The Biggest Music Stories of 2025

What a year it’s been, and the Denver music scene remains as vigorous and resilient as ever.

In 2025, we said goodbye to one of the city’s favorite music festivals — but we also saw the rise of a new, independent venue. Here are the biggest music stories of the year, news both good and bad.

Disgraced Venue Owner Behind Bars

Jay Bianchi, one of the Denver music scene’s most controversial figures, was arrested in April 2024 and charged with six counts of sexual assault and one for unlawful sexual contact. After a three-week-long trial and a week of deliberation this fall, the jury found him guilty of five felony sex offenses involving three women; he will be sentenced on January 23.

Bianchi had been active in the jam-band scene for two decades, opening Deadhead watering holes like Sancho’s Broken Arrow (which closed in 2022) and So Many Roads (which closed in 2024). The greasy-haired, scrawny bar owner already had a terrible reputation that included punching his employees and attempting to attack a band later that same night; he also had a history of raping women he’d drugged, as his conviction confirmed.

Your Mom’s House Under Fire

Your Mom’s House has been hit by at least nine wage claims filed with the Colorado Department of Labor since January, when Jillian Johnson took over majority ownership of the venue; some musicians also claim they haven’t received payment for their performances. While Johnson said she bought her majority stake in YMH with the goal of amping up its punk roster, the venue has shifted its focus to more hip-hop shows. Although there are no shows right now: On December 17, the venue was seized by the city because of unpaid taxes that the previous owners did not pay.

Your Mom’s House has been on rocky footing since March, when a dispute over a liquor license between Johnson and owners of the Pearl took an ugly turn. Then in April, former co-owner James Bedwell filed a lawsuit charging that Johnson fraudulently took the venue from him. And the action isn’t over yet….

Federal Theatre Opens

The Federal Theatre became the area’s newest independent music venue when it opened at 3830 Federal Boulevard on September 19 with fanfare and fierce cultural pride: The free show featured two of Denver’s top Latin bands, Los Mocochetes and iZCALLi. The theater had opened as a cinema in the 1920s and closed in the ’70s, with a church utilizing it as a space for over a decade until January 2023. That’s when Oriental Theater owners Scott Happel, Peter Ore and Andy Barcaw stepped in and brought the 650-capacity space back to life. “We need to provide fun places for people to come,” Happel told us, “and we need people to want to come out and have a good time.”

The Northside certainly obliged, and we look forward to many more shows at this community-oriented venue in the year to come.

Project 70’s Hardcore Debut

Although there had been whispers about Project 70, no one could have anticipated its wild debut this fall that had us wishing it were open year-round. The pop-up venue is the latest project from Anschutz Entertainment Group, which also created such venues as Mission Ballroom, and it arrived in September with a bang. Located under the I-70 overpass at 46th Avenue and Humboldt Street, next to the Denver Coliseum, Project 70 debuted with a hard-core celebration that included performances by Turnstile, Mannequin Pussy, SPEED and Jane Remover, as well as a half pipe with pro skaters, food trucks and a giant mosh pit. More shows followed, including a rave with drum-and-bass producers Chase & Status.

“One of the joys of live music and the live experience is getting something new and different,” Don Strasburg, co-president of AEG Presents Rocky Mountains, told us. “Bringing the opportunity to explore new places to dance is our mission. We want to constantly evolve and create dynamic experiences for the entire community.”

Underground Music Showcase Goes Under

It was the end of an era: When the Underground Music Showcase announced it would cease after 2025, we were a mess. The festival had been one of the highlights of a Denver summer for 25 unforgettable years, and the last event was colored by both nostalgia and a no-holds-barred attitude to make the absolute most of it. The swan song included performances from major groups like DeVotchKa, which was at the festival’s early iterations, but the main pull was the local bands and musicians that continue to make our scene so strong, from Dressy Bessy, Cheap Perfume and the Velveteers to Rootbeer Richie and the Reveille, Horse Bitch, Monica The Great, Jaiel and Velvet Daydream.

All in all, the festival’s end came with a reminder: We’re lucky to have a scene that’s thriving year-round, and for the cost of one weekend pass to UMS, you can still buy a ticket to a weekly local show throughout the year.

Five Points Music Festivals Lost and Found

This was our first year without the Five Points Jazz Festival. The event had been a city favorite since it began in 2003, bringing people together along Welton Street for a celebration of the neighborhood’s historic jazz roots. When Denver Arts & Venues announced that the fest was ending, it said it would be replaced with the Five Points Jazz grant program, which “supports jazz performances and jazz-related activities in Five Points, both to celebrate the history of jazz in the ‘Harlem of the West.”

