Inside a 26-year residency

On the gentrified strip of South Congress in Austin, Texas is a music club where time has stood still and you can’t buy a ticket in advance, only give the guy on the door $10 cash to watch honky tonk supergroup Heybale play EVERY Sunday at 6.30pm. Or Marshall Hood at 2.30pm, or Willie Pipkin & Friends at 9.30pm, if you prefer. I knew nothing of any of them but went for Heybale on a recommendation from musician and film and theatre composer Graham Reynolds.

Reynolds has made one of the most unique and addictive albums of 2026 so far: The Portcullis – an instrumental record of medieval synthesiser music; like Vangelis soundtracking an RPG with ambient music for fantasy dungeons. I wasn’t in Austin to interview Graham but when my holiday gave me the opportunity to meet him for an episode of our First & Best video series I jumped at the chance. It meant taking a taxi to his home straight from my flight as Graham was leaving town the following morning. He messaged me his address and instructions to access his home studio at the back of his house, which is as unassuming as most of them are in east Austin. “Home studio” doesn’t do Graham’s setup justice. It’s ginormous, features a grand piano, countless other keys and synths, a drum kit, walls of vintage guitars and neatly stored percussive instruments, books and things. Rugs, of course. Good sofas. The pitched roof is lined with the cladding of recycled fencing slats.

After we’d finished our miniature interview (it’ll be out next month), Graham recommended a couple of untouched institutions in a city where of all those glass towers you see on the downtown skyline only 2 were built prior to 2003. The Broken Spoke is a spit and sawdust honky tonk and dancehall on Lamar, Austin’s other main vertical avenue. It’s surrounded by condos but has refused to sell to developers. And there’s the Continental Club on South Congress, where it goes Nike shop, New Balance, Sweetgreen, artisan ice cream, and the club, which is a single black room that you step into straight off the street where it was 40 degrees.