The Underground Music Showcase, the largest continuously held annual music festival in Denver, will return for its 21st year from Aug. 27-29, it was announced Monday. After a hybrid COVID year, the 2021 UMS is being billed as “Back to Broadway,” and back to in-person performances. Pre-sale will start on Wednesday, May 12, at undergroundmusicshowcase.com.

Local and national headliners will be announced in July, said Casey Berry, founder of the local events company Two Parts, which has owned and operated The UMS since 2018.

The 2021 UMS will be held about a month later than usual, Berry said, to give venues along South Broadway more time to prepare for the return of a major festival.

“Thanks to The UMS, we have always considered the last weekend of July to be ‘the’weekend of the summer in Denver,” Berry said. “But when we started to pursue those dates this year, we realized that having that extra time could be really beneficial, both for helping our venues get back on their feet and for us to do this as safely as possible.”

Last year, in the face of the COVID-19 shutdown, Two Parts pivoted to what it cleverly called “UMSomething,” a one-day streaming telethon event with a 15-band lineup including local favorites The Still Tide and Wildermiss. The effort raised $75,000 in emergency relief for local musicians.

Berry said the full return of The UMS should provide a psychological lift for music fans who have been denied live concerts for a year, local musicians who haven’t been able to earn an income and venues that have been devastated by the pandemic.

“Sitting here last year when we first realized that we may never be able to have indoor shows like we once knew them made for the saddest and most stressful days of my life,” Berry said. “Those were definitely some dark days – especially for the artists. Because without events like these, where do they play? We take our responsibility to them very seriously. So it’s such an incredible feeling to be coming back.”

The website Music Festival Wizard calls The UMS “Denver’s premier indie-music festival,” and “widely regarded as the best opportunity to explore and discover the local independent music scene.” 303 Magazine, a sponsor of the event, calls The UMS “a 20-year tradition that is integral to our city’s music scene.”

At its largest, the festival spanned four days and offered 400 local and national performances in an eclectic mix of several dozen indoor and outdoor venues stretching from about Alameda Avenue north to Fifth Avenue. Berry said the goal for 2021 will be a return to the scale of the 2019 UMS, which was about 200 bands over three days.

Since the last full UMS In 2019, the landscape of Broadway has changed radically, in large part because of the economic devastation to retail businesses during the pandemic. 3Kings, one of the anchor venues of every previous UMS on Broadway, is now a bar called Headquarters, and Berry said it will be a UMS venue in 2021. “There have actually been quite a few new businesses that have opened since 2019, so it will be interesting to navigate what the future of our venues will be,” he said.

The UMS was founded by The Denver Post in 2001 as a way to highlight local bands most deserving of more mainstream attention. In 2016, former Denver Post Pop Music Critic Ricardo Baca expanded what was then a one-night event into a multi-day festival along South Broadway. In 2018, The Denver Post Community Foundation sold The UMS to Two Parts for an undisclosed amount.

John Moore is a contributing arts journalist for The Denver Gazette who co-founded The Underground Music Showcase in 2001. He is now producing independent journalism as part of his own company, MooreMedia