City Lights welcomes you to Pride Month. As per usual you’ll find our regularly scheduled event previews below, but if you’re looking for something a little—or a lot—more queer, check out Blvck Hippie below along with the first half of City Paper’s 2024 Pride Guide. For parade and festival lovers, this is the weekend. You can get all the details for Capital Pride at capitalpride.org.

Friday: Historically Speaking: Alice Randall, My Black Country at NMAAHC

This year has seen a surge in conversation about the various states of Black country music due, in part, to Beyoncé’s showstopping Cowboy Carter album and Shaboozey’s country chart-topper “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” (The Woodbridge native is also featured on Cowboy Carter.) My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future, a new book by professor, songwriter, and author Alice Randall, continues the conversation on the page. In My Black Country, Randall explores the contributions of Black musicians and songwriters to the genre, as well as her own distinct role in this musical and political history: Randall became the first Black woman to cowrite a No. 1 country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s 1995 song “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl).” Randall is both scholar and subject, making for a unique perspective that’s rooted in her work and lived experience. The book centers on the radical joy of recognizing the power of Black influence and creativity on American culture. Alice Randall talks at 7 p.m. on June 7 at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, 1400 Constitution Ave. NW. nmaahc.si.edu. Free. —Serena Zets 

Saturday: Blvck Hippie at Quarry House Tavern

When he was working on The Godfather, producer Robert Evans said he wanted the audience to be so deeply immersed in Italian American culture they could “smell the spaghetti.” Blvck Hippie offer a comparable degree of immersion into indie DIY culture, so much so that, after listening to a few tracks of their 2021 debut LP, If You Feel Alone At Parties, you’ll swear you can smell the warm PBR and stale menthols. This album is not at all concerned with seeming aloof or cool. It’s at times borderline unnerving, like a mental health crisis on a public bus, with desperation bleeding through the cracks in lead singer and creative mastermind Josh Shaw’s voice. But there’s always a purpose, something Shaw is reaching for—and if they don’t quite get there on that track, maybe the futility was the point. The Memphis band’s official mission statement is “tryna show Black kids they can be weird too,” and they pursue this laudable goal with a version of drama kid energy that feels like it’s actually been allowed to grow up on its own terms. Shaw credits Kid Cudi with inspiring them to push their music creatively. “There was this Black dude making a grunge album, playing all the instruments, and being super vulnerable about men’s mental health,” Shaw said in a 2023 interview with Alternative Press. “I want to be everything that Kid Cudi was for me as a kid.” Cudi-inspired iconoclasm combined with a love of Julian Casablancas’ songwriting helps make every Blvck Hippie song feel like a diary entry. The band’s sound has already been compared to everything from Blood Orange to the Violent Femmes, but it’s still evolving. Their new album, Basketball Camp, out June 14, plays like a scaled-up sequel to Parties, a psychological epic that has scope and emotional range rivaling that of Cudi’s Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. “For so many years I believed nothing gets better,” Shaw says in a spoken-word section of “Try To Stay Lucky,” Basketball Camp’s final track. “I had no idea I could be doing things that, like, actually made me happy.” Blvck Hippie play at 10:30 p.m. on June 8 at Quarry House Tavern, 8401 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring. quarryhousetavern.com. $19.84. —Will Lennon

June 9: Gary Clark Jr. at Wolf Trap

Once a child prodigy playing guitar in the same Texas clubs where Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan got their start, Gary Clark Jr. spent the last year of his 30s in pandemic lockdown, seeing his world change in radical ways from the Black Lives Matter protests across the country to the insurrection at the Capitol. During that time he worked on his latest album, JPEG RAW, which was finally released on March 22 of this year. As on his previous album, 2019’s This Land, on JPEG RAW Clark confronts some societal ills head-on, but the call to action on the aggressive opener “Maktub” (Arabic for “destiny”) is deeply personal—offering a way to heal in these troubled times by embracing art and rocking out. On JPEG RAW, the Austin native has eased into a wide-ranging style, riffing on sounds from across the American musical continuum with a bevy of guest artists including jazz trumpeter Keyon Harrold, Appalachian roots artist Valerie June, and Australian alt-pop singer-songwriter Naala. George Clinton appears on “Funk Witch U,” a number that has a deep Prince-like psychedelic swoon, while Stevie Wonder takes the lead on the 1970s-inspired “What About the Children.” The diverse influences and inspirations show that this guitar god is shattering genre conventions and expanding sonically into new territories. In 2019, Clark played a sold-out show at the Anthem, and it was an unforgettable performance. Emerging from a backdrop of smoke and fog, his fire engine red Epiphone Casino slung low on his hip and donning a large suede hat, he opened with his signature song “Bright Lights,” the Texas blues-rock burner that brought him international fame at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads show a decade before. Clark demonstrated an indelible coolness as he commanded the stage with his virtuosic and prodigious playing: Expect nothing less when he plays in support of JPEG RAW this weekend. Gary Clark Jr. plays at 8 p.m. on June 9 at Wolf Trap’s Filene Center, 1551 Wolf Trap Rd., Vienna. wolftrap.org. $45–$109. —Colleen Kennedy

