Update: This show has been canceled to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Tickets will be refunded at point of purchase.

Damo Suzuki has always had a case of wanderlust. Born in 1950 in Kobe, Japan, he began traveling while still in his teens and spent time living in Grasmark, Sweden, before eventually landing in Cologne, Germany, where he landed a gig as the lead singer of Krautrock progenitors Can in the early 70s. His contributions included recording 1971’s Tago Mago, arguably the band’s high point: the album judders with taut rhythms and seethes with waves of gnarly guitar, and Suzuki intones words and sounds that seem pulled up from a poetic subconscious. His penchant for travel never abated, and after leaving Can in 1973, he kicked around and sporadically recorded with a few other ensembles. But by the 1990s, Suzuki had embarked on an ongoing, basically endless tour, an open-ended road show in which he travels from city to city fronting bands of local players. He calls these many bands Damo Suzuki’s Network, and at his current Chicago stop (he had to cancel in May 2019 due to visa issues), the Network is set to include multi-instrumentalist Cooper Crain, bassist Joshua Abrams, and drummer Quin Kirchner. Regardless of his accompanists, though, twinges of the delivery he showcased on his recordings with Can sporadically pop up: a live 2018 album with Black Midi caught him mimicking his cadence and melody from the Tago Mago cut “Mushroom.” But whether Suzuki is recalibrating the past or diving into an impromptu moment of vocal eloquence, each of his performances enhances his legacy. v

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Emerging Chicago rapper-singer Sun Blvd, aka Sunny, approaches genre with a fluidity that should serve her well in the long run. On her 2019 EP, Link in Bio, her voice glides across pop, rap, and R&B, gassed up by skittering, sometimes blistering production that’s cut out for blasting late at night in a dim club. On “The Blues,” she complements knobby percussion and zipping synth with springy, punchy bars that bristle at the end of every line–but even on her most aggressive verses, she projects the nonchalance of someone tanning on a California beach. Beat-scene regular and event promoter DJ Skoli produced Link in Bio (he also founded Kinky Elevator Music, the label-slash-collective that released it), and he expertly augments Sunny’s animated turns–together they have the potential to level up the KEM collective. v

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Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, this show has been postponed until further notice. Ticket holders should contact point of purchase for refund or exchange information.

Canadian artist Dan Snaith, who performs as Caribou, crafts mesmerizing explorations of dance music that are alluring, catchy, and intimate. He distills various strains of house music into simple moods and fleshes out the emotions of each track with gently spoken vocals. This is especially true on his latest album, Suddenly (Merge). On “Home,” Snaith sings along with a sample from the Gloria Barnes song of the same name, capturing his love for music and for a woman who’s found contentment in life. “New Jade” speaks of someone on the precipice of fulfillment and healing after a breakup, and its skittering hip-hop instrumentation and sampling push toward that catharsis. Snaith’s voice anchors many of these songs, but it feels most crucial on “Never Come Back,” a wistful piano-house track where he reminisces about a past relationship; for most of the song he simply riffs on the title, but every so often he moves into a higher register to deliver a few more lyrics, suffusing the song with new tenderness and vulnerability. Even on songs where Snaith’s voice isn’t as prominent, he can make a similar softness felt; on “Ravi,” he lays a fractured vocal sample over a shuffling two-step beat, then comes in to sing a couple lines. Whether Snaith is producing the music or singing over it, he always finds ways to keep you emotionally invested. v

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Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, these shows have been postponed until further notice. Ticket holders should contact the point of purchase for refund or exchange information.

Lyrics aren’t the only way for musicians to communicate political messages, just the most obvious. When the Knife turned their live show for 2013’s Shaking the Habitual into a group study in Queer Space Jazzercise, they deliberately obscured which performers were the Dreijer siblings, making a point about equitable collaboration by dissolving the hierarchy of star and supernumerary. Baltimore four-piece Horse Lords are already a collective without a front person, and they play wordless, mostly instrumental music–but they’ve still got song titles to work with. On the new The Common Task (Northern Spy), they’ve named a track “People’s Park,” after a public space in Lincoln Park established in the late 1960s by the Young Lords (a former Latinx street gang devoted to radical activism) in an effort to slow the gentrification displacing the neighborhood’s Puerto Rican population. Horse Lords’ music (rendered with guitar, bass, drum kit, percussion, electronics, and alto saxophone) also conveys the joy and excitement of utopian politics more abstractly, by laboring to transform the bricks and mortar of rock ‘n’ roll into a dizzying, fractal cloud of morphing and overlapping ostinatos. These songs topple the tyranny of the beat–hardly the worst kind of tyranny, admittedly–not by doing away with tempo, the way free jazz and ambient music frequently do, but by harnessing the musicians’ ferocious rhythmic discipline to maintain several simultaneous tempos, often in bafflingly complex relationships to one another. It’s frequently danceable, and you get lots of choices about which beat to follow. The Common Task can sound like overcaffeinated Tuareg “desert blues,” like 17 robots all trying to get into the same elevator, or like a reggaeton beat in a clothes dryer. “Fanfare for Effective Freedom” begins with simple, recognizable two-against-three and three-against-four phasing before sidestepping casually into 11-dimensional spacetime. Halfway through, the track hits a thrilling, intricate groove in a swift 5/8 meter, providing a stable core beat that might arrive as a relief if your brain has been pinballing among competing rhythms and compulsively trying to count out what’s happening. But as satisfying as that moment can be, it requires collapsing the swarm of possibilities that’s brought us this far–and possibility is what Horse Lords do better than anybody. v

