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Spiria – Amateur’s Garden

September 18, 2025

Listening to Amateur’s Garden, the second album from Buffalo’s art pop duo Spiria *, feels like stepping into a secret world. It’s a space that’s both carefully tended to and wonderfully overgrown. You can tell that siblings Mikayla and Johnny Manke spent a lot of time with these songs, having written them over a few years before recording them in the summer of 2024. The result is an album that doesn’t rush – one that builds intricate, personal worlds and is more concerned with texture and feeling than easy hooks. It’s an invitation to get lost for a while, and its our album of the week.   The duo officially formed Spiria in 2022 after a lifetime of musical bonding. Their sound is built around the interplay between Mikayla’s piano and passionate, introspective vocals, and Johnny’s dynamic, expressive drumming. They move freely between ethereal, ambient textures and jazzy, experimental passages,[...]

10 Acts to Catch Music is Art 2024

September 19, 2024

Music is Art is a dream come true for Buffalo music fans looking to Kobayashi the local scene in 12 hours. The list of local talents playing this year can be a bit overwhelming if you don’t know what to look for, so we put together a compilation of ten bands to add to your must-see list this weekend. If you’re a blog-reading regular, you may notice we aren’t writing about the many established local acts that are great and we’ve covered ad hoc. There are dozens of bands playing that we won’t discuss today, as we’ve already exhausted hundreds of adverbs over the past ten-plus years via album reviews and show previews. The purpose of this article is to add some newer bands to your knowledge base and expand everyone’s horizons. Should you see bands that aren’t on this list? For sure. One of the best aspects of this[...]