███ █████ █████ █████ ██ a lot of mid-size cities has gotten genuinely more interesting over the last five years and I want to push back on the narrative that everything is centralized in a few coastal scenes.

I've been paying attention to mid-size city scenes — not the obvious ones, the secondary cities that don't get covered in music media — and there's real vitality happening in places that don't have established critical infrastructure. The interesting thing is that the absence of critical infrastructure actually produces different music: without the feedback loop between local press and local shows, artists are working without the incentive to make music that will be covered in a certain way.

The other thing mid-size city scenes have going for them is that the cost of living is lower, which means artists can afford to do this longer without commercial pressure. The music that results sometimes has a different relationship to time — it's not trying to be the thing of the moment.