And Five Points has a community that shows up for music, which was evident when the Drop 104.7 stepped in to support the Juneteenth Music Festival, also on the brink of cancellation, bringing on headliner Juvenile and keeping the event free. In September, the Hi Points Festival debuted, a multi-venue, day-long event along Welton Street that celebrated the musical legacy of Five Points as well as late, legendary bassist Charles Burrell.

More New Festivals Make Their Mark

Hi Points wasn’t the area’s only new music festival. One of our favorites was Indiewood, a collaboration between Swallow Hill Music and Downtown Englewood that provided a full day of music, vendors, food trucks, art installations and more in June. It marked Swallow Hill’s return to the festival world since the pandemic had shut down its Blues and Brews and Brewgrass fests, and it was a sold-out success, with the crowd smiling through sets by Barbara, Sunstoney, Yarn, Rootbeer Richie and the Reveille, and Kiltro.

There was also the Colfax Carousel Punk Fest, organized by Tom Dodd and Ryan Heller, of Denver band Tuff Bluff. The fest filled the Lion’s Lair, the Squire Lounge and Tight End Bar with eighteen local bands in a punk-rock celebration that invigorated a portion of Colfax Avenue that’s been hurting since the Bus Rapid Transit project construction began. Denon Moore, business director of the Colfax Avenue Business Improvement District, said the festival would “lift the energy level back up on Colfax,” and it sure did.

Further afield, Field of Vision hosted its inaugural event at Meadow Creek in Buena Vista this summer. Helmed by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, perhaps the best contemporary rock band in the world right now, the three-day event was a major success, pulling in fans around the globe. It was also tinged by tragedy, after fan Matt Gawiak suffered cardiac arrest during the first evening of the festival and passed away. But King Gizz underscored how its fans are more like family, dedicating a song to him and his family at the end of the festival. Field of Vision will return from August 14-16, 2026.

Nightclubs Close, and Another Opens

This year saw the closure of several downtown nightclubs. Status Ultra Lounge had opened on New Year’s Eve 2022 at 1822 Blake Street, which previously housed the short-lived gay nightclub Sir. In late November, Denver declared the nightclub a “public nuisance,” citing “unlawful use, firing, or discharging of any firearm”; it has a January 9 hearing with the city to argue why its license should not be suspended or revoked altogether.

Riot House shut down in early December, but not because of any order from the city. The nightclub, which was located at 1920 Market Street, where The Real World: Denver was set almost two decades ago, had opened on New Year’s Eve 2023, and was a project of Riot Hospitality Group, Monfort Companies and MAR Ventures, the same entities that partnered to open Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row at 1946 Market Street on New Year’s Eve 2021.

La Diabla, a Latin nightclub at 1512 Curtis Street, closed last summer. But a new nightclub soon entered the scene: XSO Nightclub, which opened in Denver Pavilions in October. Co-owner Ventura Morales, whose family is behind 3 Margaritas, put a lot of focus into the club’s sound system and high-end aesthetic. “Our vision is to become Colorado’s best nightclub,” Morales told us, “and to try to make it a place where, if you visit Denver, you have to go to XSO.”

The Loss of Colorado Music Legends

The state lost some real music icons this year. Jill Sobule, who wrote such successful songs as “I Kissed a Girl” and “Supermodel” (which made it to the Clueless soundtrack), was killed in a house fire the day before she was slated to play a show at Swallow Hill Music. The event instead turned into an informal memorial for the artist, who was born and raised in Denver, then headed to New York City to pursue her music career.

The loss of legendary jazz bassist Charles Burrell on June 17 was also deeply felt. Known as the Jackie Robinson of classical music for breaking the color barrier in the Denver Symphony Orchestra in 1949, he was 104 years old when he passed. As the house bassist at the Rossonian in Five Points decades earlier, he collaborated with such greats as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, as well as and instrumentalists Charlie Parker, Gene Harris and Ben Webster, among many others.

Burrell’s cousin, Purnell Steen, another revered jazz performer, passed away in November. As leaeder of the Five Points Ambassadors, he was a staple of the Denver jazz scene for decades, and spoke with us about Five Points’ rich history in February. He’d also made a mark as a civil-rights activist, meeting with Robert F. Kennedy when he was attorney general and attending Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.

They’ll all be missed.