her politics are leftist, and the synths are analog. If the Source Ensemble feature more group vocals than before, the end result recalls the multi-tracking that characterizes her solo work. In addition to longtime collaborators Emmanuel Mario (drums) and Xavi Munoz (bass), the band’s debut, Finding Me Finding You, features David Thayer (keyboards, flute), Phil M FU (synths, electronics), Mason le Long (guitar), Rob Mazurek (coronet), and a lovely duet with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. If liturgical music for atheists is a thing that can actually exist, it lives on this record. KATHY FENNESSY

THURSDAY

Diamond Head, Substratum, Skeletor, Ape Machine, Salem Knights
I’ll take Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil” over Diamond Head’s same-titled tune, as a tune. But Diamond Head, unkillable more than 40 years after hatching, make more sense as “Devil”-dunking wise men on their new self-titled set. Here he comes! He’s bad! He’ll fuck you up! Shout him down! Stand your ground! They sing about hot love and wizards, too. Oh, wait a minute. Looks like “Wizard Sleeve” is… about hot love. I’ll leave you to draw the connecting lines… never heard it called that before, anyway… Hot riffs, satisfyingly typical hard-rock lead guitar, bashing cymbals, and the creepiest bit (saved for last) is called “Silence” and rips off Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” with zombie-horde lyrics, even! ANDREW HAMLIN

Mark Lanegan Band, Duke Harwood, Lyenn
Even without taking into account Mark Lanegan’s legendary voice, it shouldn’t be a stretch to call him one of the foremost poets of our time. He’s certainly prolific, having partnered in his post–Screaming Trees career with such disparate acts as Isobel Campbell (Belle and Sebastian) and Queens of the Stone Age. Yet whether he finds himself in a soft Americana setting or heavy stoner metal, his gravelly, beautiful-like-an-oil-slick voice is one that can take the air out of any room. His latest album, Gargoyle, consists of more of the tortured highway blues he seems to favor and abounds with sickeningly beautiful lines like “Wild thing, see the monkey in the jungle swing, canary in the cavern sing, that the devil lives in anything.” TODD HAMM

San Cisco with Wooing
San Cisco are one of the thousands of bands who have gotten their start on Australian radio station triple j’s Unearthed, a website where independent Aussie acts can upload their songs directly to people who are looking for new music. Shortly after presenting their tracks in 2009, San Cisco’s infectious strain of indie pop led them to a record deal with Fat Possum Records, making them the first Australian act to sign with the label. Since then, San Cisco have been churning out massive pop tunes, as nearly every track on their newest record, The Water, sounds like it could be the backdrop to a sunny summer day. Triple j also named them as the #12 discovery on Unearthed… not too shabby out of more than 75,000 artists. ANNA KAPLAN

Zoolab x King Snake, Navvi, Katie Kate
Zoolab (Seattle producer Terence Ankeny) is part of Seattle's recent wave of young producers working in the hazy realm where hiphop entwines with nightbus, that vaporous, downcast strain of bass music birthed from Burial's fertile imagination. Zoolab's music makes you nod your head while befogging it with gray clouds of synth, although ebullient rays sometimes shoot through the mist. DAVE SEGAL

THURSDAY-SUNDAY

Maceo Parker
Soulful saxophonist Maceo Parker has spent decades exploring and rewriting the history of funk in collaborations with icons like James Brown, George Clinton, and Prince, while simultaneously honing his own brand of creative showmanship.

FRIDAY

Beck
It’s remarkable to have lived through so many phases of Beck—from loving the sound of “Loser” to scorning its novelty (that was about a week) to doubting his debut full-length could possibly be any good to then hearing One Foot in the Grave and being like “holy shit, he’s brilliant” to going back to Mellow Gold and feeling like an idiot for almost missing it for no reason then seeing him live and thinking he should probably stick to the studio then hearing Odelay and not knowing how to feel but essentially loving it, to seeing the Odelay tour and realizing that once he ditched the rock band he was one of the most inspired and versatile performers around, to then slowly losing track of which record was his most recent—Modern something? Wasn’t there one about an ocean?—but still knowing in your heart that he is, was, and has always been amazing. What a thing to live in an age when it’s possible to take an artist like Beck for granted. SEAN NELSON

Concerts at the Mural
In true KEXP fashion, another enjoyable round of free family-friendly concerts this year are up at the Mural Amphitheater at Seattle Center. For the final concert of the series, catch the Maldives, Industrial Revelation, and Emma Lee Toyoda.

