Mark Redfern and Wendy Lynch met and fell in love in December 2000. A year later, their first issue existed: a black-and-white zine on cheap paper, 1,000 copies, given away at shows and record stores across Los Angeles. He was a writer who wanted to interview his favourite bands. She was a photographer who wanted to shoot them. Neither had any experience in magazine publishing. They called it Under the Radar, and its tagline — "The solution to music pollution" — captured a founding conviction that the best music was being ignored by the publications big enough to reach people.
Twenty-four years later, Under the Radar is still in print, still 100% independent, and still run by the same husband-and-wife team — now married since 2007, now based in Virginia, now with a twelve-year-old daughter, Rose, who grew up attending cover photo shoots. The magazine prints two to three issues a year, distributed across North America and internationally, and has built a reputation for being early to artists who later become unavoidable. It was the first nationally distributed American print magazine to interview Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend, the first U.S. outlet to feature Wet Leg and The Last Dinner Party, and an early champion of Charli XCX, Bright Eyes, Interpol, Death Cab for Cutie, and TV on the Radio. In 2003, Mark Redfern and writer Marcus Kagler conducted what turned out to be the last interview and photo shoot with Elliott Smith before his death — a piece that has taken on an almost sacred status in indie music journalism.
The magazine's Protest Issues, timed to U.S. presidential elections in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2021, have become a signature: bands photographed with handmade protest signs, the originals auctioned for charities including War Child and the American Cancer Society. The Nation named Under the Radar the Most Valuable Music Magazine in its 2016 Progressive Honor Roll. A fictitious cover of the magazine even appeared in the 2019 Oscar-winning film Sound of Metal. In an era when most music publications have either folded or gone digital-only, the Redferns keep printing — sometimes closing funding gaps out of pocket, sometimes cutting paper stock, never cutting editorial ambition. The kitchen where they stored back issues has gotten smaller; the conviction that print music journalism matters has not.
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