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Live stream: Black Pumas 2/20

Austin City Limits is thrilled to announce our first taping of milestone Season 50, featuring Austin’s own Black Pumas on February 20, will be live streamed for the occasion. 2024 marks the 50th Anniversary of the trailblazing series, kicking off a yearlong celebration saluting five decades of iconic performances. Eight-time Grammy nominees Black Pumas make their highly-anticipated return to the ACL stage in support of their acclaimed sophomore release Chronicles of a Diamond. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this taping live in its entirety free here at 8pm CT on Tuesday, February 20 on our ACLTV YouTube Channel. The broadcast episode will air on PBS and stream on PBS.org this fall as part of ACL’s golden anniversary season.  

When Black Pumas released their star-making self-titled debut in 2019, the soul duo set off a reaction almost as combustible and rapturous as their unbridled breed of psychedelic soul. Along with earning an astounding seven Grammy Award nominations (including Album Of The Year) and critical acclaim, singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada achieved massive success as a sensational live act, delivering a transcendent show Burton aptly refers to as “electric church.” The band’s meteoric rise  saw them playing thrilling sold-out shows across North and South America and Europe and selling more than one million albums worldwide.  Their breakout single “Colors,” a gold-certified anthem that resonated with audiences across the globe, received over 450 million streams. In creating the follow-up to one of the most celebrated debuts in recent years, the band broadened their sonic palette to include a dazzling expanse of musical forms: heavenly hybrids of soul and symphonic pop, mind-bending excursions into jazz-funk and psychedelia, and starry-eyed love songs that feel dropped down from the cosmos. Chronicles of a Diamond harnesses the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Burton (a self-taught musician who got his start busking on beaches and subway platforms in his native Los Angeles) and Grammy Award-winning Quesada. Wilder and weirder and more extravagantly composed than its predecessor, Chronicles of a Diamond arrives as the fullest expression yet of Black Pumas’ frenetic creativity and limitless vision, bringing their singular vision to life with more power, passion, and daring originality than ever before. Pumas have already earned a 2024 Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance for the record’s irresistible opening track “More Than a Love Song,” along with widespread praise: “One of the most moving things about this record is his (Burton’s) voice…” says  NPR Music, adding it’s, “a little trippy, [and] a little gritty.” and the Austin American-Statesman declares “it will go down in history as one of the defining soul albums of our generation.” 

Join us here on February 20 at 8 p.m. CT for Black Pumas; the broadcast episode will air on PBS this fall as part of our golden anniversary Season 50. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for fan-favorite encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org or the PBS App.

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Live stream: Sudan Archives

Austin City Limits is excited to announce that we will be live streaming our upcoming Season 49 taping with acclaimed singer-songwriter, violinist, and producer Sudan Archives for her ACL debut on August 10 at 8pm CT. We welcome this innovative artist to the ACL stage on the heels of her buzzed-about performances at Glastonbury and Coachella. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this taping live in its entirety free here on our ACLTV YouTube Channel. 

