The All Songs Considered SXSW Preview, 2019

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The annual South by Southwest music festival is our personal endurance challenge to discover as many great unknown and often unsigned bands as possible in just one week. To train for the event, Bob Boilen, Stephen Thompson and I listen to more than a thousand songs by bands playing the festival, from all over the world, and try to map out a calendar to see our favorites.

On this edition of All Songs Considered we play some of the standout songs ahead of the 2019 festival, including the Ghanian artist Jojo Abot, garage rock from Blushh, the Japanese pop group CHAI, music made by robots (I'm not making that up) and much, much more. -- Robin Hilton

This preview show is just a small part of NPR Music's SXSW coverage.

Subscribe to the All Songs Considered podcast for in-the-moment exclamations of joy and bleary-eyed, late-night dispatches from the All Songs Considered team.

Listen to the Austin 100, a playlist of songs from 100 bands playing the festival.

On this page, we'll post concert videos from our first-ever Tiny Desk Family hour, daily discoveries, including a playlist of things to hear as we discover them — and keep an eye on our social media.

To get you started: here's All Songs Considered, Bob, Robin and Stephen on Twitter, plus Bob on Instagram, where he posts photos of many of the shows he sees.

Lastly, subscribe to the NPR Music newsletter for updates not only about the festival but other features available, including Tiny Desks, interviews and more.