Slacker Promotions Proudly Present Wayne Graham

Slacker Promotions proudly present Wayne Graham (US)!

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With their 9th studio album 'BASTION' due for release on 6th September - you are in for a treat from these indie-rock maestros!

This will be the first UK show on their European tour, so let's give these Kentucky natives a proper Nottingham welcome!

About Wayne Graham

In case you were wondering, Wayne Graham are a band, not one guy.

Named after brothers Kenny and Hayden Miles’ two grandfathers, each coal miners with storied histories, they have long been at the forefront of the new movement of artists, shaping the New Appalachian Sound- shaped by tradition, but intentionally set on forging a new sonic landscape.

What do you do when you no longer identify with the place you call home?

Wayne Graham are the product of Whitesburg, Kentucky, USA, a small town of fewer than 2,000 souls on the extreme eastern end of the state, almost in western Virginia. That’s where they grew up, where they learned to play music from their family, where they served as the rhythm section for their father’s small church, where they started making music together in a band with an unusual moniker, and it’s where Hayden still lives.

“Our music is the way it is because we’re from here,” he says. “It’s very specifically Kentucky.”

As adults, however, they find themselves increasingly alienated from the culture and values of the place, a small town not unlike so many other small towns in America.

“I feel very fortunate to be able to say we’re from here, and it’s inspiring to watch other people from this region find success,” says Kenny, who lives two hours away in Lexington, Kentucky.

"At the same time, it can be very isolating. It feels strange to play our hometown because our music isn’t what people are looking for here. Sometimes Wayne Graham feels like a square peg in a round hole.”

That sense of place—and the tension between identification and alienation, pride and shames, home and not-home—has always informed Wayne Graham’s music, but it comes to the foreground on their ambitiously imaginative, boundlessly compassionate, and deeply disruptive new album, Bastion, which is due for release on 6th September 2024 on Hickman Holler Records (thats Tyler Childers' label for those in the know!).

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