Benny Hagerty
Benny Hagerty plays folk, blues, and bluegrass like a man who has no interest in being anything other than exactly himself.
Benny Hagerty picked up a guitar at thirteen and never really put it back down. The Greenville singer-songwriter plays Appalachian folk and blues — intimate and acoustic. He spent years playing local restaurants and private events before going full-time in 2024. Debut single "Quittin’ Time" in March of that year. "Gamblin’ Blues" two months later.
Benny Hagerty — vocals, guitar
Darby Wilcox
Ten years deep in the Upstate scene with a debut album that sounds like a decade's worth of living distilled into something raw and unhurried — Darby Wilcox is the real thing.
Darby Wilcox has been doing this for a decade in Greenville, and she has earned every bit of the praise she gets. The singer-songwriter and self-proclaimed Mayor of Babetown — a community she founded on the radically simple premise of babes supporting babes — plays that Americana which pulls directly from the Joss Stone and Janis Joplin end of the dial: soulful, direct, tender. Usually found with The Peep Show backing her up the way a good band should, dynamically flowing as one. Her debut album 11:11, in 2018. EP It's OK in 2023. Fall for Greenville. The Brooks Center. The Radio Room. A decade of showing up and meaning it, and she's still just getting started.
Members: Darby Wilcox (vocals, guitar) with The Peep Show
Sunhouse
Formed in 2022 and already sounding fully formed — Sunhouse are the indie rock band Greenville didn't know it needed until the Radio Room sold out for their debut album release.
Sunhouse started in the summer of 2022 in Greenville with six songs and a sound that arrived, in the words of Vincent Harris of the Greenville Journal's Upstate Beat, "fully formed." Four people pulling from indie rock, '80s pop, folk, and grunge and somehow landing somewhere that sounds like none of those things exactly and all of them at once. Their debut album, No One's Home, took more than a year to create, a labor of love that Rice called an achievement just to finish. And when they finally played the release show at the Radio Room in November 2024, it felt less like a local band milestone and more like a quiet arrival. Swanson's Warehouse. The Radio Room. Athens. Charleston. The rooms keep getting a little bigger, and the songs keep holding up.
Brass Tongue
DIY to the bone and Upstate Music Award winners before most people knew their name
Brass Tongue formed in Greenville in early 2022, and their debut EP, "Dangerous World Demo," made them a name fast, a finalist for an Upstate Music Award before most people outside the scene had caught a show. They followed it up in 2024 with a second EP, "ONE STEP AWAY." Confident, tight, and clearly not interested in a slow build.
Reviler
High-energy, relentless, and built from scratch in a group chat — Reviler arrived in 2022 and became the heartbeat of Greenville's hardcore resurgence almost immediately
Reviler crawled out of Greenville, South Carolina in late 2022 with nothing but a group chat, some scrapped demos, and an agreement that the music would be relentless or it would be nothing. They've been making good on that promise ever since — playing two-plus shows a month, booking their own tours from the Carolinas down to Jacksonville and all the way to Puerto Rico, pressing cassettes by hand, drawing their own logos.
Reedy River String Band
Three writers, three singers, three-part harmony — playing boot-stomping Appalachian roots music from Greenville
Three writers, three singers, three-part harmony — Reedy River String Band play the kind of boot-stomping Appalachian music that makes you feel like you've been missing something your whole life, which you have, and they've been making that case around the world.
Wasted Wine
Nearly two decades in and still the weirdest popular band in Greenville — violin-shredding, fire-accompanied, and completely uncategorizable in the best possible way.
Wasted Wine is what happens when two men decide that gypsy violin, cabaret rock, and the ghost of Nick Cave all belong in the same room together, the Greenville Journal called it "a bouncy burlesque-style romp" and NPR's Bob Boilen called it "a bastard child of David Lynch and Nick Cave," and both of them are correct and neither of them is entirely right.
WVRM
They call it "grinding self-hatred" and mean every word — WVRM are Greenville's working class made loud, four men on Prosthetic Records who sound like the city's prettified downtown skyline collapsing
They call it "grinding self-hatred" and mean every word, WVRM are Greenville's working class made loud, four men on Prosthetic Records who sound like the city's prettified downtown skyline collapsing.
Valentine Wolfe
Braxton Ballew plays double bass for the Greenville Symphony by day and conjures Victorian ghost music with vocalist Sarah Black by night — the strangest and most essential duo this city has produced.
Sarah Black and Braxton Ballew have been conjuring something genuinely strange in Greenville since 2006, two people who decided that gothic literature and 18th-century opera were not mutually exclusive with playing shows in South Carolina.
Slow Funeral
Slow Funeral is Greenville's most quietly devastating rock act, and she's just getting started.
Slow Funeral is what happens when a woman from the South Carolina Piedmont decides, against the advice of everyone sensible, to make the album she's been carrying around in her chest since she was sixteen.