Welcome once again to another year of coverage for Pitchfork Music Festival here on Faronheit! Every July, we spend one week diving into the various musical aspects of the Pitchfork Music Festival lineup. This comes in multiple forms. There’s the playlist featuring every artist on the lineup, which is what always kicks off the coverage so you can hear music from every artist performing and get a better sense of what you might like and who might be worth checking out over the course of the 3-day weekend. More on that in a minute. But other coverage will include day-by-day preview guides to give a little more context to the artists and schedule matchups that can cause some serious conflicts if you know and like multiple artists performing at the same time. Then we get into the daily recaps, which deliver a lot of the play-by-play looks at exactly what happened, what songs were performed, and what crazy thing that one artist did on stage. Whether you’re going and want to learn more about this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival itself, or aren’t able to attend but would love to hear about what’s happening in Union Park from July 19-21, this coverage will provide all of that and more.

As I previously mentioned, Pitchfork Music Festival week always starts with a playlist. Two songs from every single artist on the lineup. It’s arranged by date and set time, so for example Black Duck starts things off on Friday afternoon so they are first on the playlist, while Alanis Morissette closes out the weekend on Sunday so she’s last on the playlist. If you listen in order, you’ll journey through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday over the course of about five hours. Easy peasy. Jump into it, get familiar with a bunch of artists you haven’t heard before or have only heard a song or two from. A big part of this festival is discovery of great up-and-coming artists, so get started on that process right now with the playlist below. Sadly it’s only available through Spotify, so if you prefer a different streaming service you’re out of luck. But since most everyone I know has a Spotify account, hopefully it won’t be too much of a lift. Please enjoy, and come on back tomorrow for the start of the preview guides!