Forty years after Pixies first began turning quiet verses into explosions of guitar noise, the hugely influential band is bringing that unmistakable sound back to the Bluegrass State.
Pixies will perform at Louisville’s Iroquois Amphitheater on Sept. 22 as part of a brief U.S. run, celebrating a milestone year for an enigmatic ensemble whose influence has long exceeded its record sales. Formed in Boston in 1986, Pixies helped establish a musical vocabulary that would become fundamental to alternative rock in the 1990s and beyond: jagged guitars, surreal lyrics, unexpected melodies, and perhaps most famously, the dramatic quiet-loud dynamic that countless other artists would subsequently adopt.
Importantly, Kurt Cobain acknowledged Pixies as an influence while writing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but the band’s musical descendants stretch far beyond grunge. Radiohead, Weezer, PJ Harvey, and many more have cited or reflected the group’s influence, while younger listeners continue discovering Pixies through films, television, streaming, and the enduring appeal of the band’s late-’80s and early-’90s catalog.
That catalog includes “Surfer Rosa” (1988), “Doolittle” (1989), “Bossanova” (1990) and “Trompe le Monde” (1991), a remarkably concentrated run of albums that helped establish Pixies as one of the defining American bands of the college-rock era. “Where Is My Mind?,” a tune originally tucked away on “Surfer Rosa,” has taken on a particularly vibrant afterlife, recently surpassing one billion streams on Spotify…