Passenger Princess (good vibes, workout beats)

Francisco Martin was born and raised in the Bay Area into a musically fertile household. Self-taught as a child, Francisco mastered drums, guitar, piano, and several other instruments, taking his talent to local stages while playing with musicians several years his senior. He later earned the title ‘writer-producer’ as he began to dabble in poetry and experiment with SoundCloud, where he amassed a following for his original renditions of favorite covers.

Francisco first shot to fame with American Idol season 18 in 2020 where he placed Top 5. From there, he quickly released a few singles before embarking on a fall coast-to-coast tour. His heart-on-sleeve soulful pop has garnered favorable comparisons to songwriter artists such as James Bay, John Mayer, Maggie Rogers, and Ed Sheeran. While touring, post-EP, Francisco found himself writing and producing his next project, a blend of retro-soul, bedroom pop, low-fi and pop soundscapes highlighting Francisco’s signature dreamy falsetto and robust belting yet moving into the lighter-hearted territory of songs like “Passenger Princess”, where pleasure and happiness as the highest good is your crush’s feet on your dashboard.

Make It to Tomorrow (the feels)

From the shadows of Confederate Mount Rushmore in Stone Mountain, Georgia, just miles outside the Civil Rights capital city of Atlanta, comes a sharp-tongued, soft-hearted messenger, dealing hope and hard pills about the gap between the world we have and the world that could be. Through vulnerable storytelling, incisive writing, and conscious, soulful, cinematic, pop anthems, Andre Henry calls listeners into a beautiful rebellion.

Andre was studying theology when the killing of Philando Castile by the Minneapolis Police Department triggered an awakening. For several months, he lugged a 100-pound boulder around the Los Angeles area, to visually express the pressure anti-Black racism can exert on the Black psyche, even on stage.

He’s a graduate of 1500 Sound Academy in Inglewood, California, founded by Grammy winners James Fauntleroy and Larrance Dopson, and the inaugural recipient of the “Reach Out and Touch Award” in honor of legendary singer-songwriter Nick Ashford from The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation. His work has been featured in The Nation, The New Yorker, New York’s Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., and Super Bowl LVI.

Whether he's marching the streets with local activists, preaching from a pulpit, writing his books or performing his music, Andre is here to make the revolution irresistible.

Like I Care (good vibes)

Indie-rock/folk singer Nikita Lev is committed to crafting compelling music. Nikita crafts music that is honest, confident, and mature for someone who is just about to turn nineteen in April. Not afraid to speak her mind, she introduces a tension between nostalgia and modernity on “Elegance.” As she penned the lead single off her forthcoming “Clearly Misunderstood” EP, she examined the juxtaposition between entering adulthood and the carelessness of being a free-spirited youth. 
 Hinged with guitar, piano, and drums, the song showcases Nikita’s rich, lower-register vocals that call to mind influences like Lana Del Rey and Phoebe Bridgers. 
 Nikita picked up the flute and piano at an early age and by ten, she was learning how to play the guitar and write songs. Today, when she composes her music, she leans on the guitar or piano to come up with the melody. “I always know what I'm going to say first and the melody comes later. I need a narrative thread to hold on to when writing. The lyrics are the reason the song is being written rather than sonic motivation but I think both are equally important. Most of the time when I write, I’ll have a bunch of different lyric ideas. I’ll accumulate them on one page, map them out, and put them together like a puzzle. Sometimes lyrically and melodically, it all happens at once, which is amazing. Other times it needs some deliberate fleshing out, and I tend to focus on the lyric side of things to get excited about it sonically.”