Author Archives: Leor Galil

So far this summer, few new indie-rock songs have affected me as much as “You Can’t Do It All,” the not-quite-title track from Cusp’s self-released debut album, You Can Do It All. Jen Bender’s sweet, straightforward vocals snuggle up against a fogbank of guitar fuzz, a quietly humming bass line, a waltz-time beat, and an […]

I understand why people are sad that this year’s Silver Room Sound System Block Party will be the last. When Silver Room owner Eric Williams started the block party in 2002, he did so in part to address the fact that neighborhood street festivals routinely overlooked the Black musicians and artists in his community—if no […]

Like basically anyone who works or plays in a developed country, I’m familiar with the frustrations of technology that stops working properly—it bothers me irrationally that I have to really lean on my laptop’s “R” key to get the letter to appear. Sometimes I repeatedly hammer on the errant key, which produces spelling errors rather […]

Last year, Chicago multi-instrumentalist Ryan Nolen launched a solo project called Footballhead as an outlet for material too poppy for his ongoing band, Kirby Grip, who play soaring, sometimes serious space rock. On Footballhead’s debut, the July 2022 EP Kitchen Fly, Nolen made his affection for 90s alt-rock radio hits, caramel-sweet emo, and turn-of-the-century pop […]

Experimental artist Matthew Sage, better known as M. Sage, moved to Chicago from Colorado in 2014, and within a couple years I’d become quite fond of his work. The reflective solo material he’d put out on Atlanta label Geographic North and the gigabytes of other peoples’ recordings he issued via his own label Patient Sounds […]

Do you ever feel incapacitated by the firehose of depressing news about our deteriorating environment and the stubborn nonresponse by the governments and corporations who could actually help? What about the deeply ingrained structural racism that disenfranchises and marginalizes large swaths of our communities, or the fascists who want to increase that misery? Maybe what […]

Chicagoans rarely suffer from a shortage of music festivals, but few such events make me feel like I’m participating in the city’s cultural fabric like the Chosen Few Picnic. The long-running house-music celebration began informally in 1990, and its roots extend even further back. Wayne Williams founded the Chosen Few DJ collective in 1977 as […]

Rising Chicago four-piece Rotundos make lo-fi rock with the kind of freewheeling glee that feeds any good DIY scene. They’ve released a handful of singles and demos, and they’re headlining Beat Kitchen to celebrate their new debut EP, Ya Nos Conocen (Sawyer), which corrals bubblegum-sweet power-pop hooks and rough-and-tumble punk grit into six lean bilingual […]

I pay attention whenever Chicagoan Owen Ashworth releases music through his Orindal Records label, and not just because I like his indie-pop project Advance Base. Orindal’s back catalog is a murderers’ row of indie artists, some of whom the label got behind very early in their careers: Julie Byrne (who will release The Greater Wings […]