The Head and The Heart, Bob Mould, Arcade Fire, Lady Blackbird Kick Off Day 1 of NON-COMM 2025

NON-COMMvention 2025 opened on Tuesday, May 6, with eight back-to-back live sets streamed from World Cafe Live’s Music Hall and the PRX Stage at WXPN.

The night began at 7:00 PM with a lineup that paired fresh voices with familiar names, offering a snapshot of where non-commercial music is headed. Every performance was streamed live on XPN.org, bringing the energy of the room to audiences everywhere.

As the final set wrapped, the first night closed with a sense of momentum. NON-COMMvention was officially underway — and there’s much more music to come.

---

Muireann Bradley

A native of County Donegal, Ireland, Muireann Bradley got NON-COMM 2025 under way with a breathtaking set of fingerstyle guitar and soft vocals, playing a selection of songs from her 2025 Tompkins Square release I Kept These Old Blues. The album collects Bradley’s versions of folk and blues songs, and she played them to a quiet and attentive crowd. The instrumental “Buck Dancer’s Choice” is a song she told the crowd she first heard via revered guitarist John Fahey. Bradley also played “When The Levee Breaks,” a song originally by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy that was later made famous to rock fans through Led Zeppelin’s version, but Bradley’s rendition hewed closer to the original.

---

Lady Blackbird

With a subtle yet commanding voice, UK artist Lady Blackbird offered NON-COMM a set of groove-oriented songs that draw on soul, jazz, and folk music. The first artist to play on the NPR Music Stage in World Cafe Live’s Music Hall, Lady Blackbird’s performance was arranged with electrifying rockers at the top (“Woman” was a stunner) with emotive acoustic arrangements (the closing “Like A Woman”) that called to mind Nina Simone and Joan Armatrading. Her sophomore album Slang Spirituals came out on London label Foundation Music in May of 2024.

---

Yuno

A bright pick-me-up on the PRX Stage of NON-COMM, Florida’s Yuno is a week out from the release of his Sub Pop Records debut Blest. Active as a producer and songwriter since 2018, his set was his first performance with a band in six years, and he felt primed for a return. Showcasing four songs off the new record, his music felt custom made for warmer days and breezy climates; think Toro Y Moi, Blood Orange, and Philly’s Vacationer as Kindred souls. The title track, which arrived at the end of the set, was the standout, but a vibrant performance of his debut 2018 single “No Going Back” — which at the time Pitchfork called “vibrant and debonair” — was a close second.

---

Bob Mould

Bob Mould is legendary for many things: co-founding college rock icons Hüsker Dü, expanding his sonic palette on the alternative-era trio Sugar, script-writing for World Championship Wrestling — and the prolific rocker continues this year with the new album Here We Go Crazy, his fifteenth solo album. His set at NON-COMM was short on chitchat (as is Mould’s standard operating procedure) and heavy on rock, showcasing not just the new album but selections from 2012’s Silver Age (the opening “Star Machine”) and 2020’s Blue Hearts (“It’s Another American Crisis”), with a knockout punch of Hüsker Dü’s “Makes No Sense At All” to close the performance.

---

Jensen McRae

Playing to a packed Lounge at World Cafe Live, California singer-songwriter Jensen McRae shared a set of heartwarming and relatable songs that were a high point of NON-COMM’s first night. “Savannah” was a sweeping country power ballad to open the performance; the infectious “Let Me Be Wrong” smoothly slid into “Praying For A Downfall,” mixing in catchy hooks and pop urgency. McRae’s debut album I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! came out in April on Dead Oceans records, and during breaks between songs she offered casual anecdotes about the music, joking about the bummer exes who inspired some of her more cutting lyrics, and telling the crowd that she wrote “I Can Change Him” long before Taylor Swift’s “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).” “Love blondie,” McRae said, “But she really scooped me on that one.”

---

The Head and the Heart

As The Head and The Heart took the Music Hall stage at World Cafe Live, Charity Rose Thielen looked out at the room of radio industry pros, fans, and friends, and said “I haven’t had butterflies like this since we began as a band.” Their sixth album, Aperture, comes out Friday on Verve Records, and for a band that has grown in profile exponentially since debuting in 2011, it feels like a return to form, a full circle moment. The band used the bulk of its set to showcase the record — the title track, and “After The Setting Sun,” were captivating moments out of the gate. They only offered two back-catalog selections, but they were winners both: the uplifting “Lost in My Mind” and the contemplative “Rivers and Roads” from their debut. “Having nerves means you’re in the right place,” Thielen said. “It means you’re doing the right thing.”

---

Michigander

“Shoutout to public media, and the people who are fighting the good fight,” said Michigander frontperson Jason Singer, a reference to the recent move in Washington to end federal funding for NPR and PBS. It was a political statement without being overtly political, but for the most part, Singer and Michigander used their NON-COMM performance to keep their eyes on the future with a glimmer of hope in their outlook and an acknowledgement of the difficulty being positive in turbulent times. “This song is brought to you by Zoloft,” Singer playfully said to introduce their terrific single “I’ll Be OK”; later, the closing “Let Down” worked a similar dichotomy, building to an uplifting refrain of “I got high hopes, I got high hopes,” only to offer the flipside “But they let me down, they usually let me down” in the most optimistic of ways.

---

Arcade Fire

The night wrapped with a performance by Arcade Fire, promoting the release of their new album Pink Elephant and playing back-catalog cuts “The Suburbs” and “Wake Up.” They will be the musical guests on Saturday Night Live this weekend.