Tuesday: Sheppard at DC9

If summery optimism can be packaged in musical form, Australian indie-pop trio Sheppard have managed to do just that with their latest release, Zora. The writing of this album from this sibling band, however, was done at probably the least optimistic time ever: the pandemic. “We were trying to cheer ourselves up with this album,” lead singer George Sheppard tells City Paper. “We were writing it during COVID. We spent that entire year going, ‘Alright, we’re going to own this. We’re gonna sit there and write and record a song every single month.’ It was a huge challenge for us.” The challenge paid off and Sheppard—which includes George’s sisters Amy and Emma Sheppard—will make that clear on their current tour, which stops at DC9 on June 11. The trio recently relocated from Brisbane to Nashville, but family continues to play a huge part in their work. Zora’s idealistic feeling can be credited to the siblings’ grandmother Zora. “We constantly had her in our thoughts because she’s been through some of the biggest challenges that I could imagine any human going through. She was shipped away from her home [in Croatia] at 18 years old because of a war-torn country. She had seven children with the love of her life, who then passed away from lung cancer when he was 50, leaving her to raise those kids on her own. So she’s been through a lot and at the end of the day, she’s still the happiest person we know…. We wanted to sort of capture that in an album … knowing that there’s always going to be a new dawn.” The 86-year old Zora is also known to get down at Sheppard shows. “She actually pushes the fans to the side,” says bassist Emma. “She’s always at the front in the mosh pit. She loves it and she just sits there crying… Big fans of us know who she is so they allow her to come in and they look after her in the crowd.” Sheppard play at 8 p.m. on June 11 at DC9, 1940 9th St. NW. dc9.club. $15–$55. —Christina Smart

Ongoing: It Was Only a Dream exhibition at Hamiltonian Artists

You’ll hardly see a face stepping through Edgar Reyes’ autobiographical walk-through and mixed-media exhibit, located a block away from the U Street Metro station. The Baltimore-based multimedia artist and educator takes attendees through the patched recollection of growing up Chicano in the Washington D.C., area, where he emigrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, at age 5 and had to assimilate to American culture. The memories of his own family and their Mexican and Indigenous roots have blurred over the years, which Reyes attempts to piece together through this 14-piece installation. The puzzle starts at the exhibit’s entrance, where a single 1980 Chevy Silverado rearview mirror hangs on the walls, depicting the blurry landscape that Reyes recalls walking away from when he left Mexico. “That’s the saddest part,” Reyes says. “It’s leaving, saying goodbye.” The memories he’s procured—displayed through an array of prints, woven blankets, sculptures, and Catholic scapulars—are hard to fully contextualize at first glance, but the storyline is tied together the details. On a digitally woven baby blanket, Reyes unites prints that recall cultural aspects of his Chicano identity, including Catholic crosses, red roses, and Mesoamerican Indigenous graphics. Reyes also displays abstract images inspired by archived family photos, where many of the relatives found in these pictures are either too distant to immediately recall or have since died. In some photos, the eyes of cousins and uncles are hidden behind sunglasses or turned to their side. But they are photographed on family farms, hoisting shrines of the Virgen de Guadalupe on their shoulders as a group and taking part in the culture Reyes feels nostalgic for. There are also memories he attempts to recreate through AI-generated images within wooden light boxes. These works raise larger questions, such as the role of masculinity and criminality within Chicano culture, Mexican American beauty standards, and assimilation. It Was Only a Dream: New Works by Edgar Reyes runs through June 22 at Hamiltonian Artists, 1353 U St. NW. An artist-led walkthrough starts at 3 p.m. on June 8. Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and by appointment. hamiltonianartists.org. Free. —Heidi Perez-Moreno