Red Bull Music Festival New York 2019

Red Bull Music Festival NYC lineup: FKA twigs, Rosalia, Teyana Taylor, more (tix on sale)

RBMF NYC 2019_Calendar

The 2019 edition of the Red Bull Music Festival runs April 30 – May 18 at venues all over New York City. This year’s lineup includes:

  • FKA twigs‘ playing Park Ave Armory on May 11 & 12, her first NYC shows since 2015.
  • Rosalía playing one of the first shows of the refurbished Webster Hall on April 30, a night they’re calling “Rosalía: El Mal Querer.”
  • Tierra Whack will perform at The Rainbow Room on May 10, creating an immersive show just for the festival that will include music from Whackworld and more.
  • Teyana Taylor will play the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center on May 15 for a show called “House of Petunia” — a “spectacular audio-visual experience spearheaded by her all-female production company, The Aunties.”
  • Holly Herndon will premiere her new live show, PROTO, showcasing music from for forthcoming album of the same name, at Pioneer Works on May 16.
  • The 2019 Red Bull Music Festival will also host events featuring rapper JPEGMAFIA, Moor Mother, the Onyx Collective, and “Nyege Nyege Night” with DJ Kampire and MCZO & Duke.

Tickets for all announced events are on sale now and more details on all are listed below.

RED BULL MUSIC FESTIVAL NEW YORK 2019 LINEUP

April 30 – Red Bull Music Festival Presents ROSALÍA: EL MAL QUERER @ Webster Hall
Since the release of her sophomore album, 2018’s El Mal Querer, Catalan singer and songwriter Rosalía has been on the verge of international stardom. Her pointed lyrics and commanding vocals, combined with the flamenco-rooted hybrid of experimental pop and R&B she’s crafted with co-producer El Guincho, have earned her fans and accolades in Spain and the U.S. El Mal Querer was certified platinum in Spain and reached the top 10 of Billboard’s Latin Albums chart. The album’s brooding yet undeniably catchy lead single, “Malamente,” won two Latin Grammy’s and landed on several of Pitchfork’s 2018 end-of-the-year lists. It’s only a matter of time until you’ll hear Rosalía on every playlist and radio station.

Following a string of several massive shows, including her spectacular Red Bull Presents show in Madrid and performances at Coachella and the Latin Grammys, Rosalía will put on her biggest New York show. Featuring a live band, brilliant dancers, and stunning LED visuals, this will be one of the first shows in the newly renovated Webster Hall and a historic night for contemporary Latin music.

May 3 – Red Bull Music Festival Presents ONYX COLLECTIVE’S NYXO: DEFYING GRAVITY
The jazz renaissance is here. Marathon recording sessions from Los Angeles jazz collective the West Coast Get Down resulted in landmark albums from members like Kamasi Washington. In New York, Onyx Collective is charting a similar course. A classically trained ensemble that nods to jazz conventions as much as they disregard them, the octet have become renowned for their intense and unpredictable impromptu shows in basements and on rooftops. Some of their concerts also feature appearances from New York musicians like Dev Hynes (Blood Orange) and Wiki (RATKING). The group’s first release, The Lower East Suite (Big Dada), consists of two EPs and an LP, each pieced together from several of the ensemble’s electric live sets.

For one night at one of New York City’s beautiful parks, Onyx Collective will put on a freeform collaboration with as many New York musicians as they see fit. Though guests will include artists who specialize in hip-hop, soul, and R&B, jazz will only take five on Onyx Collective’s time.

May 8 – Red Bull Music Festival Presents JPEGMAFIA: A TRIBUTE TO BUTTERMILK JESUS, also featuring Abdu Ali @ Elsewhere
For JPEGMAFIA, no icon, politician, or peer is above reproach. The 29-year-old rapper/producer has been through too much to suffer fools gladly. JPEG spent his childhood in Brooklyn before his family moved to Alabama. Faced with the south’s stark racism, he found consolation and inspiration in the militant music of Ice Cube and Bad Brains. After a harrowing stint in the Air Force, he earned a masters in journalism, moved to Baltimore, and began making the acerbic, politically-charged songs on early projects like Communist Slow Jams (2015). 2018’s Veteran, on which he skewers cable news anchors and Internet trolls with pointed impersonations, was a critical breakthrough, landing a spot on year-end lists from publications like Pitchfork.

JPEG will return to Brooklyn to play at Elsewhere. Performing in-the-round inside a reimagined space, he will showcase his gritty, forward-thinking beats with a dynamic live show.

May 9 – Red Bull Music Festival Presents MOOR MOTHER: RED SUMMER @ BRIC
Moor Mother is a Philadelphia-based artist, musician, and activist whose work operates at the intersection of spoken word, noise, punk, and free jazz. On acclaimed albums like 2016’s Fetish Bones and 2017’s The Motionless Present, she examines consciousness, identity, blackness and the global socio-political landscape through an Afrofuturist lens. Narratives both ancestral and contemporary sit side by side amidst fragmented instrumentation and dissonant electronics. Her work is a vital document of what it means to survive centuries of oppression.

Moor Mother’s new work Red Summer, which will occur on the 100th anniversary of Red Summer – the flood of heightened anti-Black racial terror that swept cities across America in 1919 – features a large-scale performance curated by Moor Mother and an installation by Black Quantum Futurism. Both entangle the temporal present with these historical events, enacting a retro-current wave that reaches back to connect these layers in the fabric of space-time.