FIDLAR with Thee Commons
Greasy punx FIDLAR (it's short for "Fuck it, dawg, life's a risk") will headline the Showbox for the first time in two years, with help from Thee Commons.

M. Barreca, J. Muir, S. Peters
It’s a safe bet that Marc Barreca is the world’s only bankruptcy judge to release a cult-classic experimental electronic album that doubles as a commentary on late capitalism. Barreca’s 1983 opus Music Works for Industry was reissued earlier this year by Freedom to Spend, and its combination of gloomy, William Basinski–like atmospheres and industrial samples still confounds 34 years later. That record is a highlight of Barreca’s extensive catalog, but his more recent work also shows a mastery of mood, texture, and pacing. Striking a more bucolic tone is opener Jake Muir, a fellow Seattle ambient artist who released his debut on local label Further Records last year and whose fluid, field-recording-heavy compositions subtly evoke Pacific Northwest landscapes. ANDREW GOSPE

Puget Soundtrack: Holy Mountain
Alejandro Jodorowsky may be best known for the films he did not make. The Chilean film director and comic-book luminary unsuccessfully attempted to make a huge adaptation of Dune in the late 1970s. That project never came to fruition, but it did create the entire 1980s sci-fi film renaissance, according to a ridiculously entertaining 2013 documentary about the maverick director’s attempt to interpret Frank Herbert’s novel. Before then, Jodorowsky was more famous for existentialist, sexual, and absurdly entertaining fantasy films like 1973’s The Holy Mountain, which was funded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It makes perfect sense that local ambient psychedelic rockers Zen Mother will provide a live soundtrack to this genre-defying, mythopoetic epic. JOSEPH SCHAFER

SWANS with Okkyung Lee
It’s the last go-round for Swans as we’ve known the band over the last seven years, as leader Michael Gira* reassesses in which direction his musical path will veer. He drops a hint in a press release: “I seem to have the sound of a sustained chord in my mind—not the striking of the chord, but what hangs in the air after as it dissipates.” Whereas Swans began in the early 1980s as none-more-grim no wave nihilists, they’ve since transformed into sadistic electro mofos, bleak folk troubadours, radiant trance-rock dynamos, and mantric goth-rockers, with the common threads over the last 35 years being transcendence through repetition, remorseless intensity, and rejection of frippery. Tonight they’ll likely draw heavily from the most recent album, 2016’s majestic, refulgent The Glowing Man. (* In 2016, Larkin Grimm—a musician who enlisted Gira to produce her 2008 album, Parplar—accused him of rape; Gira and his wife, Jennifer, vigorously denied the claim.) DAVE SEGAL

SATURDAY

Dead Cross with Secret Chiefs 3
Dead Cross were originally one of several side projects for members of San Diego’s sci-fi grind outfit the Locust, but with the distinct advantage of former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo manning the kit. For the first couple of years, Dead Cross were a lean and mean thrashy hardcore band. But founding singer Gabe Serbian defected, Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantômas) took over vocal duties, and now the band sounds like a more unhinged incarnation of the Jello Biafra/Ministry mash-up Lard. Patton’s musical fingerprint inevitably makes things more enigmatic and surly, as is evident with Secret Chiefs 3, which is essentially Mr. Bungle minus the frontman, who retain the kitchen-sink approach of albums like Disco Volante while excising its abrupt stylistic shifts and schizophrenic aura. BRIAN COOK

Frankie Cosmos with iji
It’s been nearly a year and a half since Frankie Cosmos’s debut LP, Next Thing, came out. That makes it a nostalgia listen by contemporary standards. Luckily, this dusty old chestnut has aged incredibly well, its unshakable melodies, wry lyrics, buzzy tones, and garagey rhythmic sensibilities nestling comfortably in—or at least near—the pantheon of (goddamn my worthless fingers for typing the following three words) classic indie rock. The NYC-based band has been very thoughtful about coming to Seattle—this is at least the third time they’ll have played here for this record, and it seems likely that the next time they arrive, they’ll be playing someplace bigger than the Crocodile, so tarry not. SEAN NELSON

