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Home » pop music

Tag: pop music

Posted inArts & Culture

Prince of the Mag Mile

by Jack Riedy June 23, 2022July 8, 2022

“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 […]

Joeboy
Posted inMusic

Nigeria’s Joeboy makes life-affirming pop music

by Joshua Minsoo Kim May 10, 2022May 10, 2022

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 […]

Young Guv in a multi-colored leather jacket outside a store front covered in graffiti
Posted inMusic

Young Guv’s Guv III threatens to give you the warm fuzzies

by Luca Cimarusti March 8, 2022February 28, 2022

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 […]

Nilufer Yanya sitting on white and green chckerboard fake grass with a phone to her ear
Posted inMusic

With Painless, Nilüfer Yanya presents a quietly perfect pop album

by Noah Berlatsky March 3, 2022February 28, 2022

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 […]

Dreamer Isioma playing electric guitar while reclining on a cloud
Posted inMusic Review

Dreamer Isioma yokes their wildly maximalist aesthetic to their pop-star ambition on Goodnight Dreamer

by Leor Galil February 21, 2022February 15, 2022

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 […]

The musician Mitski squatting down on the ground, wearing a black and white dress and white boots
Posted inMusic

Mitski returns to music stronger than ever with Laurel Hell

by Jamie Ludwig February 2, 2022February 9, 2022

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 […]

The electronic musician Jitwam squats on the ground in front of cacti and behind pink flowers, wearing a bucket hat.
Posted inMusic

Experimental pop auteur Jitwam just wants you to dance

by Leor Galil February 1, 2022January 31, 2022

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 […]

Emily Blue in a corset and gloves with teased out hair against a dreamy sky-like background
Posted inMusic

Emily Blue makes 80s pop for every era on The Afterlove

by Leor Galil January 11, 2022January 5, 2022

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 […]

Hana Vu in an all-black outfit reaching forward
Posted inMusic

Hana Vu carves new pop landscapes with Public Storage

by Shannon Nico Shreibak January 10, 2022January 5, 2022

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 […]

The band Desert Liminal, a trio, with 2 sitting inside a green car and one member sitting on top of the car
Posted inMusic

Desert Liminal make art for artifice with Glass Fate

by Shannon Nico Shreibak November 26, 2021November 29, 2021

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 […]

Singer Tatiana Hazel poses with blonde hair looking up from a sitting position on the floor
Posted inMusic

Chicago native Tatiana Hazel crafts pop songs for the arena shows of tomorrow

by Leor Galil September 27, 2021September 27, 2021

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 […]

Alicia Walter
Posted inMusic

Former Oshwa bandleader Alicia Walter makes a grand entrance as a solo artist

by Leor Galil September 22, 2021September 20, 2021

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 […]

Emily Jane Powers
Posted inMusic

Chicago songwriter Emily Jane Powers supercharges Isometry with wild guitar work

by Leor Galil August 2, 2021August 18, 2021

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 […]

Posted inMusic

L’Rain creates glittering, warped pop collages on Fatigue

by Noah Berlatsky July 1, 2021July 1, 2022

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 […]

Posted inMusic

Chicago producer DJ C brings life-giving daring to his hybridized dance music on Do Radly

by Leor Galil June 1, 2021August 18, 2021

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 […]

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