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Chicago pop experimentalists White Ppl offer a brief glimpse of their huge...
In a 2019 interview for WBEZ’s Weekend Passport, Filipinx producer-vocalist Ano Ba said they were inspired to start their own group after seeing a garage band at a favorite Logan Square bar that was...
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Chicago indie rockers Cafe Racer meld psych, shoegaze, and Krautrock to...
Psychedelic Chicago indie rockers Cafe Racer emerged from a young north-side scene obsessed with garage; in fact, guitarist-vocalist Michael Santana previously played rugged, bratty garage pop in the...
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Wu Fei and Abigail Washburn bring China and Appalachia together
Trump hates China in order to better hate the United States; by blaming the Chinese for the virus, he can pretend he’s not at fault for our own dead and our own misery. In that poisoned atmosphere,...
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Kris Esfandiari of King Woman and producer Darcy Baylis combine forces in...
Kris Esfandiari is no stranger to side projects. Since cofounding doom-metal band King Woman in 2009, she’s released solo material under the names Miserable, Kris, Dalmatian, and Nghtcrwler.…
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Country mainstay Pam Tillis hits her stride on Looking for a Feeling
If you’re going to put out your first solo album in 13 years, you’ll probably want to make sure it includes a few songs that will appeal to your longtime fans. What country audiences want is obviously...
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Death metal supergroup Umbra Vitae blend catharsis and fun on Shadow of Life
The beauty of musical collaboration is that you can never totally anticipate what will happen, even when the people coming together have established aesthetics of their own. Some groups devise a...
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Psalm One and Angel Davanport of Rapper Chicks introduce Big Silky, their...
Born from the ashes of Rapper Chicks, one of the city’s best and most slept-on rap groups of the past decade, Big Silky reintroduces two members of that crew, Psalm One and Angel Davanport. On their...
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The Black Dahlia Murder pull out some new tricks on Verminous
Three years after releasing their first record with new guitarist Brandon Ellis, the Billboard-charting Nightbringers, the Black Dahlia Murder have returned with their ninth studio album, Verminous....
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A pair of Italian experimentalists help Ken Vandermark and Hamid Drake cross...
For decades, percussionist Hamid Drake and reedist Ken Vandermark have sustained a partnership founded upon a deep engagement with the history of free jazz. Both within and outside the DKV Trio, their...
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Chicago rapper Joshua Virtue irreducibly defines pandemic life on Jackie’s House
Ever since COVID-19 seeped into every detail of our everyday lives, I’ve struggled to articulate the mental gymnastics I go through just to remember to brush my teeth twice a day. Thank goodness for...
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Eccentric Chicago musician Zango the Third warps soul, pop, and lounge into...
Chicagoan Frank Zango possesses something like magic: under the name Zango the Third, he’s able to create oddly soothing, stylistically scrambled outsider-soul songs fast enough to fill several...
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Kassel Jaeger and Jim O’Rourke take us on a journey with In Cobalt Aura Sleeps
In 2017, Paris-based electroacoustic composer Kassel Jaeger (born François Bonnet) and Chicago-born multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke joined forces for Wakes on Cerulean, a kaleidoscopic duo...
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Chicago footwork master DJ Taye invokes the rapid pace of our changing times...
Pop music moves fast: new instructional-dance songs, new Drake songs, and new instructional-dance songs by Drake can bombard the zeitgeist one week and all but evaporate the next. Footwork, the...
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Danzig Sings Elvis is a covers album we didn’t need
For Glenn Danzig, the past 15 years have been especially weird. Starting with the infamous 2004 backstage TKO punch delivered by North Side Kings singer Danny Marianino, the Misfits mastermind—in his...
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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith creates a mosaic of electricity on The Mosaic of...
It’s a struggle to define the purpose of most music—the answer is perpetually changing, based on time, place, and innumerable other factors. But Los Angeles-based synthesist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith...
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Spanish quartet Melenas channel a half-century of pop goodness on Dias Raros
Pamplona, Spain, is probably best known for the festival of San Fermín, when thrill seekers run with bulls through the streets—which usually ends much worse for the animals than the humans. The four...
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Gothic doom masters Paradise Lost get eclectic on Obsidian
British five-piece Paradise Lost had already helped pioneer death-doom by the time they put out their second album, 1991’s Gothic, and laid groundwork for subsequent generations of bands that combined...
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Chicago’s Retirement Party will brighten your summer with the heavy emo of...
Chicago emo acts helped raise the national profile of the fourth-wave scene in the early 2010s, but most of them had gone on hiatus or broken up by the time Retirement Party dropped their debut EP,...
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Chicago rapper Ric Wilson and Los Angeles producer Terrace Martin invigorate...
Chicago rapper and prison abolitionist Ric Wilson knows the joy of combing through history for jewels of knowledge that enrich his connection to his hometown’s multifaceted Black communities. He also...
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Musical time traveler Paul Burch creates vivid, impressionistic stories on...
Paul Burch is a musical time traveler: four years ago he released Meridian Rising, a pristine concept album in the voice of Jimmie Rodgers, the greatest pop star of the Great Depression era. The...
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