We are less than ten days away from our big self-congratulatory anniversary extravaganza at Marymoor Park and tempers are flaring here in the office. In fact, it seems that I hear the phrase, “No, why don’t YOU shut the fuck up and try planning this goddamn festival!” at least six to seven times a day, with those numbers steadily ramping up as we get closer to the big weekend. Despite the yelling and the door slamming everyone here is unbelievably excited for this to happen and there is a ton of cool shit going down in celebration of Sub Pop.

For starters, and personally I am secretly the most excited about this over almost everything else that’s happening, the people in charge are letting us fly a giant Sub Pop flag on the fucking Space Needle! And, they’re painting the top of it to look like a record! If you happen to be flying in for the Fest make sure to keep an eye out for this and get a photo if you can. The festivities kick off July 10th at the EMP with their Oral History Live! series featuring Sub Pop founders Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt at 7pm. It’s only $5 and maybe some grunge superstars will be in attendance.

Friday night is our Comedy Show at the Moore Theatre with Todd Barry, David Cross, Eugene Mirman, Patton Oswalt, and Kristen Schaal. After laughing your guts out you might want to check out Obits at the Funhouse, Death Vessel & Les Thugs at Neumo’s, or Retribution Gospel Choir at the High Dive. Don’t wear yourself out, though, because the real fun begins on Saturday at noon at Marymoor Park with Day One of SP20 Fest featuring Obits, Constantines, Eric’s Trip, Seaweed, The Helio Sequence, Pissed Jeans, Fleet Foxes, The Fluid, Low, Mudhoney, The Vaselines, Iron and Wine, and Flight of the Conchords. Bring money for fair food and a small supply of amphetamines so you keep the party going for The Gutter Twins and Tad’s new band Brothers of the Sonic Cloth at the Showbox afterward. Day Two’s festivities also begin at noon, and you want to make sure not to miss The Ruby Suns, Grand Archives, Kinski, Foals, Les Thugs, No Age, Red Red Meat, Comets on Fire, Beachwood Sparks, Green River, Wolf Parade and one, maybe two bands we’re not allowed to announce. The world is an uncertain place, however, those unannounced bands may fall through. Please don’t count on anything we haven’t actually said is happening, and don’t make a big thing out of it if this is it.

Also, since we’re a record company, we’re going to put out a record this month as well. On July 22 we will release Donkey upon the world. Donkey, besides being one of the top 3 funny animals known to man, is the new album from those crazy Brazilians known as CSS and it seems like a good way to keep the party going after all the hubbub, you know like that last warm beer at 7am or something, but in a positive way. Our pals at Hardly Art are releasing She’s the Dutchess, He’s the Duke by Dutchess and the Duke on July 8th and I can hardly wait. I can wholeheartedly endorse both these albums, but I suspect the minute I start wholeheartedly un-endorsing albums I will no longer be writing this column, so….

Oh hey, do you live in Seattle? Do you like baseball? Well, lucky for you our fearless leader Jonathan Poneman will be throwing out the first pitch at the Mariners v. Tigers at Safeco on Sunday July 6th. Please, please, please come down and make him feel more uncomfortable than he already does!

And finally, the news you’ve all (well some of you, maybe) been waiting for—SINGLES CLUB 3.0 IS FINALLY HERE! If you subscribe to the Singles Club we’ll send you a seven inch a month from bands like Om, Mika Miko, Notwist, Black Lips, Unnatural Helpers, etc. This edition of the Singles Club is limited to 1500 and once we’re out, we’re out. We are selling subscriptions here for $75 in North America and $90 for the rest of the world so get to gettin’ before they’re all gone.

Happy July, everyone! (Oh, and Happy Birthday America.)

The Fleet Foxes record comes out on June 3rd and the LP—and it’s a gate-fold LP, mind you—comes with a digital download code, AND includes the Sun Giant EP on a second piece of vinyl! This is currently the only way to get Sun Giant on vinyl so it seems crazy not to buy it. Oh, this record is coming out on CD, too, if you’re into that. Buy it here. Want to know all about Fleet Foxes? Look here for tour info and here for myspace informations.

The new Wolf Parade record comes out June 17th, and it’ll be on CD and LP (w/ download code) as well. Buy it! We’re giving away a poster of the Wolfers’ heads on animal bodies, painted by Spencer’s sister Zoe Krug Sather. You can see it here. Click here for more Wolf Newz.

So, 20th Anniversary festivities continue to roll along quite nicely. We’ve got the big fest weekend coming up in just over a month and we’ve added The Vaselines and Les Thugs to the rock line-up and David Cross to the comedy line-up. Singles Club is not quite ready yet but we (I mean “they”) are working hard on getting it all lined up in a timely fashion—please be on the look out for it in 2012. Kidding!

Have a good June, and see you in July at Marymoor!

May has arrived and here at HQ we are all ready for the best summer we’ve ever known, what with all the good records coming out and the hot shit SP20 Festival right around the corner. In fact, the SP20 Fest was voted Best Summer Music Fest in an informal poll I quietly held here at my desk. Want more info? Read this, bub.