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Are Possessed a band or a hive of slavering meat puppets inhabited by time-traveling demons from the future? The case for the latter is strong. The Bay Area band’s 1985 classic, Seven Churches (Relativity/Combat), was death metal before death metal had chewed its way out of heavy metal’s womb. With thrash speeds, crude punk-crust-vomit production, and Jeff Becerra’s pioneering esophagus-rupturing growl, Possessed created an unholy, scabrous adrenaline rush dedicated to an apocalyptic millennium of hellfire and amphetamines before splitting up in 1987. Nearly 35 years later, Possessed’s monstrous vision is still tattooed on many metalheads’ brains, and their music sounds more relevant than any metal from the 80s has a right to. Becerra was paralyzed from the chest down when he was shot during a robbery in 1989, but he began performing again under the Possessed name in 2007, assembling a backing band from members of Los Angeles death-metal crew Sadistic Intent. Last year the group put out their first album in more than three decades, Revelations of Oblivion (Nuclear Blast). Becerra no longer plays bass, but he still does a fine imitation of a man with wolverines climbing out of his throat. And the latest incarnation of the group–drummer Emilio Marquez, guitarists Daniel Gonzalez and Claudeous Creamer, and bassist Robert Cardenas–delivers the same leather land-speed thrill as the original lineup. Whether shredding through tunes from Revelations of Oblivion or blasting through their back catalog, Possessed still sound like they’ve bargained with Satan for an eternal, festering youth. v

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Colorado three-piece Velnias have always had their own distinctive blend of black, progressive, and folk metal: it builds slowly, and they give it a lot of room to breathe. They took their name from a primal Baltic forest god, and they’re very fond of passages of braided, interlaced clean guitar that verge on space metal. After making ripples with 2012’s RuneEater and 2016’s Absolution, the group are continuing their rocky path through misty mountains on their upcoming third album, Scion of Aether (out March 27 on Eisenwald). With a moody, cerebral sound that values atmosphere over dirty raw power, Velnias aren’t a band to go to if you require constant pummeling, but they could certainly provide it if they wanted–the excellent drumming often patters beneath the quiet bits like a lurking threat. Depending on your need for speed or your tolerance for rambling indulgence, Velnias might have a little too much restraint or not enough, but when they do unleash the dogs of war (as in the tightly coiled riffs of 15-minute closer “Oblivion Horizon–Null Terminus”), the payoff comes in a volcanic eruption. The band play Chicago just weeks before they head off on a European tour (knock on wood), and they’re sharing the bill with two great locals: sludgy but explosive four-piece Pale Horseman and atmospheric black-metal band Vukari, whose third full-length, last fall’s Aevum, brings all the wall-slamming fury you could want. v

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Update: This show has been canceled to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Tickets will be refunded at point of purchase.

When I was in middle school in the mid-90s, I cut my teeth on the hyperslick skate-punk records churned out by California label Fat Wreck Chords. But when I got to high school and discovered “smarter,” more “highbrow” punk bands such as Fugazi and the Honor System, the scene that first captured my attention might as well have simply ceased to exist. Now here we are in 2020, and it turns out the classic Fat Wreck sound is not only still alive, but it’s fucking kicking. I’d argue that the best of the modern Fat Wreck bunch is Los Angeles four-piece the Bombpops. Their breakneck, melodic pop punk is the catchiest I’ve ever heard, and it speaks to my nostalgic side by paying homage to the all-time greats of 90s skate punk, piling on the palm-muted guitars, shimmering crash cymbals, and undeniable vocal harmonies of NOFX, Lagwagon, No Use for a Name, All, and other Epitaph and Fat Wreck stars. The Bombpops’ newest single, “Notre Dame,” off the upcoming LP Death in Venice Beach, perfectly sums up why this music continues to thrive: it’s fun, energetic, heartfelt, and all-around unstoppable. Front women Poli van Dam and Jen Razavi weave gigantic hooks while the rock-solid rhythm section of drummer Josh Lewis and bassist Neil Wayne keeps it simple and quick. This formula has been at the core of pop punk for decades, and the Bombpops make a strong case that it always will be. v

