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Julianna Barwick builds a paradise of her own design with Healing Is a Miracle
While wounds can be stitched and broken bones may mend, other types of injuries never fully heal; perhaps they linger as phantom pain or burrow deep into the brain’s pathways. It’s these imperceptible...
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Northwest Indiana rapper Vince Ash samples hip-hop history for a distinctly...
Vince Ash hails from Hammond, Indiana, but at age 23 he already raps like he’s lived lifetimes in some of the country’s most storied hip-hop scenes. On his new EP, Vito (POW Recordings), he braids...
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Old comrades Peter Brötzmann and Fred Lonberg-Holm reunite on Memories of a...
German reeds player Peter Brötzmann turned 79 in March, so it would be developmentally appropriate for him to take a look back. But memories are a mixed blessing for a devoted practitioner of...
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Tatiana Hazel knows she was meant to shine
Chicago native Tatiana Hazel has been on a journey that merges fashion, visual design, and music since she was 13 years old, when she began posting videos of herself singing and playing acoustic...
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Park Hye Jin’s house music transforms your room into an emotive, prismatic...
South Korean producer Park Hye Jin makes evocative house music for late nights. On her new EP, How Can I (Ninja Tune), her vocal delivery and production are poised and searing, building on the...
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Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson showcase their telepathic...
In 2005, Los Angeles percussionist, DJ, arranger, and producer Carlos Niño began collaborating with fellow Angeleno Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and music director. That...
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New York metal outfit Pyrrhon confront our harrowing reality on Abscess Time
Metal has a reputation as an escapist genre. That could be because some bands indulge in the theatrics and fun of dragons, witchcraft, and swordplay, or because others traffic in gruesome or...
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Chicago beat maker Spectacular Diagnostics brings a mystical touch to...
Chicago hip-hop producer and visual artist Robert Krums has been making music for nearly two decades, and for most of that time he went by the name Earmint. About five years ago, he reinvented himself...
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Boris rage against a world turned upside-down on the urgent, hardcore driven No
In their nearly 30 years as a band, Boris have developed the rare ability to alchemize practically any sound in the vast realm of heavy, atmospheric, and psychedelic rock into their distorted,...
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Bruges create a Chicago noise-rock masterpiece on A Thread of Light
Chicago is a noise-rock city. It’s a gritty, working-class town built out of iron, glass, and dirt.…
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Nicole Mitchell and Lisa E. Harris explore soulful Afrofuturist visions on...
A friend in Houston recently described multidisciplinary artist and space goddess Lisa E. Harris as a “force of nature” in the Texas scene and beyond. Upon investigation, I had to concur.…
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Prolific Chicago rapper Chris Crack shows off his range on Cute Boys
In June, Chicago rapper Chris Crack self-released Cute Boys (The Rise of Lil Delicious) on Bandcamp roughly two months after dropping White People Love Algorithms. Most artists releasing 36 songs in a...
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Bob Nanna lays his post-divorce life bare on Celebration States
Midwestern emo cornerstone Bob Nanna made his bones working guarded feelings into nervy posthardcore with anthemic ambitions. Nanna started his streak in the early 90s with teenage band Friction, and...
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Brazilian singer-songwriter Thiago Nassif pulls off a bizarre tropicalia...
The spiky, new wavy, herky-jerky pop rock of Mente, the new album from Brazilian singer-songwriter Thiago Nassif, may remind you of Talking Heads. But the link between them arises more from shared...
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Streaming theater goes beyond Hamilton
The Public Theater, Black Lives, Black Words, and Hell in a Handbag put it all online. In the first days of the COVID-19 shutdown, many theaters scrambled to find archival production videos of high...
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Margo Price tackles her personal and professional growing pains on That's...
On her new third album, That’s How Rumors Get Started, Margo Price spins her modern outlaw-country sound into golden strands of pop-friendly Americana, tackling her critics, rock ’n’ roll mythology,...
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Uptown’s In-On Thai excels behind a dark dining room
Its second incarnation abides with extraordinary carryout. One of my last great group restaurant meals was in February. All the essential elements for a swell time were present: a long, loaded table...
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Chicago garage stalwart James Swanberg enriches his carefree pop sound
Over the past decade or so, whenever a garage band has played a Chicago show, you’ll have likely found James Swanberg somewhere on the premises, in the crowd or hawking merch or even onstage. For most...
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Paisley Fields makes out and open country music
The country-music world has been slow to embrace its queer community, so it’s been refreshing to see a new generation of queer country artists and songwriters—among them Brandi Carlile, Ty Herndon,...
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Sault’s Untitled (Black Is) is the soundtrack for the 2020 revolution
Sault are an anonymous UK trio who create music grounded in the tenets of Black rights and Black freedom, and there’s never been a better time than now to hear their message. Last year they put out...
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