Crooked Beat Records is reopening this weekend in a new Del Ray storefront, capping off a rough stretch that began with catastrophic basement flooding at its old shop back in January. The vinyl store will welcome customers to 2101B Mount Vernon Avenue starting Friday from 4 to 7 p.m., with additional hours Saturday from 2 to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 6 p.m.
Owner Bill Daly announced the reopening schedule on social media, as reported by ALXnow. Daly said the new space carries over the same colors and atmosphere as the store's previous location, though he cautioned it will still be a work in progress as the shop settles in. Crooked Beat plans to open full time in about a week or so, according to the same report.
The new spot is a two-story townhouse with 950 square feet of retail space that had sat vacant for more than a decade before Crooked Beat moved in. Per ALXnow, the location became available after a longtime Crooked Beat customer bought the building and offered Daly the street-level space as a tenant, a detail also noted by Patch.
A Flood That Nearly Sank the Shop
Crooked Beat closed its previous basement location at 2417 Mount Vernon Avenue in May after significant flooding had hit the store in January. The shop lost an estimated $60,000 worth of merchandise in the disaster, and a GoFundMe campaign later recovered $23,500 of those losses. That former location reopened briefly at the end of February before the move to the new storefront became necessary.
Crooked Beat first landed in Del Ray in 2023, after operating in Old Town North for seven years. Its roots go back even further: the store originally opened in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1997, before moving to Washington, D.C.'s Adams Morgan neighborhood in 2004 and later to Old Town Alexandria in 2016, according to background on the shop compiled on Wikipedia. Before founding Crooked Beat, Daly ran the independent label Crisis Discs in Raleigh during the 1990s and played in the D.C. punk band Insurgence DC.
Daly's connection to the local music scene runs deeper than retail. In 2014, he expanded Crooked Beat into an independent record label to publish D.C.-area musicians, releasing multi-artist compilations and Record Store Day titles such as *Recutting the Crap*, per entity background on Discogs.
A New Neighbor Right Across the Street
Crooked Beat isn't the only record shop drawing collectors to this stretch of Mount Vernon Avenue. Mobius Records opened its second location at 2016 Mount Vernon Avenue a few weeks before Crooked Beat's reopening, expanding from its flagship store in Fairfax City that has operated since August 2014, according to The Zebra Press.
Mobius expanded to Del Ray in partnership with Neighborhood Restaurant Group, joining group founder Michael Babin, chef Nathan Anda, and beverage director Greg Engert, as reported by The Alexandria Brief. Prior to opening Mobius ALX, founder Dempsey Hamilton and Neighborhood Restaurant Group had collaborated for over a decade on music projects, including Record Store Day craft beer releases with Bluejacket brewery and DJ events at the Snallygaster festival.
The two shops sit roughly 128 feet apart on opposite sides of Mount Vernon Avenue, putting two independent record stores within a one-minute walk of each other, per The Alexandria Brief's reporting. Rather than treating the proximity as competition, Babin said Daly supported Mobius Records opening because it would help make Del Ray more of a destination for record store shoppers, according to ALXnow.
Vinyl's National Comeback Fuels Local Growth
The timing lines up with a broader surge in vinyl's fortunes nationwide. U.S. vinyl record revenues eclipsed $1 billion for the first time in 2025 on roughly 47 million units sold, marking 19 consecutive years of revenue growth for the format, according to Forbes. Vinyl also accounted for more than 70% of total physical music format revenue in the United States in both 2024 and 2025, maintaining higher unit sales than compact discs every year since 2022, per the Recording Industry Association of America.
That national momentum helps explain why two independent shops can now share a single block in Del Ray without one crowding out the other. For Daly, the reopening marks not just a recovery from the spring flood but a return to a neighborhood that has fully embraced record shopping as part of its identity, alongside longtime local spots like Evening Star Café.
