A music festival can be a beautiful thing. But it can also be a machine that launders vast quantities of money through young talent into old pockets.
The Big Pop Show—coming to the Cat’s Cradle Back Room, the ArtsCenter, Duke Coffeehouse, and the Pinhook for four days, starting March 20—dispenses with the power differential. Instead of commercial sponsors, support comes from Duke Coffeehouse and Duke’s and UNC’s student radio stations, WXDU and WXYC, where the five organizers have all been involved in various ways.
Three of them—Lilian Fan, Charlotte Kane, and Annie Vedder—live in the Triangle. The other two, Nathan McMurray and Eli Schmitt, are in Chicago. They’re all in their early 20s, the same age as the dozens of bands they’re convening from around the South, the Midwest, and beyond.
The festival is volunteer-run; all the proceeds go to the bands. Rather than navigating booking agencies, they reached out directly to artists they know or admire. There’s no hierarchy, no fight for type size on a flyer, just “a small, beautiful subsection of DIY music culture today,” according to Schmitt, whose psych-rock band TV Buddha will also perform.
Though guitars will be plentiful, Big Pop offers an array of genres. The common thread is a drive for independence in community, to create something “local, tangible and real,” said Nathan McMurray, a Durham native, whose new band Sects sounds like early Modest Mouse.
Big Pop debuted last year with a one-day event at Duke Coffeehouse, emerging organically from the friendships of its organizers.
“Annie and I were running a local music zine together,” said Lilian Fan. “Charlotte and I play in a band [Little Chair], and we met Eli when they invited us to play a show in Chicago.”
Expanding from one day to four, this year, will give visitors an authentic taste of what it’s like to live here and love music, even if that means always driving up and down 15-501.
With the bigger footprint, accessibility remains a priority. Though last year’s small-scale fest was free, this much more ambitious outing costs $15 a night or $40 for all four days—still a relative bargain.
Schmitt is excited about Paper Jam, a sugar-sweet Texas indie-pop band. “I’ve known them for a while on the internet,” Schmitt says, “and I’m finally going to get to see it.”
Vedder, a musician who works at All Day Records, is stoked for Orlando band Warm Frames, “a bunch of hardcore musicians who really love pop music.” Kane and McMurray both highlighted April Magazine, a gorgeous dreampop band from San Francisco, because it’s exciting to have someone coming from so far away.
And Fan picked Pipe, the old-school Chapel Hill punk-rock ringers: “Everyone in the band is a local legend I look up to, and they rock.”
For a festival run by and for Gen Z, the Gen X lineage in Big Pop is strong. Many things about it seem more 1996 than 2026: the college-radio roots, the zine-trading day, the screening of Chapel Hill filmmakers Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley’s Half-Cocked, a ’90s indie slice of life with Polvo on the soundtrack. The festival’s website is a Web 1.0 throwback, all static links stuck in dancing tiles.
Even the name Big Pop Show echoes a little-remembered but pivotal Chapel Hill indie festival from 1992, the Big Record Stardom Convention. The organizers were unaware of it, but drew significant inspiration from the International Pop Underground Convention, a similar event in Olympia, Washington. Then as now, indie kids love those mock-grandiose names.
There’s something really human and real about college radio. Because it’s a space that was built up by a past generation who were doing what we’re doing, there’s a large amount of intergenerational care.”
Nathan McMurray, co-organizer, big pop show
Above all, they were inspired by the living roots of DIY music in college radio and at Duke Coffeehouse.
“They have been the most endlessly supportive group of an older generation,” said Vedder. “At least in the Triangle, college radio is the crux of the local community, and I think it can be a resistant tool within universities, or at least that’s how a lot of my friends have approached it.”
“There’s something really human and real about college radio,” McMurray added. “Because it’s a space that was built up by a past generation who were doing what we’re doing, there’s a large amount of intergenerational care.”
Big Pop is a chance to see some great up-and-coming bands, but it’s also great to see history repeating itself in a good way—with young people grounded in a tradition, reinterrogating it for their times, finding the same core principles: DIY, RIYL, and IRL.
“My biggest dream for it is that the people who come see that this kind of thing is possible,” Schmitt says. “You don’t need to wait for adults to do it for you, which I think is a really inspirational thing.”
To comment on this story, email [email protected].