I haven't lived in the Valley since high school - I am in another state these days - but I find myself home a lot more often to see my mom since my dad passed about four years ago. I average about three flights per year down into McAllen.
I tried reconnecting with some old friends but that was a bust 🙄. I figured I'd try to navigate myself toward what I DO know and that's music, but it's hard to tell what's going on based solely on the handful of fb groups I follow.
What's it like these days for rock music? I never was too into country or Tejano (I'm not a very good Mexicano I guess lol). I don't mind a decent traditional venue/club or even house shows if that's a thing. I don't mind driving if there's something cool and fun happening in Harlingen, Brownsville... I might even run to Corpus if the music is worth it.
Thoughts?
The current RGV music scene is pretty young but growing pretty rapidly.
From the top of my head the two biggest bands right now are Glare (Shoegaze) from McAllen and Twin Tribes (Darkwave) from Brownsville.
Glare has pretty big feat under their belts including having half a million monthly listeners on Spotify and will be opening for bands such as Interpol and Pachinko.
Twin Tribes has been touring nationally and internationally for a while now. They have about 350k monthly listeners on Spotify.
Other recommendations:
Metal:
Havrath
King in Yellow
Indie/Alt-Rock
Principium
Cannon the Dealers
The Culture
Gusto Gusto
Mox
Fate
Gumwood
Sycamore
Reverie
Dream Pop/Shoegaze/Synth:
Lunar Heart
Fun with Ether
Lure Division
Pop:
Mayberry/Stev
Mr. Q
Favian Villa
Hardcore:
Worst Behavior
S.K.A.
Inconvenient Truth
Nekrotic
The hardcore list can honestly go on for a while but if you follow these guys, you'll find the rest.
Punk(ish):
Brag
Dirty Damsels
OK Robot!
Psychedelic Rock:
Guilty Pleasure
MidWest Emo:
Riley!
While I don't listen much to Rap. These are the common names I hear:
Gavino
Amani
Kome
Jake the Wagonman
Torti
Experimental Music:
iKilledTechno
Pillowsnake
There's more musicians and bands I wish I could say but this is already a wall of text as it is.
As for venues:
Downtown McAllen has The Gremlin, The Flying Walrus and Cine El Rey.
Alamo has 707 Coffee House.
Harlingen has The Hop Shop.
Brownsville has The Kraken and Double Trouble. There's also a neat live music spot called Hueso de Fraile worth checking out. Not really a Rock place but it has other cool stuff.