FIVER! Live at High Line

Fiver is the musical alias of songwriter, vocalist, researcher, and guitarist Simone Schmidt. Schmidt has been innovating in the Country and Folk music traditions with humour and gravity for nearly two decades. Their lyrics refuse sloganeering but remain political, deploying wit and poetry to detangle the knot of our human condition under late-stage capitalism. Their collaborators range a wide musical spectrum, from Old Time musicians Lonesome Ace String Band (Audible Songs From Rockwood, 2017) to free music improvisers in Fiver with the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition (named best music of 2021 by the Guardian UK), to punks Fucked Up, and electronic music producer ADO (Splitter). Despite evading the logic of the commercial music industry, their presence is felt. Their songs are covered widely, most notably by U.S. Girls and Stripmall Ballads. Most recently, their collaboration with Destroyer, the song Bologna, was named one of the Top 100 songs of 2025 by Pitchfork.