Sudan Archives breakthrough second album Natural Brown Prom Queen is an epic record that is also her most personal, taking in race, womanhood, and the fiercely loyal, loving relationships at the heart of Sudan’s life with her family, friends, and partner. Born Brittney Denise Parks, Sudan burst onto the scene in 2017 with “Come Meh Way,” back when she was a violinist and loop maker producing beats in her Ohio bedroom. While her 2019 debut album Athena drew inspiration from divine Black feminine power, on Natural Brown Prom Queen Sudan is in character as Britt, the girl next door from Cincinnati who drives around the city with the top down and shows up to high school prom in a pink furry bikini with her thong hanging out her denim skirt. From first listen, it’s immediately apparent that Natural Brown Prom Queen is the one-woman instrumentalist’s most ambitious work to date, spanning 18 tracks – from the disco-influenced R&B of “Home Maker” to Afrocentric anthem “Selfish Soul,” hip-hop banger “OMG Britt,” the wild ride of “NBPQ (Topless)” and the ballad “Homesick (Gorgeous & Arrogant).” The acclaimed release was named an album of the year by Pitchfork, The New York Times, The Guardian, The FADER, The Needle Drop, NPR, Vulture, Time Out, CNN, Slate, Paste, SPIN, Pop Matters, and many more; “Home Maker” was chosen by Barack Obama for his Favorite Songs of 2022, and Sudan Archives was handpicked by superstar Bad Bunny for Rolling Stone’s Future of Music issue. Fittingly for an album named for a homecoming event, Natural Brown Prom Queen is all about home: both Sudan’s adopted hometown of L.A. and Cincinnati, where she was raised. It’s intimate in all senses of the word, with Sudan unafraid to be vulnerable, tender and open about her insecurities. “Natural Brown Prom Queen is an album of many movements and ruminations, but almost all of them trace back to the multiple ways that a person can find and re-find home,” writes poet and Sudan’s fellow Ohio native Hanif Abdurraqib. “In flimsy, shifting geography, in the fights and triumphs that filter into interactions with beloveds and kinfolk, and, of course, the mighty work of home-making within oneself.” But the record is also about finding pleasure – after all, this is the artist who played violin upside-down on a pole in a music video. On Natural Brown Prom Queen, Sudan Archives invites you to join in and embrace shared joy.

Join us here on August 10 at 8 p.m. CT for Sudan Archives; the broadcast episode will air on PBS this fall as part of our upcoming Season 49. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for fan-favorite encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org.

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Live stream: Jorge Drexler

Austin City Limits is thrilled to announce that we will be live streaming our upcoming Season 49 taping with global music powerhouse Jorge Drexler in his ACL debut on July 31 at 8pm CT. The celebrated superstar swept the 2022 Latin Grammy Awards with a record seven awards, including top honors of Record of the Year and Song of the Year. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this taping live in its entirety free here on our ACLTV YouTube Channel. 

Jorge Drexler is an Uruguayan musician and singer-songwriter with a storied professional career—over the course of three decades, he has recorded fourteen studio albums and has toured all over the world. The widely-acclaimed and decorated artist is the recipient of an Academy Award (2004) and thirteen Latin Grammys (2014, 2018, 2021, 2022). In 2022 Drexler released the acclaimed Tinta y Tiempo (Ink and Time), his fourteenth studio album, earning an astonishing seven awards at 2022’s Latin Grammy Awards, including top honors of Song of the Year and Record of the Year for the album’s breakout single “Tocarte” (To Touch You). 

The sweeping and cinematic Tinta y Tiempo focuses on nature’s invention of love as a survival mechanism. “It was the thematic vector that informs the entire record, the kind of discourse that comes up when you emerge from a pandemic,” says Drexler. “Dealing with fear and the possibility of death makes you ponder the importance of life. Love as driving energy, life’s dynamo. This is why I believe the album is filled with color.” Anchored on his trademark poetic cosmovision and quirky wordplay, the collection is boosted by exquisite orchestral arrangements. Guest artists including Panamanian songwriter Rubén Blades, Spanish rapper C. Tangana, Israeli rapper/singer Noga Erez and Uruguayan singer Martín Buscaglia add color to a sophisticated songbook that finds Drexler’s voice—a wondrous instrument, capable of evoking vulnerability, hope and wistfulness within a single verse—in a state of grace. 

Rolling Stone calls the album “One of the most whimsical and free-spirited albums of his 30-year career.” The New York Times remarks that “Tinta y Tiempo is Drexler’s 14th studio album in a recording career filled with richly poetic, ingeniously constructed songs, delivered with amiable understatement.” This is an album of classic elegance and, at the same time, the overall sound vibrates in a very contemporary frequency, combining elements of candombe, pop, bossa nova, flamenco, bolero, Carioca funk, hip hop, trap, zamba, soul, Panamanian mejorana, or baguala, filtered through the sound of the orchestra, samples, percussive textures, female vocals, bass, drums, electric guitar and keyboards.  

