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Majority Rule’s screamo songs burn hard more than a decade after they broke up
The music community that lives together reunites together: In recent years, many of the northern-Virginia and D.C.-area screamo bands that warped punk back in the late 90s and early 2000s and went on...
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Chicago Renaissance man Malcolm London blurs his roles together on Right Away...
Chicago’s Malcolm London juggles more roles at once than some people can list on their entire resumés: he’s a poet, activist, rapper, and educator. How does he do it?…
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Chicago-raised rapper Lil Wop follows Gucci Mane in spirit but not sound
Chicago-raised, Atlanta-based rapper Lil Wop loves Gucci Mane so much he replicated the trap king’s iconic ice-cream-cone face tattoo on his right cheek. As Lil Wop told the Fader, Gucci Mane “taught...
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Chicago supergroup Lifted Bells carry a torch for emo on their debut album,...
Lifted Bells couldn’t have picked a better time to release their first EP than 2013, when “emo revival” had become an indie-rock buzzword. Now the local underground supergroup—made up of exacting...
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Turnstile are ferocious, but they just wanna have fun (with hardcore)
It’s been several decades since punk first mutated into hardcore, and many of its young acolytes still prefer to let it fester in the world’s dingiest basements and DIY spaces. But since 2010...
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Hardcore icons Integrity bring their blackened aggression to Chicago
Dwid Hellion, founder and core member of Integrity, sure can be intimidating, what with his burly stage presence, fierce intelligence, and dogged devotion to unblinking study of the darkest sides of...
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Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia presents a stunningly focused new sound on Breaking...
Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia has always been something of a polymath. After graduating from Oberlin—with a degree not in music but in economics and neuroscience—he moved to New York in 2010 and his...
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Flamenco singer Diego el Cigala pushes his Spanish roots into the fiery sound...
Over the last several decades few figures in traditional flamenco have matched the power of native Madrileño Jiménez Salazar (better known as Diego el Cigala), whose appealingly gruff timbre, deep...
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Chicago R&B wunderkind Ravyn Lenae captures the confusion of love on Crush
At 19, Chicago R&B singer and Zero Fatigue member Ravyn Lenae has proven herself a master at crafting odes to love. That’s partially because she’s open about the peculiar perplexities of being...
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Xylouris White expands its collision of Cretan traditional music and rock on...
On its fantastic fourth album, Mother (Bella Union), stirring Cretan-Australian duo Xylouris White masterfully expands its reach without surrendering the essential intimacy and bruising power that’s...
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Ty Segall’s sprawling new album proves his curiosity is as far-reaching as ever
LA rocker Ty Segall has made a name for himself partly through his prolificacy; over the last decade he’s churned out records in a slew of different contexts. He’s actually slowed down a bit,...
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Nellie “Tiger” Travis and Pokey Bear head to Chi-Town Blues Festival
Chicagoan Nellie “Tiger” Travis’s 2013 song “Mr. Sexy Man” has become a modern-day soul-blues classic with its earworm guitar pattern, propulsive beat, and vernacular chorus (“What yo’ name is? What...
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Norwegian artist Jana Winderen finds music hidden within natural sounds
Ever since John Cage popularized the idea in the 1950s, musicians have worked to find music in the everyday noises of nature and the human-built world. Many composers have sought to transcribe such...
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Jazz flutist Jamie Baum reaches beyond jazz to explore music from the Middle...
New York flutist Jamie Baum embodies the title of her forthcoming album Bridges (due May 18 on Sunnyside) through a series of stylistic connections that bridge divides between Arabic, Indian, and...
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Forty years after “Whole Wide World,” Wreckless Eric is doing some of his...
Some musicians might deem it a drag to be best known for their first single, but English rock songwriter Wreckless Eric’s a pretty good sport about it. He’s still willing to play “Whole Wide World”...
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Greenbeard’s psychedelic boogie-rock oozes stoner perfection on Lödarödböl
Greenbeard are a grimy-sounding stoner-rock trio from Austin who riffed their way onto the scene in 2014 and have produced three albums since. Like its predecessors, last year’s Lödarödböl (Sailor...
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Canadian indie wonder U.S. Girls observes pop’s darkened corners on In a Poem...
Chicago native Meg Remy began recording and performing noise collages as U.S. Girls roughly a decade ago, and through the years she's inched her sound closer and closer to pop; her 2012 track "Work...
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Avantist show they’re one of the best bands in Chicago on their debut album
When I caught local four-piece Avantist at Ian’s Party in January, front man Fernando Arias smoothly inserted some lines from Frank Ocean’s “Nights” into a cyclonic, humid jam. While I recognized that...
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Canadian turntablist extraordinaire Kid Koala invites you to help him spin
Canadian DJ and producer Eric San, aka Kid Koala, is unbound by the structures typical of someone who operates with a couple turntables and a mixer. He’s made a name for himself as a master...
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Soul legend Bettye LaVette remakes the songs of Bob Dylan on Things Have Changed
Bob Dylan has famously and relentlessly toyed with the melodies and arrangements of his voluminous repertoire, using his songs as perpetual works in progress despite the iconic status of many of them....
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