Bee Blackwell

A military childhood, then Central Texas

Bee Blackwell grew up in a military family, which meant a childhood assembled out of postings rather than a single hometown. She has pointed to San Diego and its surf-punk scene, and to Hawaii and reggae, as part of what shaped her ear before the family settled in Central Texas roughly a decade ago. Austin is where the project is based now, and the location tag on every one of her Bandcamp releases.

She has sung since she was small and picked up a guitar at twelve. The first proper band was a ska group in high school, followed by other rock bands through high school and college — the ordinary apprenticeship of someone who learned to play in rooms rather than in a bedroom. Her stated touchstones are specific rather than general: Kim Deal's bands, Helium, Lush, Hole and Liz Phair on the 1990s side, Paramore on the 2000s side. She has described herself as bowing at the altar of Hayley Williams, and named the DIY scene and emo more broadly as the thing she draws most from.

Covers first, then a catalogue

The project started in 2023, when she began posting covers of emo and grunge songs she liked. They travelled further than expected, and the audience arrived before the original material did — she has said plainly that the covers were how she worked out there was anyone listening at all.

The first EP under her own name, Calico, is three songs: 'Blue', 'Deja Vu' and 'Nostalgia Song'. Her Bandcamp page dates it 11 March 2024, while the biography issued by her publicist places it in 2023; either way it belongs to that first stretch after the covers, and 'Blue' became the song the early audience attached itself to. The sound is already tagged the way everything since has been — alternative, dream pop, indie rock, shoegaze — a set of labels that does a reasonable job of describing guitars that are loud and melodies that are not.

Nine Lives, recorded in three days

The second EP, Nine Lives, came out on 20 June 2025. She wrote it after a break-up and has said she used it like a diary, working with emotions that were still fresh rather than processed. The title is the obvious metaphor taken at face value: cats get nine lives, so if one ends there are more to go.

The record was self-written and self-produced, cut with her backing band at Sonic Ranch in El Paso over three days, with the songwriting finished about a week beforehand. Her reason for producing it herself was curiosity about her own ceiling — she has called the EP one big experiment. 'Claws' arrived in May 2025 as the single that introduced it, alongside 'LALALA', which she describes as a conversation between two people who have not spoken in years, and all the boundaries that have grown up in the gap. In March 2025 she had played her SXSW debut across several Austin venues, house shows included, and by that summer she was touring Texas behind the release.

New familiar and a settled band

The third EP, new familiar, was released independently on 19 February 2026: five tracks, 'DISTANCE', 'HIGH HORSE', 'SONG 3', 'YOUR TYPE' and 'VIDEODROME', running a little over twelve minutes in total. Coverage of it has focused on the guitars, which are heavier and dirtier than on Nine Lives, pushing the material further towards alt-rock and emo and away from the dream-pop end of her range.

The credits are the useful detail. Blackwell takes vocals, guitar and co-production; Brendan Reza mixed, mastered and co-produced; Ben Mulick and Nana Serrano play guitar, Maria Romero bass and Grace Bertman drums. That is the same four-piece she works with on stage, which is why the record sounds less like a solo project with hired hands than the previous one. She has said having a band takes the pressure off her and lets her feel the music rather than manage it.

Her writing method has stayed low-tech: a basic chord structure worked out on guitar, a melody found over the top of it, then an acoustic demo built up into tracks in Logic.

Where she stands, September 2026

2026 has been the year the project moved beyond Texas. She played the New Colossus Festival in New York in the spring, a set that got singled out in the coverage as one of the ones worth catching; her own memory of the week was watching other bands from the balcony at Baker Falls, which she called a cosy little space. A Q&A with her about gear, DIY and the festival followed in April.

In July she took a Tuesday residency at 13th Floor in Austin, starting on 7 July with the post-hardcore five-piece lose lose opening, doors at eight and music at nine, and rotating support across the following weeks from Mimiclou, sunguilt and Georgia Britt. The listings keep her there through 21 and 28 July, with a further Austin date at the Far Out Lounge & Stage on 21 August.

Then the step up. Blackwell opens the North American dates of Julia Wolf's Deep End World Tour, starting 17 September 2026 at Mohawk's outdoor stage in Austin — her own city, which is a neat piece of routing — and running through Dallas, Houston, Orlando, two nights at the Masquerade in Atlanta, the Fillmore Charlotte, Nashville, the 9:30 Club in Washington, Franklin Music Hall in Philadelphia, two nights at Irving Plaza in New York, the House of Blues in Boston, the Opera House in Toronto and on west through Denver, Portland, Seattle and the Warfield in San Francisco, finishing with two nights at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles on 25 and 26 October. The tour as a whole runs from 31 July to 4 December 2026 and was expanded from 33 dates to 43 on demand, with extra shows added in London, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles; SCRO takes the European leg from 16 November in Dublin. This is not Blackwell's first time on a bill with Wolf — she had opened for her before Nine Lives came out — but it is the first time at this scale, and several of the North American dates are ticketed as 'Julia Wolf w/ Bee Blackwell' rather than burying the opener.

The room itself

The halls on this run are 1,000 to 2,500 capacity — the Fillmore Charlotte, Roseland, the Showbox, the Warfield — which is a considerable jump from a Tuesday residency at 13th Floor, where doors were at eight and the local opener went on before her.

What has not changed is the personnel. The four musicians credited on new familiar are the ones on stage, so the set is a five-piece playing guitar music rather than a singer over tracks, and the newer songs land harder live for the same reason they land harder on record: two guitars doing the work. No published running time exists for the support slot on the Deep End dates, and nothing should be invented for it; what is documented is the shape of the catalogue she has to draw from — three EPs, eleven songs, none of them long.