“Prince: the Immersive Experience” begins with purple light through stained glass. Guests in groups of ten to 15 are led through double doors to a replica of the “When Doves […]
Tag: pop music
Posted inMusic
Nigeria’s Joeboy makes life-affirming pop music
Throughout the next few months, Chicago will host several concerts featuring contemporary Nigerian pop stars, and Joeboy in particular is a must-see. Born Joseph Akinwale Akinfenwa-Donus, the 24-year-old singer attracted […]
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Young Guv’s Guv III threatens to give you the warm fuzzies
In all my years contributing to the Reader, the artist I’ve written about the most is probably Toronto’s Ben Cook—partly because he’s been so incredibly prolific for the past two […]
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With Painless, Nilüfer Yanya presents a quietly perfect pop album
Fans of the eclectic sprawl of Nilüfer Yanya’s 2019 debut album, Miss Universe, may be a little disappointed in her more conventional follow-up; there are no satirical parodies of wellness […]
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Dreamer Isioma yokes their wildly maximalist aesthetic to their pop-star ambition on Goodnight Dreamer
In March 2020, Chicago singer-songwriter Dreamer Isioma released their breakthrough EP, Sensitive, whose slyly funky title track became a slow-burning hit—in a little under two years, it’s racked up nearly […]
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Mitski returns to music stronger than ever with Laurel Hell
In summer 2019, Mitski Miyawaki (born Mitsuki Francis Laycock) announced that she would be playing her “last show, indefinitely” that September. The singer-songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist, who’d become an indie-rock […]
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Experimental pop auteur Jitwam just wants you to dance
Born in India, raised in New Zealand and Australia, and based I’m not sure where, pop provocateur Jitwam might seem fickle—his outre style leapfrogs from sun-bleached, broken psychedelia (“Drowning in […]
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Emily Blue makes 80s pop for every era on The Afterlove
I won’t pretend it’s possible to rank pop music from different decades in a defensible way, but Emily Blue’s new self-released third album, The Afterlove, makes a great case for […]
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Hana Vu carves new pop landscapes with Public Storage
Storage units, with their heavy padlocked doors and stockpiles of intimate possessions, are ripe for metaphors about emotional compartmentalization. On her debut album, Public Storage, Los Angeles guitarist and songwriter […]
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Desert Liminal make art for artifice with Glass Fate
The lead single from Desert Liminal’s latest album bursts with a gut punch of a line: “I don’t need no southbound highway sign to tell me hell is real.” Glass […]
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Chicago native Tatiana Hazel crafts pop songs for the arena shows of tomorrow
Chicago native Tatiana Hazel has come a long way since she started uploading acoustic performances to YouTube as a preteen a decade ago. This past summer she dropped a new […]
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Former Oshwa bandleader Alicia Walter makes a grand entrance as a solo artist
In the 2010s, Alicia Walter led criminally underappreciated Chicago band Oshwa, who played dizzying, dramatic math-rock with the finesse of a tween Mensa member simultaneously solving three Rubik’s Cubes. Walter […]
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Chicago songwriter Emily Jane Powers supercharges Isometry with wild guitar work
When local folk-pop artist Jessica Risker interviewed Chicago singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emily Jane Powers on her Music Therapy podcast in April 2020, Powers was halfway through recording an album. “I […]
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L’Rain creates glittering, warped pop collages on Fatigue
Brooklyn composer and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, aka L’Rain, has titled her sophomore album Fatigue (Mexican Summer), but she doesn’t sound tired. Her aesthetic is languidly manic, with an eclectic mix […]
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Chicago producer DJ C brings life-giving daring to his hybridized dance music on Do Radly
As DJ C, Chicago producer Jake Trussell has developed a gift for extracting the DNA from an eclectic variety of pop subgenres, then scrambling their nucleotides and recombining them—and his […]