SPELLLING with papa mbye and XINA at the Whole Music Club

SPELLLING

March 20, 2026 at the Whole Music Club

7:30 PM doors | 8:00 PM show

SPELLLING, the moniker of the Bay Area experimental pop mastermind Chrystia Cabral, has emerged as a visionary artist, pushing the boundaries of genre and captivating audiences with her richly envisioned albums and enchanting live performances.

SPELLLING gained widespread recognition with the release of her critically acclaimed debut album, Pantheon of Me, in 2017. The album showcased her prodigious talent as a songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. In 2019, she signed to Sacred Bones and released her highly anticipated sophomore album, Mazy Fly, further elevating her artistic vision and expanding her sonic palette. In 2021 she released her breakthrough project The Turning Wheel, which saw her orchestrating and self-producing an album that features an ensemble of 31 collaborating musicians. The Turning Wheel has become a career-defining opus for the artist. The album received widespread unanimous praise, earning itself The Needle Drops #1 album of the year in 2021. SPELLLING and her band ‘The Mystery School’ have also become renowned for their live performances with Cabral's idiosyncratic stage presence and the bands incredible musicianship and spiritual sense of communion with the audience. A collection of reenvisioned songs from throughout SPELLLING's critically-acclaimed discography was released in 2023, breathing new life into the extravagant orchestrations she’s written and produced entirely herself.

2025 saw the release of her fourth album Portrait of My Heart. A deeply personal album, Portrait of My Heart explores SPELLLING’s relationship to intimacy, blending energetic arrangements and emotional rawness with her singular voice to deliver love songs that cement her place as a groundbreaking songwriter. You can now explore alternative versions of "Destiny Arrives" and "Portrait of My Heart" featuring collaborators Weyes Blood and Brendan Yates!

As SPELLLING continues to evolve and explore new musical territories, she further solidifies herself as a once in a lifetime artist. Her ability to create beautiful soundscapes that transport listeners to other realms along with her transcendent live performances have earned her legions of dedicated fans. With each release, SPELLLING invites us on a mesmerizing journey into her world, leaving an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of her listeners.

papa mbye writes experimental pop songs threading flourishes of electronic, R&B, soul, and more. Born in The Gambia, raised in North Minneapolis, and a relative newcomer to making music after starting as a visual artist, he’s taken strides in his sound in a short time. With his new self-produced EP, JAKAARLO, he brings his voice into focus, exercising restraint in arrangements while pushing his craft forward. Songs burst with color, texture, and hooks.

JAKAARLO is a meditation on closeness. Not just the kind shared between lovers, but the elusive kind that drifts between memory, distance, and desire. The title, which translates from Wolof as “to be close to”, is borrowed from a song by the late Senegalese musician N'dongo Lo appearing on his 2005 album Adouna. With JAKAARLO, mbye channels that sense of appreciation for the entirety of love, the real and the raw, the fleeting and finite, the spaces between people, tense, messy, and beautiful. Joined by a cast of collaborators, mbye wields layers of instrumentation and voice into vibrant, future-facing material that declares his arrival as both a visionary producer and performer.
The mood board for JAKAARLO spans the music of his youth (Youssou N'Dour, N'dongo Lo) and the boundless off-kilter pop of Jai Paul, alongside mbye’s friends and contemporaries: Minneapolis artists Young Dervish, vlush, KINFU, and Ryan Olson (Bon Iver, Gayngs, Poliça), who contributed on the album. papa mbye’s music rumbles, rattles, and darts between modes, welcoming high-wattage basslines, guitar riffs, and synth tones in a hyperactive, mesmeric mix. At the center is his emotive voice, capable of raspy croon and howling falsetto.

XINA is an independent, multi-disciplinary artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. If you ask what she does, she'll simply say "arts and crafts," an umbrella term for her expansive roles as a singer/songwriter, dancer, choreographer, producer, director, designer and entertainer. With both hands on every aspect of the process, she creates genre-bending music with intensity and vulnerability balanced with a sophisticated mystique. By exercising her intuitive finesse across a growing body of work and into rich, inventive live performances, XINA is proving impossible to ignore.

FAQs

Can I attend if I'm under 18 years of age?

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities student U Card or 18+ with valid government-issued ID required for entry. Underage Persons can only attend if they are accompanied by their own parent or legal guardian.

Accessibility requests:

To request accessibility accommodations contact [email protected] or call 612-626-6919 by 03/11/26. We will do our best to accommodate requests made after this date.

What's the refund policy?

All ticket purchases are final and non-refundable.

Click here for a complete FAQ.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Whole Music Club, Coffman Memorial Union, Minneapolis, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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