Radio NemiersRadio Nemiers

Aigars Sukurs, who DJs as 130db, has built four radio stations, and this is the fourth. In 2018 a Riga bar called Nemiers asked him for one so its bartenders would stop digging through personal playlists, and he could not say no. The bar has since closed and the station kept the name, which he calls a small flame keeping its spirit alive. The model was Radio Wazee, the American alternative station he listened to at night while learning the technical side, and whose principle he took wholesale: genres are tools, not walls.

Nothing here is a safe bet. Thousands of tracks stay in rotation from more than fifty countries, hundreds more arrive every year, and anything that falls outside a floating twenty-five-year window is retired, the heavyweights of the nineties included, by his own admission. What that leaves on air is metalcore, post-hardcore, pop-punk and modern alternative rock, with lighter sister channels running beside it.