Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to write about all of my favorite Colorado concertgoing and music-listening experiences from this year. There were simply too many.
In the four years that I’ve lived in Denver, I’ve found it to be a destination for highly esteemed folk rock, head-turning electronic music and artists finding inspiration at high altitude.
The experimental electronic shows at the Aztlan Theatre this year were the subject of a previous Staff Favorite of mine, as was “Gentle Worship,” an album by Denver composer Nathan Hall and percussion trio Perc Ens performed using stone instruments from the San Luis Valley.
Below are five other musical moments that gave me chills this year.
Autechre at Ogden Theatre (Oct. 1)
Fliers taped around the lobby of the Ogden Theatre the night of Autechre’s long-awaited return to Denver read:
“Autechre will perform in darkness. For their set all lights in the venue will be off. Please plan on being in one place for the performance and do not move unnecessarily until it has finished when the lights will come back on again.”
Quite the opening salvo for a content advisory that goes on seven more sentences and ends with “Thank you.” But to fans of the pivotal UK electronic duo, whose output since the 1990s has consistently pushed the boundaries of bass, techno and dance music, it was a promising sign. Things were about to get weird.
Singer-songwriter Ethel Cain will headline Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Tuesday, April 21, 2026. (Kristy Sparow, Getty Images)
Indeed, they did. Barely visible from behind their on-stage equipment, the floating headphones of Autechre dropped a ceaseless, complicated, breathtaking assault on the senses. Industrial grind floated over shifting interlocking drum programming. Having played at Denver’s Bluebird Theater 10 years before, the bass-heavy performance felt like a homecoming.
Ethel Cain taps Midwife for EP
Naming her EP “Perverts” was a bold move for Ethel Cain, the Tallahassee-born singer-songwriter who had previously been known for her haunting folk and Americana. (Many publications named Cain’s “American Teenager” the best song of 2022.) The project veered toward her most experimental impulses, stretching to nearly 90 minutes of drones and eerie spoken word. Fleshing out its sound is Madeline Johnston, a guitarist and singer-songwriter from Denver who records delicate, reverb-soaked folk songs as Midwife. The EP’s closer “Amber Waves” features her strongest contributions, a track that unfurls Cain’s pained vocals and Johnston’s gentle guitar over 11 minutes and 32 seconds. Though Cain would return to her roots later that year with her most recent album (“Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You”), “Amber Waves” is a high-water mark for a ghostly, heart-wrenching sound Johnston has developed over a string of solo and collaborative releases.
Ben Gibbard at Red Rocks (May 14)
Ben Gibbard performs with his band the Postal Service at Riot Fest on Sept. 16, 2023, at Douglass Park in Chicago. (Photo by Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP)
When alt-rockers Julien Baker and Torres pulled out of Rilo Kiley’s comeback tour this May, with Baker citing health struggles, none other than Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard filled in the opening slot. He and Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis are longtime studio and tour pals.
By himself on stage and slowly fingerpicking an acoustic guitar, Gibbard cooed hits such as the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” and Death Cab’s “I’ll Follow You Into the Dark” along with a song he wrote for The Monkees and a Julien Baker cover. His voice is an iconic one in indie rock, and that night it served as a sort of palate cleanser, bringing the crowd to appreciate the views and each other.
Paul McCartney at Coors Field (Oct. 11)
I thought my time to see a living Beatle had passed. Then came “Got Back,” Sir Paul McCartney’s U.S. tour with a stop at Coors Field. There were plenty of theatrics staged at center field, including McCartney performing a virtual duet with John Lennon at their seminal rooftop show. Some of it was clunky, like his on-stage choreography, but that did little to stop the masses from singing along to nearly every song. No matter how jaded you may be about pop music today, it was special and heartwarming to witness a full stadium of fans sing along to “Hey Jude.” That night, witnessed from the highest stadium chairs, it felt like the most popular song on Earth.
Rare Byrd$ at Manos Sagrados (Sept. 13)
Rare Byrd$ performs at the 2016 Titwrench Festival in Denver. Photo by Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, provided by Sarah Slater.
Electronic music hardware is expensive. Computers, hard drives, drum machines, synths, effect pads, sequencers and a spaghetti bowl of cables; it all adds up, and the return in music sales may not surpass the amount put in. That’s why it was a breath of fresh air to see Denver hip-hop duo Rare Byrd$ turn the tables on its audience during a workshop for a music festival my wife put on this summer at Manos Sagrados, a new venue in Aurora. After giving a brief presentation on the capabilities of each instrument and how to mix them live into a song, they invited members of the audience to try their hands at making a beat. I hopped on a touch pad and tapped a drunken bassline. Then the person across from me added a synth arpeggio on top and another set up a hi-hat sequence using a drum machine. We were making the music that boomed over the speakers, talking to each other without saying anything at all.
