It’s been four months since we’ve had a Bandcamp Friday. In case you’ve somehow forgotten, Bandcamp introduced them shortly after COVID-19 eliminated stateside touring in March 2020, and they’ve since become something of a tradition, helping countless musicians make ends meet without their usual road money. For the 24 hours of each Bandcamp Friday, the […]
Tag: Horsegirl
Posted inMusic
Lifeguard grow into their next underground rock vision on Crowd Can Talk
A couple weeks before Lifeguard played Horsegirl’s record-release show at Thalia Hall in June, I ran into drummer Isaac Lowenstein and bassist Asher Case while walking through the Logan Square Farmers Market with my family. My parents asked what kind of music they make, and we all had a little trouble coming up with a […]
Posted inCity Life
Art, records, and the great outdoors
Looking for stuff to do this weekend and beyond? Read on! FRI 6/3 Do-Division Street Fest (Division between Damen and Leavitt) benefits from handing over its music programming to outside local venues, and this year’s lineup (booked by Empty Bottle and Subterranean) doesn’t disappoint. Tonight you can catch several acts that we’ve written about including […]
Posted inMusic
Horsegirl and the dream of a teen rock scene
In July 2019, Chicago indie-rock trio Horsegirl played the eighth annual Square Roots Festival. At the time, live shows were the only way to hear the group’s taut but disarming dream pop, with its windswept-lakefront sound—and they’d only performed a few of them. They hadn’t released any music, not even to stream, and unsurprisingly they’d […]
Posted inMusic
Eli Schmitt, jack-of-all-trades in Chicago’s young DIY arts and music scene
Eli Schmitt, 20, moved to Chicago a couple years ago to attend DePaul, where he studies journalism and art history. In that time he’s become a crucial connector in an emerging youth arts movement best known for its bands, which include Lifeguard, Post Office Winter, Friko, Dwaal Troupe, and Horsegirl. Schmitt wears a lot of […]
Posted inMusic
Young indie rockers Friko celebrate a sophisticated new EP with a springtime show
Friko front man Niko Kapetan is a key player in Chicago’s young indie-rock underground. His band belongs to a tight-knit community that also includes like-minded acts Lifeguard, Post Office Winter, Dwaal Troupe, and Horsegirl—the connections among them are too numerous to list here, but to pick one example, Kapetan helped engineer and produce Horsegirl’s 2020 […]
Posted inBest of Chicago
Best zine documenting a teen indie-rock scene
“Hallogallo” isn’t just the name of a song by 70s Krautrock band Neu!—it’s also a term that a group of Chicago teenagers have adopted to apply to almost anything associated with their DIY music and art community. That includes the zine Hallogallo, launched in early 2021, which has done terrific work documenting this scene. It’s […]
Posted inMusic
Post Office Winter share the world of fun in Chicago’s teen DIY scene
Chicago DIY rock duo Post Office Winter take an audible joy in playing scruffy, comfortable indie rock whose charming shabbiness feels like an accident they wouldn’t have any other way. The band’s founders, Johnston and Huffman (Jones College Prep juniors who prefer to go by their last names), belong to a local teenage DIY rock […]
Posted inMusic
Elenna Sindler teams up with Hasco Duo for an EP of haunting art songs
Late last month, local contemporary classical composer and pop musician Elenna Sindler dropped a new collaborative digital EP, Lullaby Baby, with Hasco Duo (aka soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett and guitarist Jesse Langen, both of Ensemble dal Niente). Sindler, who sings the lead vocal parts on the EP, describes it as reflecting “different fears and anxieties […]
Posted inMusic
Pitchfork announces the lineup for its delayed 2021 music festival
Plenty of COVID-related uncertainty still surrounds the Pitchfork fest, as it does any large-scale event—but we can be reasonably sure about who’s scheduled to play.