The highly anticipated new No Age record Nouns comes out May 6th and will be available on CD and LP and MP3 and maybe even Blueray and/or Cassette if I finally get my way around this fucking place! Seriously though, if you order this fantastical album from subpop.com we’ll throw in a cool poster designed by a Mr. Templeton. A Mr. Ed Templeton. (Google it.) We’re throwing in something else but I want to save my dignity and not type the phrase “buttons and stickers” ever again, so… Wait, I just… Dammit! The No Age dudes just shot their first video (for “Eraser”) and although it’s still in post-production it looks really amazing—there are balloons, a giant skull, the LA River, and…Dean Spunt and Randy Randall from No Age! See? That’s them up above. Please keep an eye out for it—it would be the right thing to do. Click here to get the record. Click here to find out more about No Age.

On May 20th Mudhoney will be releasing their 37th full-length album, The Lucky Ones. Mark Arm sits out on guitar on this one, presumably so he can dance more at their shows. He is a re-mark-able dancer. (Get it?) The Lucky Ones LP will come stuffed with a 7” single of Mudhoney covering Pere Ubu’s “Street Waves” and “Gonna Make You Mine” by the Troggs. We’ll have 200 of these 7”s to give away with pre-orders of the CD so you better hurry. They’re going to try to sign some stuff as well but don’t hold your breath. (I suggested that they might want to go ahead and let their wives/girlfriends sign this one just to mix it up a bit but I was met with a stony silence so I doubt that’s happening.) On the 20th we will also release the first in what will presumably be a not un-long line of reissues for Sub Pop’s 20th, Superfuzz Bigmuff Deluxe! This is a remastered double-CD with an expanded booklet and a ton of live tracks and way too much stuff for me to type so read (then order!) this here. You don’t get anything extra with this because it is full of extras and when did you start expecting so much stuff anyway?

We’re all pretty puffed up around here (chuffed?) about how well this Flight of the Conchords thing is going. We just followed-up their (ahem…) FUCKING GRAMMY-AWARD-WINNING EP, The Distant Future with their self-titled debut full-length, and man, is that thing ever shifting units. So much so that none other than Yahoo! (Google it.) was prompted to comment: “Ashlee Simpson’s new album sold so poorly, it was beaten by a comedy album.” Our comedy album! (Hat Tip to good ol’ Matt “Epsonality/Domino’s Pizza” Olsen for this one.) Flight of the Conchords and many other Sub Pop bands are on tour right now so make sure you use our new and improved tour-search-filter to see if someone’s coming to your town.

So, yeah, this 20th Anniversary thing is really starting to happen! We’re not to a point where we feel comfortable announcing too much more (read: we don’t know yet) but we guarantee at least one to one-and-a-half more great things are on the way. We at Sub Pop value your opinion, even if we don’t always agree with it. So, if you were The Deciderer, what would you do to celebrate?

Today, and this is no April Fools joke, is Sub Pop Records’ 20th Anniversary. When I asked Jon Poneman, aka The Jonald, how it feels to turn 20 he responded, “The company maintains bowel movements at regular intervals so we’re not nearly as grouchy as some other labels our age.” I couldn’t put it better myself, but this is coming from a man who has never once used the bathroom in the office.

April is packed full of highly anticipated releases, starting first with the US release of Foals Antidotes on CD/LP (w/ download code). This is out on April 8th and if you pre-order you’ll get a bonus CDR with B-sides! April 8th is also the release date for the new seven-inch from No Age. It features “Eraser” from the upcoming album plus three covers. April 8th is also the official release date for the Fleet Foxes EP, but you’ve been able to buy that on subpop.com for practically forever so who cares?

On April 22nd we’ll be releasing Flight of the Conchords by Flight of the Conchords and then I’ll get to hear all the world sing “Business Time” wherever I go. The album is on CD and LP (w/download code) and both come with a killer little poster. Also, we’ll go ahead and give you $2 off until street date. Don’t say we never did nothing for you. We almost never stop doing nothing for you.

The first of our anniversary celebrations is tonight (April 1st) at Chop Suey, where The Ruby Suns are playing. Tomorrow (that’s April 2nd) we intend to buy all of Seattle a drink at Hattie’s Hat from 9pm on. You better show up early as the place will surely reach capacity within seconds. Keep your eye out for details on our summertime anniversary show and maybe a little something called the Singles Club. Uh oh—cat’s out of the bag.

On March 4th we’ll be releasing Saturnalia by The Gutter Twins, aka Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli, as well as Sea Lion by The Ruby Suns, aka a band from New Zealand. Both of these records are worth the price of admission so just step up to the plate and buy them, bub. We’re giving $2 off Sea Lion and Saturnalia through release date along with our patented, highly effective sticker/button combo for each band. Want to know more about these fine bands? Look at this and this and this and this. Both The Gutter Twins and The Ruby Suns are on tour—click their names to see if they’re coming to your town!

Sera Cahoone’s new record Only as the Day is Long comes out March 18th and it’s available for pre-order here. Find out all you wanted to know about Sera by looking here and make sure to check her out at her record release show at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle on March 29th and/or her Easy Street Records show on March 18th.

And finally, we have the Fleet Foxes ep available right now. Read this Pitchfork review and then snatch it up—this isn’t available everywhere.

March is also the month of everyone’s favorite music fest—the amazingly brutal SXSW in Austin. We’re having a showcase at Bourbon Rocks on Friday the 14th with Love as Laughter, Sera Cahoone, Grand Archives, Kelley Stoltz, Fleet Foxes, and Blitzen Trapper on one stage and The Ruby Suns, Pissed Jeans, Handsome Furs, The Helio Sequence, and No Age on another stage. All these bands will be playing parties all over the place but I’ll tell you about that on Monday. Let’s do it to it, March.