ENGLEWOOD — Metro Denver budtender Quentin Ferguson needs Regional Transportation District bus and trains to reach work at an Arvada dispensary from his house, a trip that takes 90 minutes each way “on a good day.”
“It is pretty inconvenient,” Ferguson, 22, said on a recent rainy evening, waiting for a nearly empty train that was eight minutes late.
He’s not complaining, however, because his relatively low income and Medicaid status qualify him for a discounted RTD monthly pass. That lets him save money for a car or an electric bicycle, he said, either of them offering a faster commute.
Then he would no longer have to ride RTD.
His plight reflects a core problem of lagging ridership that RTD directors increasingly run up against as they try to position the transit agency as the smartest way to navigate Denver. Most other U.S. public transit agencies, too, are grappling with a version of this problem.
In Colorado, state-government-driven efforts to concentrate the growing population in high-density, transit-oriented development around bus and train stations — a priority for legislators and Gov. Jared Polis — hinge on having a swift public system that residents ride.
But transit ridership has failed to rebound a year after RTD’s havoc in 2024, when operators disrupted service downtown for a $152 million rail reconstruction followed by a systemwide emergency maintenance blitz to smooth deteriorating tracks that led to trains crawling through 10-mph “slow zones.”
The latest ridership numbers show an overall decline this year, by at least 3.9%, with 40 million fewer riders per year compared with six years ago. And RTD executives’ newly proposed, record $1.3 billion budget for 2026 doesn’t include funds for boosting bus and train frequency to win back riders.
Frustrations intensified last week.
“What is the point of transit-oriented development if it is just development?” said state Rep. Meg Froelich, a Democrat representing Englewood who chairs the House Transportation, Housing and Local Government Committee. “We need reliable transit to have transit-oriented development. We have cities that have invested significant resources into their transit-oriented communities. RTD is not holding up its end of the bargain.”
At a retreat this past summer, a majority of the RTD’s 15 elected board members agreed that boosting ridership is their top priority. Some who reviewed the proposed budget last week questioned the lack of spending on service improvements for riders.
“We’re not moving the needle. Ridership is not going up. It should be going up,” director Karen Benker said in an interview.
“Over the past few years, there’s been a tremendous amount of population growth. There are so many apartment complexes, so much new housing put up all over,” Benker said. “Transit has to be relied on. You just cannot keep building more roads. We’re going to have to find ways to get people to ride public transit.”
Commuting trends blamed
RTD Chief Executive and General Manager Debra Johnson, in emailed responses to questions from The Denver Post, emphasized that “RTD is not unique” among U.S. transit agencies struggling to regain ridership lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. Johnson blamed societal shifts.
“Commuting trends have significantly changed over the last five years,” she said. “Return-to-work numbers in the Denver metro area, which accounted for a significant percentage of RTD’s ridership prior to March 2020, remain low as companies and businesses continue to provide flexible in-office schedules for their employees.”
In the future, RTD will be “changing its focus from primarily providing commuter services,” she said, toward “enhancing its bus and services and connections to high-volume events, activity centers, concerts and festivals.”
But agency directors are looking for a more aggressive approach to reversing the decline in ridership. And some are mulling a radical restructuring of routes.
Funded mostly by taxpayers across a 2,345 square-mile area spanning eight counties and 40 municipalities — one of the biggest in the nation — RTD operates 10 rail lines covering 114 miles with 84 stations and 102 bus routes with 9,720 stops.
“We should start from scratch,” said RTD director Chris Nicholson, advocating an overhaul of the “geometry” of all bus routes to align transit better with metro Denver residents’ current mobility patterns.
The key will be increasing frequency.
“We should design the routes how we think would best serve people today, and then we could take that and modify it where absolutely necessary to avoid disruptive differences with our current route map,” he said.
Then, in 2030, directors should appeal to voters for increased funding to improve service — funds that would be substantially controlled by municipalties “to pick where they want the service to go,” he said.
Reversing the RTD ridership decline may take a couple of years, Nicholson said, comparing the decreases this year to customers shunning a restaurant. “If you’re a restaurant and you poison some guests accidentally, you’re gonna lose customers even after you fix the problem.”
The RTD ridership numbers show an overall public transit ridership decrease by 5% when measured over the 12-month period from August 2024 through July 2025, the last month for which staffers have made numbers available, compared with the same period a year ago.
Bus ridership decreased by 2% and light rail by 18% over that period. In a typical month, RTD officials record around 5 million boardings — around 247,000 on weekdays.
The precautionary rail “slow zones” persisted for months as contractors worked on tracks, delaying and diverting trains, leaving transit-dependent workers in a lurch. RTD driver workforce shortages limited deployment of emergency bus shuttles.
This year, RTD ridership systemwide decreased by 3.9% when measured from January through July, compared with that period in 2024. The bus ridership this year has decreased by 2.4%.
