The Knoxville music scene’s newest and best-kept secret happens to pride itself on being just that—a secret.

Well, sort of. The Secret Show concert series, conceptualized by local music aficionados and promoters Kent Oglesby and Garrett Thomson, was designed to bring a uniquely intimate listening experience to Knoxville.

“Knoxville has such a great music scene, and a big part of that is that listeners will come and be willing to try new things and listen to music intently,” Oglesby says. “Being able to provide a new experience for that is really big.”

The concept behind the series involves selling a limited number of tickets to Secret Shows via Oglesby’s website, knoxvillemusicwarehouse.com. Now for where the “secret” part comes in: The shows’ locations will be revealed to ticket-owners only a day before the event.

The venues promise to be as unconventional as the nature of the series itself.

“We want [a space] that doesn’t necessarily feel like a music venue, and we want to transform it into a really cool listening environment,” Thomson says. “Maybe that’s an old abandoned warehouse, maybe it’s a rooftop downtown, or maybe it’s the storefront of a trendy, upcoming business. We want each space to feel unique in some manner.”

Thomson, who has had success promoting a similar concept with Cause a Scene in Nashville, believes this could be a remedy for the gap currently felt by local concertgoers.

“There’s kind of a hole between bars and theaters,” he says. “We realized there is actually a really big need for smaller venues and listening rooms in Knoxville, so we thought, why don’t we create this cool event around that to really give artists the opportunity to be heard and for fans to really listen to the music?”

The opportunity for creativity in venue spaces is one of the project’s most exciting aspects, Oglesby says.

“Some of the locations we’ve looked at, I’ll just look around and think, ‘My god, I cannot wait to turn this into a stage and decorate it and get a band in here, because it will be amazing.’”

The number of tickets sold for each event will vary in relation to the artist; while 200 audience members could feel enormous for some artists, the same number could create a comparatively cozy ambience for other, larger names.

The inaugural Secret Show will be held on July 24, at an as-of-yet-undisclosed location, of course, and will feature Americana artist Joseph LeMay. This West Tennessee native’s 2014 album, Seventeen Acres, was named by Rolling Stone as one of the releases you probably didn’t hear that year but should have. LeMay first began to catch local attention after performing at this year’s Rhythm N’ Blooms in April.

“We want his show to feel intimate and different, and we want people to be able to hear his music without background noise,” Thomson says. “So it kind of lends itself to a smaller crowd.”

Neither Thomson nor Oglesby will reveal the names of the artists headlining the future three to four Secret Shows slated to hit Knoxville later this year. But if there’s one thing this entire series can promise, it’s diversity, they say.

“Some of these shows we’ve booked for the fall I have no doubt will sell out in a matter of a few days,” Thomson says. “It’s cool to see Knoxville support this crazy idea. This is about bringing a whole new life to the music scene.”