May 10 – Red Bull Music Festival Presents TIERRA WHACK @ Rainbow Room
23-year-old Philadelphia native Tierra Whack set Instagram and the record industry ablaze when she released 15 videos for the 15 one-minute songs on her debut album, Whack World. Heralded as one of 2018’s best albums by Pitchfork and Noisey, among other publications, Whack World reimagined the parameters of a song and concept album, pithily covering love and loss, nutrition, and more. Grounded in hip-hop but unbound by any genre, Whack placed witty, breakneck verses and bright, candy-coated instrumentals alongside grim trap beats, laconic mumble rap, and pop-leaning R&B. It remains a zany and profound tour de force for small screens and attention spans, the first album for the social media generation.

After a captivating headlining set at Red Bull Music Festival Presents Illegal Civ Movie Hotel in Los Angeles earlier this year, Whack will appear at the iconic Rainbow Room, 65 floors above Manhattan, for her first headlining show in New York. Featuring a quirky and surreal stage design, the night will be as unconventional as Whack’s work.

May 11 & 12 – Red Bull Music Festival and Park Avenue Armory Present FKA TWIGS @ Park Avenue Armory
FKA twigs emerged as an enigma. From her earliest spellbinding music videos to her critically-acclaimed debut LP1 (2014), the English singer, dancer, producer, and choreographer’s distinctive amalgam of electronic music, R&B, and avant-garde pop has entertained fans as much as its intrigued them. With vocals either as fragile as crystal stemware or sharp as a katana blade, she’s created songs that pulse with sexuality but reveal only glimpses of the woman who owns it.

FKA twigs returns to New York City for the first time since dazzling audiences over three nights at her 2015 Red Bull Music Festival show, Congregata. Co-presented with Park Avenue Armory, she will perform for two nights in the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall.

May 15 – Red Bull Music Festival Presents TEYANA TAYLOR: HOUSE OF PETUNIA @ Grand Ballroom at Manhattan Center
Teyana Taylor was a star long before she broke the Internet as the lone dancer in Kanye West’s “Fade” video. By then, the Harlem-born singer, songwriter, dancer, model, director, actress, and reality TV star had already released several auspicious projects, including the Billboard-charting VII (2014). Her sophomore album on G.O.O.D. Music, K.T.S.E. (2018), realized the promise of previous records, landing on end-of-the-year album lists from publications like Complex, FACT, and Okayplayer, which ranked the album as the best of 2018. A sex-positive R&B album with slices of soul and pop, it proved the perfect vehicle for Taylor’s alternately powerful and sultry vocals.

Following a stunning performance at Red Bull Music Festival Chicago 2018, Taylor returns to New York to present House of Petunia. A spectacular audio-visual experience spearheaded by her all-female production company, The Aunties, the evening will feature provocative stage design and mesmerizing choreography from a world-class team of dancers. Soundtracked by Taylor’s hits and songs from her latest album, House of Petunia will be her most ambitious show to date, the kind she was born to put on.

May 16 – Red Bull Music Festival Presents HOLLY HERNDON: PROTO @ Pioneer Works
Tennessee-born, Berlin-based composer and sound artist Holly Herndon has spent her career mining the shrinking divide between the digital and the human. The owner of a Masters in Electronic Music, she creates densely layered soundscapes that can be academically dissected or simply appreciated for their visceral impact. Made with a myriad of vocal processing techniques and proprietary digital instruments, her alternately beautiful and unsettling suites don’t just probe the line between man and machine, they practically eradicate it.

Red Bull Music Festival New York will host the premiere of Herndon’s pioneering new live show, PROTO. Showcasing music from her latest album, PROTO (4AD), which features critically-acclaimed electronic producer Jlin, the show also incorporates a fluid ensemble of 8 vocalists, Spawn (a nascent machine intelligence), machine learning specialists, choreographers, and visual artists. This multisensory experience will raise questions as much as it moves bodies.

May 18 – Red Bull Music Festival Presents NYEGE NYEGE NIGHT WITH DJ KAMPIRE AND MCZO & DUKE, also featuring BEARCAT @ Black Flamingo
Ranked one of Mixmag’s ten breakthrough DJs of 2018, Kampire is also one of the biggest names in the underground electronic music scene in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. Along with record label and collective Nyege Nyege Tapes, she has laid the bedrock for creating safe party spaces for women and the LGBTQ+ community. Virtually nonexistent in the Kampala club scene until Kampire and Nyege Nyege Tapes, these events spotlight the most forward-thinking pan-African sounds tailored for the dancefloor, including but not limited to gqom and afrobeat. Kampire is a pioneer of the East African new wave scene and her propulsive, bass-heavy sets are always one of the highlights at Nyege Nyege shows.

In recent years, Kampire has played everywhere from Diplo’s Africa showcase at Sónar to Shanghai and Tokyo. This year, Red Bull Music Festival New York will bring her to Brooklyn’s Black Flamingo for her U.S. debut. For this landmark event, Kampire will co-headline a club night with rising singeli duo MCZO & Duke and will also feature one of her favorite stateside DJs, Discwoman affiliate BEARCAT, to celebrate an array of Pan-African club music.