On rail lines, the ridership on the relatively popular A Line that runs from Union Station downtown to Denver International Airport was down by 9.7%. The E Line light rail that runs from downtown to the southeastern edge of metro Denver was down by 24%. Rail ridership on the W Line decreased by 18% and on R Line by 15%, agency records show.
The annual RTD ridership has decreased by 38% since 2019, from 105.8 million to 65.2 million in 2024.
A Regional Transportation District light rail train moves through downtown Denver on Friday, June 27, 2025. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
Light rail ‘sickness’ spreading
“The sickness on RTD light rail is spreading to other parts of the RTD system,” said James Flattum, a co-founder of the Greater Denver Transit grassroots rider advocacy group, who also serves on the state’s RTD Accountability Committee. “We’re seeing permanent demand destruction as a consequence of having an unreliable system. This comes from a loss of trust in RTD to get you where you need to go.”
RTD officials have countered critics by pointing out that the light rail’s on-time performance recovered this year to 91% or better. Bus on-time performance still lagged at 83% in July, agency records show.
The officials also pointed to decreased security reports made using an RTD smartphone app after deploying more police officers on buses and trains. The number of reported assaults has decreased — to four in September, compared with 16 in September 2024, records show.
Greater Denver Transit members acknowledged that safety has improved, but question the agency’s assertions based on app usage. “It may be true that the number of security calls went down,” Flattum said, “but maybe the people who otherwise would have made more safety calls are no longer riding RTD.”
RTD staffers developing the 2026 budget have focused on managing debt and maintaining operations spending at current levels. They’ve received forecasts that revenues from taxpayers will increase slightly. It’s unclear whether state and federal funds will be available.
RTD directors and leaders of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, an environmental group, are opposing the rollback of RTD’s planned shift to the cleaner, quieter electric hybrid buses and taking on new debt for that purpose.
Colorado lawmakers will “push on a bunch of different fronts” to prioritize better service to boost ridership, Froelich said.
The legislature in recent years directed funds to help RTD provide free transit for riders under age 20. Buses and trains running at least every 15 minutes would improve both ridership and safety, she said, because more riders would discourage bad behavior and riders wouldn’t have to wait alone at night on often-empty platforms for up to an hour.
“We’re trying to do what we can to get people back onto the transit system,” Froelich said. “They do it in other places, and people here do ride the Bustang (intercity bus system). RTD just seems to lack the nimbleness required to meet the moment.”
Denver Center for the Performing Arts stage hand Chris Grossman walks home after work in downtown Denver on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
Riders switch modes
Meanwhile, riders continue to abandon public transit when it doesn’t meet their needs.
For Denver Center for the Performing Arts theater technician Chris Grossman, 35, ditching RTD led to a better quality of life. He had to move from the Virginia Village neighborhood he loved.
Back in 2016, Grossman sold his ailing blue 2003 VW Golf when he moved there in the belief that “RTD light rail was more or less reliable.” He rode nearly every day between the Colorado Station and downtown.
But trains became erratic as maintenance of walls along tracks caused delays. “It just got so bad. I was burning so much money on rideshares that I probably could have bought a car.” Shortly before RTD announced the “slow zones” last summer, he moved to an apartment closer to downtown on Capitol Hill.
He walks or rides scooters to work, faster than taking the bus, he said.
Similarly, Honor Morgan, 25, who came to Denver from the rural Midwest, “grateful for any public transit,” said she had to move from her place east of downtown to be closer to her workplace due to RTD transit trouble.
Buses were late, and one blew by her as she waited. She had to adjust her attire when riding her Colfax Avenue route to Union Station to manage harassment. She faced regular dramas of riders with substance-use problems erupting.
Morgan moved to an apartment near Union Station in March, allowing her to walk to work.
She still hoped to rely on RTD for concerts and nightlife, and to reach DIA for work-related flights at least once a month. But RTD social media posts have alerted her to enough delays on the A Line that she no longer trusts it, she said. To reduce her “anxiety” and minimize the risk of missing her flights, she shells out for rides — even though these often get stuck in traffic.
She and her boyfriend recently tried RTD again, riding a train to the 38th and Blake Station near the Mission Ballroom. They attended “an amazing concert” there, she said, and felt happy as they walked to the station to catch the train home.
A man on the platform collapsed backward, hitting his head. He was bleeding. She called 911. Her boyfriend and other riders gathered. She ran across the street to an apartment building and grabbed paper towels. RTD isn’t really to blame, but “I just wish they had a station platform attendant, or someone. I do not know head-injury first aid,” Morgan said.
The train they’d been waiting for came and went. An ambulance arrived. They got home late, the evening ruined, she said.
“His head cracked open. He had skin flaps hanging off his head. This was stuck in my head, at least for the rest of the night.”
