By Simone Goldstone \ NB Indy Soundcheck Columnist
[Editor’s Note: Soundcheck Columnist Simone Goldstone took a detour to Austin, Texas earlier this month for the Austin City Limits Music Festival and filed this report.]
The Austin skyline looms in the heavy heat, but nobody seems to mind. The grass is green, the dust not yet windswept, and the sky is impossibly blue.
Austin City Limits Music Festival (October 3-5 and 10-12) is right on the city’s literal limits, where you cross the Colorado River into Zilker Park. The festival’s mascot – a cowboy silhouetted in a bandana – embodies the strange and cinematic spirit of Austin itself: a little lonesome, a little unusual, and very wild.
Friday opened under a blazing sun and a wave of genre-bending acts. Lvvrs kicked off with a smooth cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” proving that the Louisiana group can blend modern sheen with old-school soul. When lead singer River Gibson leaned into the melody, his southern accent melted away, leaving pure pop charm.
Good Neighbors followed with jangly guitar riffs and bright-eyed energy, their debut album dropping that very morning. Their song “Won’t You Take Me Home” lit the day ablaze.
But it was Austin duo Briscoe who stole the day—and maybe the whole festival. Their new record “Heat of July,” released just a week before ACL, captures something few modern acts can: America’s unpolished heart. It’s impossibly hard to make roots music and use banjo and harmonica in a way that doesn’t feel contrived, but Briscoe makes the sound seem natural and organic.
Isn’t that the kind of music you come to Austin for? Music that sings from Texas hill country, settling over this odd southwestern prairie split by the Colorado river. The kind of roots music that you imagine the ACL cowboy listening to: a dusty bandana, cowboy hats with burned playing cards in the brim instead of feathers, cactus shadows in the distance—and the sound of fiddles against the thump of steel guitar strings.
Not quite country, not quite rock, not quite folk, but a gathering of all three, the way Austin is not quite desert, not quite prairie, not quite the echoes of El Paso or the Panhandle, but unique in its own funkiness, weirdness, iconicness. Their songs are similar to those found in “O Brother Where Art Thou,” songs that seep up from a sepia steeped past.
It’s a revival of what made roots music magical before algorithms flattened it. The American spirit in a way that evokes lonesome highways, burned out phosphate of forgotten Route 66 signs, and swaying wildflowers of Appalachia.
Where pop acts like Benson Boone try to package Americana, Briscoe live it—the mud, the honeysuckle, the sweat, and the poetry. With “Heat of July,” Briscoe reminds us what real musicianship feels like: not recycled, not polished, but played.
Saturday shimmered with a different energy—less nostalgia, more evolution. The Heavy Heavy brought vintage harmonies that felt straight out of 1977. Their set landed somewhere between Fleetwood Mac and Creedence Clearwater Revival, full of swampy basslines and golden-hour harmonies. When Adrian Quesada of the Black Pumas joined for a song about Laredo, the crowd erupted. Later, their cover of Father John Misty’s “Real Love” was equal parts soulful and psychedelic—a love letter to rock’s enduring heartbeat.
Willow Avalon proved one of the fest’s most magnetic rising stars. Despite a few technical hiccups, her confidence never wavered. The crowd sang every word of “Homewrecker,” her drawl adding grit and personality that felt refreshingly real. She brought the “country” back to this festival, blending twang and soul with a voice that was as sweet as wild honey pie.
On Sunday, Passion Pitt brought back the nostalgia of what is now called “Recession Pop.” The feel-good music during 2010-2015, the kind of care-free Indie that was listened to by the crowd on high school bus rides or at college parties, the precursor of what is now an oversaturated field of Indie Pop.
“Take a Walk,” which is the group’s anthem, rang out from the Tito’s Stage. Titos sponsors ACL, fittingly as an Austin brand, but also in a more philanthropic way. Tito’s partnership with Sonic Guild provides financial support for emerging bands to tour, which is essential in today’s landscape where streaming has prevented the revenue music sales used to generate.
Of course, ACL always saves room for its giants. The Strokes, The Killers, Hozier, and Sabrina Carpenter headlined across the weekend, each commanding their stages with arena-size charisma.
Yet what stood out most in 2025 wasn’t the flash—it was the return of feel. From the garage grit of Good Neighbors to the fiddle-driven poetry of Briscoe, this year’s lineup reminded Austin that the future of music isn’t AI-generated or algorithm-fed. It’s still human, imperfect, and alive.
ACL 2025 sounded like what the city itself has always been: a place caught between worlds. From the old neon of South Congress where vintage shops line the heat-soaked pavement to where the desert looms at the edge of town, the perfect Downtown skyline backdrops this iconic music city.
A celebration of where the poetry of Townes Van Zandt and the blues guitar of Stevie Ray Vaughn was born, ACL brings the past and present to life. Modern music is shadowed by outlaw legends and the mystic sounds of music that once carried from the Guadeloupe River to San Antonio.
Somehow, Austin became the most wonderful home to some of the most talented musicians in history.
