Category: Concert Preview

Geneva Jacuzzi is like if Nina Hagen grew up in a doomsday cult. (And Jacuzzi did, in fact, grow up in a doomsday cult.) In a 2020 interview with Genius List, the Los Angeles-based artist explained her love of jacuzzis, describing them as “these tiny, weird, warm whirlpools of bacteria, chemicals, pleasure, and relaxation.” She […]

Five years ago, the Hideout’s talent booker at the time, Sullivan Davis, teamed up with producer and musician Dorian Gehrig to start the Cosmic Country Showcase. Their dream was to bring to life Gram Parsons’s philosophy of a welcoming, expansive, and absolutely trippy form of country music, freed of its hidebound and less imaginative old […]

Mike Reed thinks big. He’s an accomplished organizer who helped conceive the Pitchfork Music Festival. His two venues, the Hungry Brain and Constellation, serve not only to support the local creative-music community but also to foster a dialogue between it and similar scenes in other states and abroad. And when he turns to leading a […]

Indie rocker Joseph Farago sings in a falsetto that can get nearly as high a teenager singing chipmunk style with a lungful of helium. He leads the band Joey Nebulous, which he formed as an Oberlin student in 2015, and he now lives in Chicago, where he’s also played in the bands Jodi and Tenci. […]

Chicago band Deeper can translate chilly UK postpunk into a midwestern dialect—their music has lots of space and lakeshore bluster, and these guys have clearly spent uncounted hours packed into an unheated van driving to out-of-town gigs. Since issuing their 2020 breakthrough, Auto-Pain, Deeper have expanded their lineup from three to four with the addition […]

Chicago hasn’t always been welcoming of hip-hop. In the late 80s and early 90s, its artistic viability was often overlooked or ignored by local clubs and radio stations. That disregard lasted long enough that when Chicago hip-hop finally blew up internationally years later, many people were blindsided. But those in the know have always been […]

As Heartgaze, Clemente Calandra makes skewed underground pop songs that stitch together stiff-legged drum ’n’ bass breaks, nimble acoustic guitars with the raw vulnerability of mainstream emo, and shocks of feedback that smell like dimly lit basement noise shows. Born and raised in Argentina, Calandra created Heartgaze in Chile and then moved to Chicago in […]

In 2021, Twitter user Benjamin Deshawn Hoard posted a photo of himself looking glum and out of sorts while sitting on a replica of SpongeBob SquarePants’s bed. His caption read, “I Shoulda Never Smoke That Shit Now Im At Spongebob House.” That joke launched a meme, where other posters would superimpose Hoard onto increasingly absurd […]

Popular music has plenty of upbeat anthems that celebrate the performer’s beauty and success—think Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” or Olivia Rodrigo’s “All-American Bitch.” It also has lots of downbeat paeans to the performer’s pitifulness, a la Beck’s “Loser” or Radiohead’s “Creep.” Much less common are enthusiastic, danceable tracks that boast of the singer’s ugliness and smallness, which […]

When mathy metalcore bands such as the Dillinger Escape Plan, Converge, and Coalesce reigned supreme in the late 90s and early aughts, no one struck a balance between proggy virtuosity and hardcore aggression quite like scrappy Tacoma upstarts Botch. Formed in 1993 and disbanded in 2002, the four-piece never reached the crossover popularity of those […]

Steve Krakow can’t be pinned down to one pursuit or even one name, and when he plans a festival, it creates its own niche. He performs music under the name Plastic Crimewave; he writes and draws about music for the Reader and his own publication, the Galactic Zoo Dossier; and he’s been organizing eclectic events […]

It’s rare for Chicago to have even one noteworthy Australian punk show, much less two in one night—the necessity to choose between them is an excellent problem to have. While protopunk five-piece Civic play the Empty Bottle with local postpunks Ganser, Queensland upstarts the Chats headline this package tour at the Vic. Formed in 2016, […]

All sorts of classic American and British punk and garage rock have been revived and revived again to the point of cliché, but foundational Australian groups such as Radio Birdman, the Lime Spiders, the Scientists, and the Celibate Rifles still often go unsung outside their home country. Thankfully, rising artists from down under are connecting […]

Marina Herlop’s primary interest is aesthetics. She’ll say her songs aren’t autobiographical, and the pianist’s penchant for dropping made-up language into digitally manipulated audio environments can make it difficult for listeners to ground her work in something familiar. But with enough scrutiny, you can follow clues that situate her evolving output within a number of […]