Jarrad Powell & Golden Retriever
As director of Seattle ensemble Gamelan Pacifica, Jarrad Powell has been responsible for a lot of spectral, deeply tranquil music in the namesake vein of that group. They prove that the beautifully tintinnabulating gongs of gamelan never wear out their welcome, never fail to dissipate your anxiety (of which we have a surplus this year). Powell’s solo output also is profoundly meditative and teeming with interesting percussive timbres. Portland’s Golden Retriever—modular-synth genius Matt Carlson and bass-clarinetist Jonathan Sielaff—have been elevating Thrill Jockey’s catalog over the last five years, issuing three albums that explore the transcendental nexus where early avant-electronic composition, astral jazz, and ambient music converge. DAVE SEGAL

Jidenna
All right, show of hands: Who first heard Jidenna on Netflix’s Luke Cage? The Wisconsin MC and singer made the most of the show’s live musical guest segment with a minimal rendition of his song “Long Live the Chief.” That tune, the highlight of his debut album, The Chief, goes harder than his otherwise tropical-pop oeuvre. A Janelle Monáe protégé, he pulls both styles off: His earlier single “Classic Man” made waves in 2015, as did his uniquely aristocratic fashion sense. Whether spitting bars or singing Auto-Tuned choruses, Jidenna’s appeal lies in his seemingly endless well of charisma. Few artists sound so self-assured this early in their careers. JOSEPH SCHAFER

Linda's Fest 2017
Capitol Hill brunch-and-brews institution Linda’s Tavern continues to give back to the community with a yearly sample of free local music. And while the average income of the restaurant’s neighbors continues to change, the sonic fare of Linda’s Fest does not—heavy, rhythmic, and loud continue to be adjectives of consequence. Because, really, what is the sound of brunch? It is the aural equivalent of that which quenches the hangover: grease, carbon, caffeine, and further blood-borne ethanol. This year’s amp-worship seminar features Chastity Belt as keynote speaker. Support comes from Bread & Butter, Scott Yoder, DoNormaal, Guayaba, and Ex Licks. JOSEPH SCHAFER

TUF FEST
TUF FEST is back for year two in Judkins Park. This annual, free, all-day/all-night affair (noon to 10 pm) is thrown by the local TUF collective of female/nonbinary/trans artists and creatives with an emphasis on electronic music and comes with support from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. Panels will cover nuts-and-bolts matters like how to set up a PA, career advice like business skills for artists, and critical reflections like Shine Theory, which breaks down the myth of female competition. Local daytime performers include rapper Taylar Elizza Beth, mutant-pop duo Pleather, and dark electronica purveyors Youryoungbody. Out-of-town support comes from Vancouver’s dreamy x/o and Oakland techno fiend Russell E.L. Butler. On the late-night tip (location to be revealed with ticket purchase, but daytime is free and all ages), gear up for the First Lady of Detroit techno, Acacia Records honcho K-Hand, and Chicago beat spiritualist Eris Drew. GREG SCRUGGS

SUNDAY

Air Supply
Can the hedgehog still hit the high notes? And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance! Well, okay, no non–Air Supply fan. Air Supply fans don’t mind or laugh off their silly clothes (me, I searched the web in vain for a bright-white dress shirt with a yellow tiger over the right breast), unapologetic use of French horns, Jim Steinman’s confession that they almost bored him to death (“but I found that fascinating”) while he recorded one of their hugest hits. Air Supply rarely bother with new albums. They’re about the hits and the memories of those tiger-shirt days. Graham Russell looks like he never leaves the beach. Russell Hitchcock’s the hedgehog. Hope he’s still got it! (That shirt, I mean, which may be too much too hope for.) ANDREW HAMLIN

Lilac, Donormaal, Briana Marela, Toya B
Ambient electro-pop wind nymph and Stranger favorite Lilac will release their new tape You Can Call Me Papa at this intimate show with special musical guests Donormaal, Briana Marela, and Toya B, a reiki energy-charged immersive altar by Lily Kay, and an art installation in part designed by Amanda Leaty.

Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app—available now on the App Store and Google Play.