The conceptual song cycle of Tinta y Tiempo sums up Drexler’s lush take on popular song, its ability to uplift and enlighten. “We have just emerged from a very difficult experience [the pandemic],” he adds. “Our capacity to love and our zest for life have been tested. The act of loving involves a certain sense of confusion, of losing control, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We should not lock ourselves in a world fueled by fear and self-oppression. We must keep our hearts thirsty for more, much more – against all odds.” 

Join us here on July 31 at 8 p.m. CT for Jorge Drexler; the broadcast episode will air on PBS this fall as part of our upcoming Season 49. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for fan-favorite encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org.

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ACL live stream: Rodrigo y Gabriela with the Austin Symphony Orchestra 7/7

Jenny Lewis Live stream July 26, 2023 at 8pm central

Austin City Limits is excited to announce that we will be live streaming our upcoming Season 49 taping with Grammy-winning guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela in their first appearance in a decade, with a one-of-a-kind performance featuring the Austin Symphony Orchestra on July 7 at 8pm CT. This appearance marks the first time Austin City Limits/Austin PBS has collaborated with the Austin Symphony Orchestra, one of Austin’s oldest and most respected arts institutions. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this taping live in its entirety free  here on our ACLTV YouTube Channel. 

In an unprecedented performance, Rodrigo y Gabriela will be joined by over thirty musicians from the Austin Symphony Orchestra to bring to life their latest release In Between Thoughts…A New World on the ACL stage. For over two decades, the Mexico City-bred duo of Gabriela Quintero and Rodrigo Sanchez have created music that invites lasting transcendence, captivating audiences across the globe with their virtuosic and wildly inventive guitar playing. In Between Thoughts marks a sharp departure from the signature acoustic sound the acclaimed act first showcased on their 2006 self-titled studio debut, and finds the pair expanding their sound with an orchestra. Conceived during the pandemic, the duo worked remotely with Vienna-based composer Adam Ilyas Kuruc and The Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra, who ornamented their serpentine arrangements with lush strings and powerful percussion. Sparked from their study of Advaita Vedanta (a Hindu philosophy rooted in the concept of nondualism), In Between Thoughts…A New World arrives as one of Rodrigo y Gabriela’s most revelatory offerings to date: a spontaneously composed body of work primed to bring about the very expansion of consciousness that inspired its creation. As they delved further into the philosophy, the duo began channeling their sense of heightened awareness into song form. “The music just started flowing out, without any real intention,” says Rodrigo. “When we looked back we realized we’d come up with nine songs that told the story of our coming to understand the Advaita path, in the exact perfect order.” The album finds Rodrigo trading his acoustic guitar for electric, adding a mercurial new energy that’s elegantly amplified by the duo’s subtle use of analog synths, Mellotron, and other electronic instruments. Propelled by a fierce vitality hinting at their thrash-metal roots, the result is an album of relentless movement and endless fluidity, each moment charged with the pure thrill of discovery. “When the subject matter is something like spirituality or seeking meaning, that can very easily go along with music that’s calming or serene,” says Gabriela. “But we wanted to do something different — we wanted to bring a cinematic quality and a lot of action to the music, and make it feel as exciting as we find all this to be.” 

Join us here on July 7 at 8 p.m. CT for Rodrigo y Gabriela featuring the Austin Symphony Orchestra; the broadcast episode will air on PBS this fall as part of our upcoming Season 49. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for fan-favorite encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org.

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Free live stream announcement: MUNA on April 24

Austin City Limits is thrilled to announce that we will be live streaming our second taping of Season 49 with indie-pop act MUNA on April 24. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this highly-anticipated taping free in its entirety here on our ACLTV YouTube Channel. The fast-rising California trio take time from their US headlining tour, festival appearances at Coachella and stadium dates opening for Taylor Swift to make their Austin City Limits debut.

