Thao & The Get Down Stay Down – Phenom

We kind of lost track of Thao & the Get Down Stay Down since the pandemic happened… but you know we’ve always been supportive of Thao Nguyen ever since we heard about her in January 2008: “Thao Nguyen has a new album that’s coming out on January 29th called We Brave Bee Stings and All. The title of the album comes from one of her songs, “Swimming Pools” (which you can hear on her myspace). She’s also going on tour in London starting on January 17th with Willis, see tour information below.”

Thao and Mirah at the Cedar Cultural Cente (7/1/2010)

We’ve seen her live a few times, including her first few Minneapolis appearance in 2009 and, my personal favorite, her appearance with Mirah in July 2010.
Recently, we saw Thao’s fifth studio album Temple, released in May 2020. With the global shutdown, it meant that promoting the album through traditional touring wasn’t going to happen.



One of the best music videos I’ve seen in a while is for their song “Phenom”, which took inspiration from having to do all those Zoom video conferencing. It’s very fun and you may have seen similar “pass the thing” type of video trickery, but this music video takes it a step further. It’s very fun and worth checking out if you haven’t seen it.