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In January 2018, Berlin-based dance producer, vocalist, and composer Laurel Halo tweeted that she’d written a score for Possessed, a documentary by Rob Schroder and Metahaven, a Dutch design collective that’s branched out into film since forming in 2007. Metahaven’s work focuses on the dystopian aspects of our present lives, and those themes are central to Possessed, which navigates a wide range of technological horrors–some are obviously frightening (facial recognition software), and others are so quotidian we engage with them almost thoughtlessly (YouTube makeup tutorials). In her score, which Vinyl Factory will release next month, Halo uses minimal piano melodies and eerie electronics to evoke paranoia, terror, melancholy, and beauty. Violinist Galya Bisengalieva and cellist Oliver Coates help add detail to the atmosphere, whether they’re underscoring the awfulness of the neoliberal hellscape (the sawtoothed strings on the anxious “Zeljava”) or expressing a simple reverence for classical tradition (the cordial melodies of the three-part “Rome Theme”). Even in its darkest moments, though, Halo’s score has enough heart to give me hope we’ll find ways to survive. v

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On their third full-length, 2019’s Black Friday (Polyvinyl), Boston band Palehound offer candid meditations on love–its many forms and stages, and the vulnerability it brings–from the perspective of someone deep in the midst of it. The trio remain firmly planted in the 90s-flecked indie pop that roots their sound, but they add new folk-rock twists; they also find a balance between their instrumentals and the luminous, airy vocals of front woman and songwriter Ellen Kempner, which convey a wide range of emotional inflections. The record feels like a natural progression from 2017’s A Place I’ll Always Go and its inward musings on pain: each track on Black Friday feels like an entry from a personal journal wrapped in a sophisticated sonic package. On album opener “Company,” Kempner sings in a cautious reverie over striking chords reminiscent of a booming church organ, which reinforce a sense that the narrator’s current relationship has arrived at something akin to bliss. But on “Worthy,” her voice feels intentionally restrained as she whispers in the voice of someone whose negative self-image has invited insecurity into a romance. She considers these issues from the opposite perspective on “Bullshit,” empathetically addressing a troubled lover struggling with inner turmoil. Some of the album’s most affecting stories concern platonic friendships: on “Killer,” for instance, Kempner colors her voice with earnest anger and pain as she lays out her desire to enact revenge on the person who’s harmed a friend. Though Black Friday doesn’t provide a clear resolution to the anxieties at its center, closing track “In Town” suggests the hope of peace amidst the chaos. Kempner’s intimate lyrics and passionate onstage presence give her a keen ability to help listeners feel her anguish, and her stories gain extra power as they resonate among a live audience. v

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About three years ago, “Soundcloud rap” emerged as a catchall for a variety of aggressive, rock-influenced hip-hop made by digital natives operating outside the mainstream. It often felt unhelpful to group together rappers whose styles were tugging hip-hop in several different directions, and naming that incohesive group after a streaming service didn’t make the situation more clear. But the ambiguity of the Soundcloud rap category has also allowed it to include artists who move in several different directions all by themselves, producing saccharine ballads about heartache side by side with brash rippers that sound ready to blow your speakers no matter how quietly you play them. Misanthropic New York group City Morgue definitely lean toward the latter: their lurid, hostile tracks borrow from Memphis rap’s sinister sonics, nu-metal’s pop-friendly heaviness, and crunk’s delirious shouts. On December’s City Morgue Vol. 2: As Good as Dead (Republic), the dark, downcast instrumentals of producer Thraxx inflict both dread and desire, while the bellicose bars of rappers ZillaKami and SosMula seethe even when they switch from throaty screams to melodic quasi-singing (as they do on “The Give Up”). City Morgue’s current tourmate, TikTok phenom Tokyo’s Revenge, has taken off by mixing lovelorn R&B singing with the syllable-jammed aggro rapping popularized by fellow Floridian Ski Mask the Slump God. On the 2019 EP Mdnght (Side B), released by the Blac Noize! label, he veers between these two poles. He’s most magnetic on the anxious ballad “Drug Lullaby,” transplanting the morbid histrionics of third-wave emo into a tortuous performance tinged with vulnerability that’s hard to pin down. v

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