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Aluna makes good use of creative control on her solo debut
This summer UK dance-music singer-songwriter Aluna released her solo debut, Renaissance, whose lead track, “I’ve Been Starting to Love All the Things I Hate,” makes a case for pulling ourselves out of...
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Dezron Douglas and Brandee Younger address cultural issues from lockdown on...
For the past few months, bassist Dezron Douglas and harpist Brandee Younger have dealt with the necessity of social distancing with their own kind of intimate gigs: a series of quietly uplifting...
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Sour hearken back to thrash metal’s glory days on their self-titled debut
If you blindfolded me and played me the self-titled debut from Aurora thrash band Sour, I’d totally believe it’d been recorded in 1984 with a cassette four-track in a dusty garage. They recall thrash...
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Denmark’s Causa Sui channel guitar legend Gábor Szabó on their latest...
When things got dark in 2020, some bands leaned into anxiety, loneliness, and rage, but others embraced silver linings—especially if COVID shutdowns allowed them a more relaxed pace of life that...
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New Goo’s patchwork bedroom pop creates its own peculiar giddiness
Chicago singer-songwriter Kelso Ashby makes whimsical bedroom pop as New Goo, stacking lo-fi percussion, spectral synths, and featherweight vocals. On their new self-released album, Picture of a...
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Guido Gamboa transforms everyday sounds into haunting atmospheres on A Droll
For the past few years, Chicagoan Guido Gamboa has been one of the city’s best purveyors of experimental music, though too few people have noticed. He launched his record label, Pentiments, in...
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Finding Yingying looks at the human impact of a tragic crime
Jiayan “Jenny” Shi’s documentary honors Yingying Zhang as a person, not a victim. On June 9, 2017, Yingying Zhang, a 26-year-old visiting Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois in...
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Chicago squares off against New York City on the fourth volume of Mars...
Among the myriad injuries inflicted upon Americans by COVID-19 (though admittedly one of the mildest) is the impossibility of attending your favorite holiday concert. For the past dozen years,...
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Chicago math-rock goofballs Snooze memorialize one of their own with Still
Freewheeling Chicago band Snooze play math rock like they’re trying to be inexplicable. They’re fans of emo, metal, and prog, and though that’s comfortably ordinary in this subgenre, I’d be...
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Turkish psych legends Moğollar revitalize songs from their extensive catalog...
In the late 90s and early 00s, a wave of indie reissues brought 70s psychedelic music that had been made all over the world to new generations of American fans. In Turkey, for instance, a regional...
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Yule be home for Christmas with Manual Cinema and Hell in a Handbag
A Dickens chestnut and a spoof of 1970s celebrity specials join the online holiday theater lineup. For a lot of performing arts organizations, the holiday season is when the cash cow gets milked for...
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Catherine Edelman Gallery closes with a 'Place in the Sun'
Landscape photographer scott b. davis treks into the wild and discovers the undiscoverable. Raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., scott b. davis first became interested in photography in the...
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Code-Switched delivers universal lessons with South Asian nuance
It’s the late-20s existential crisis sitcom that all South Asian American millennials deserve. Code-Switched is the thoughtfully curated care package only your fellow South Asian friend from high...
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Josephine Foster keeps the freak-folk flame burning with the catchy but...
Back in ye olde early aughts, “freak folk” ruled the land. Championed and perhaps encouraged by photogenic weirdo Devendra Banhart, artists influenced by elegiac or subliminally psychedelic folk acts...
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Katatonia make the most of a year without tours with the ‘live’ album Dead Air
Katatonia were fresh off a hiatus when they dropped their 11th studio album, City Burials, in April, but the pandemic meant they couldn’t stage the triumphant return tour it merited. In May, the...
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The Best of the Miyumi Project celebrates 20 years of Tatsu Aoki’s...
Tatsu Aoki left his native Tokyo in 1977 to study experimental film and settled in Chicago two years later. In addition to making films, he improvises, composes, and conducts music, playing bass,...
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Chicago MC Freddie Old Soul captures the complications of pandemic life on...
Chicago rapper Fredrianna Harris, aka Freddie Old Soul, uses hip-hop to open a vivid window into everyday life. On “Hot Tamale,” one of the best tracks off her new self-released EP, The First People,...
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Electric Hydra blasts the pop metal stoner rock
When it comes to music, Sweden is perhaps most famous for sweetly catchy pop and brutal death metal. Five-piece Electric Hydra finds the spiritual midpoint between those genres on its self-titled...
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Retail, resistance, and rebirth in Wally World and Kickback
Christmas Eve goes to 11 in Isaac Gómez's workplace comedy; About Face celebrates Black queer lives, past and present. If you're not working retail this Christmas Eve, spare a thought for those who...
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Chicago polymath Cam Be melds funk, R&B, and hip-hop to lift up struggling...
Chicago composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist Cam Be draws on his community to invigorate his already bold musical ideas. On his new second album, Summer in September (on his own Camovement...
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