Working the source code of pop, MUNA is magic. Coming up on ten years of friendship, singer/songwriter Katie Gavin and guitarists Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin began making music together in college, at USC, and released an early hit in the 2017 single “I Know a Place,” a pent-up invocation of LGBTQ sanctuary and transcendence. Now in their late twenties, the trio has become something more like family. Their now viral single “Silk Chiffon,” 2021’s life-affirming, queer anthem, which features MUNA’S new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. 

For Naomi McPherson, MUNA’s guitarist and producer, it was a “song for kids to have their first gay kiss to.” “Silk Chiffon” leads off MUNA, their self-titled third release and a feat of an album — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves. The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” with its soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. MUNA earned widespread acclaim and the album landed on multiple best of 2022 year end lists including Billboard, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Stereogum and TIME Magazine. The band was also hailed as Consequence’s 2022 Band of the Year. MUNA sold out shows all over the world in 2022 and were handpicked by Taylor Swift for a coveted opening slot on her upcoming “Eras” 2023 stadium tour in between their own US headlining “Life’s So Fun” tour and festival slots at 2023’s Coachella and Bonnaroo. 

“What ultimately keeps us together,” Maskin said, “is knowing that someone’s going to hear each one of these songs and use it to make a change they need in their life.” McPherson added, “I hope this album helps people connect to each other the way that we, in MUNA, have learned to connect to each other.” What MUNA does, in the end is carve out a space in the middle of whatever existential muck you’re doing the everyday dog-paddle through and transports you, suddenly — you who’ve come to music looking for an answer you can’t find anywhere else — into a room where everything is possible. We’re thrilled to welcome MUNA to the ACL stage.

Join us here on April 24 at 8 p.m. CT for MUNA; the broadcast episode will air on PBS as part of our upcoming Season 49. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for fan-favorite encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org.

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Featured Live Stream News

New taping live stream: Margo Price

Austin City Limits is excited to announce that we will be live streaming our debut taping of Season 49 with iconoclastic singer/songwriter/author Margo Price on March 19. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this highly-anticipated taping here in its entirety on our ACLTV YouTube Channel. 

Margo Price returns to the ACL stage with Strays, her “strongest, most cohesive record yet” (Rolling Stone). Featuring “volcanic vocal performances and sharp character studies” (Vulture), as well as Sharon Van Etten, Lucius, and The Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell, the record “struts through big-hearted indie country, honky-tonk stomp and ’70s guitar-explosion psychedelia” (The New York Times). The new album serves as a resilient proclamation of freedom for Price, who surmounts a lifetime of loss, lies, trauma and substance abuse (as chronicled in her best-selling memoir Maybe We’ll Make It, hailed as one of the best books of 2022) with ten new songs that prove her place as an independent artist, singular storyteller and endlessly experimental explorer, with so much to say but nothing to prove. 

While much of Strays was written in a South Carolina cottage – during six days that the Nashville-based Price spent eating psychedelic mushrooms with her husband and musical partner Jeremy Ivey – the album was primarily recorded in California’s Topanga Canyon. There at producer Jonathan Wilson’s studio in the summer of 2021, Price and her longtime band of Pricetags channeled their telepathic abilities into their best recording sessions and most ambitious array of sounds, styles and arrangements to date. Having been together since the days before Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, her breakthrough 2016 debut that Rolling Stone named one of the Greatest Country Albums of All Time, Price and her band tracked live in the same room, simultaneously expanding upon and completely exploding the notions of every other album they have made together. Price sings unabashedly about self-worth, bodily autonomy and a woman’s right to choose. Across the rest of the LP, she writes about losing herself in sex, overcoming marital conflict, tuning out haters, the aftermath of quitting drinking and more, as “Strays bursts with easy confidence and kind, stoic pearls of wisdom” (Pitchfork). 

“I feel this urgency to keep moving, keep creating,” says Price. “Maybe it’s getting older, or the years the pandemic stole from us all. I feel more mature in the way that I write now, I’m on more than just a search for large crowds and accolades. I’m trying to find what my soul needs.”

Join us here March 19 at 8 p.m. CT for Margo Price; the broadcast episode will air on PBS as part of our Season 49. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org.