{"id":438263,"date":"2025-12-10T17:01:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T17:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/438263\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T17:01:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T17:01:20","slug":"the-best-overlooked-chicago-records-of-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/438263\/","title":{"rendered":"The best overlooked Chicago records of 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CoverCredit: Collage by Kirk Williamson<\/p>\n

In July, the Atlantic ran a story about<\/a> a vanishing resource that was once commonplace in publications covering arts and culture: event listings. The story\u2019s author, career musician Gabriel Kahane, had moved to New York City fresh out of college in 2003, and he focused his attention on the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Village Voice. His paean and obituary pointed out not only that listings showed him everything he could do each night but also that the pithy blurbs alongside the concert listings in Time Out gave him a crucial early boost as an emerging artist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kahane treated these critics\u2019 picks as interchangeable with listings, which caused me some confusion. To me, critical writing about an upcoming concert is fundamentally different from a listing, which is typically just the basic details of the event, sorted by venue or date or some other principle. A listing doesn\u2019t have opinions. A critic\u2019s pick, by contrast, offers a concise argument as to why a specific show matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Reader still runs several such concert previews weekly, though they\u2019re much longer than the old Time Out picks. (My preview of Chance the Rapper\u2019s headlining show<\/a> in October, for example, was nearly 1,000 words.) Kahane and I agree about many of the reasons concert previews are important\u2014for one thing, they allow critics to use their knowledge and insight to advocate for artists their readers may never have heard of. Kahane mentions several famous musicians he found through listings before they became stars, which feels a little self-defeating. If it\u2019s important to write about folks who aren\u2019t household names, why focus on celebrities? I suppose he\u2019s trying to explain the value of listings to boomer readers of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Kahane\u2019s Atlantic piece also gets into the emergence of poptimism in the 2000s and connects it to the death of listings. Poptimism, loosely speaking, is a school of thought that encourages critics to bring intellectual rigor to pop music that\u2019s been maligned (or ignored) by older generations of writers. (That said, two decades after the widespread adoption of the term, two critics might come up with three different definitions of it.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kahane argues that poptimist critics enriched the culture but couldn\u2019t have imagined \u201cthe extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism.\u201d No longer was coverage of genuinely popular artists discouraged by snobbery, sexism, or racism\u2014the drive for clicks eventually made it \u201cthe status quo in mainstream music journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

This trend reached its \u201capotheosis,\u201d as Kahane puts it, \u201cin 2023 with USA Today\u2018s hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file\u2014you may want to sit down\u2014501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fairness to West, he\u2019s not a music critic. He spent almost a decade as a broadcast news reporter and producer, and he has experience in investigative journalism. Of course, broadcast reporting, investigative journalism, and arts criticism aren\u2019t mutually exclusive. But USA Today didn\u2019t hire West to write criticism about Taylor Swift. They wanted him to produce a lot of copy with her name in it to draw in as many readers as possible. If that sounds cheap or cynical, so is what West does.<\/p>\n

What has West written about Swift lately? A piece about Travis Kelce allegedly never arguing with Swift<\/a>, with quotes sourced mostly from Kelce\u2019s New Heights podcast. A report on a new trailer for a second Eras Tour movie<\/a>, which quotes from the trailer and a fan\u2019s TikTok explainer. Three separate stories about a Naperville family with an elaborate \u201cviral\u201d Swift-themed Christmas display: a reported story<\/a>, a photo gallery<\/a>, and a short-form video<\/a>. I\u2019ll argue that traditional reporting can function as an act of criticism (and vice versa), but this kind of low-calorie content mining is barely as useful as a press release.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more fun to use this space to convince people to give, say, Heet Deth\u2019s Bad Reading a try than it is to be the umpteenth person to put Geese\u2019s Getting Killed on a top ten.<\/p>\n

Last month, USA Today\u2019s parent entity, Gannett, changed its name<\/a> to USA Today Company. It\u2019s the largest newspaper company in the country, and it operates more than 200 papers. In 2019, the year it merged with the country\u2019s second-largest newspaper business, GateHouse Media, Gannett ran 563 papers. At the time, the newly combined company, loaded with more than $1 billion in debt, employed about 24,000 people in the States; by the end of 2022, that number had fallen to 11,200<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Among the surviving newspapers under the USA Today Company banner is the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. The Free Press website lists six editorial employees<\/a>. As USA Today Company has hacked away at the Free Press over the years, several staffers have moved over to Seven Days<\/a>, a Vermont alt-weekly. Seven Days has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Vermont, and its editorial department employs 32 people<\/a>. It also still publishes concert and event listings.<\/p>\n

Seven Days is an exception. As former Reader staffer Aimee Levitt detailed in a Columbia Journalism Review story in June<\/a>, Seven Days has survived the decline of local news and the extinction-level crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic because it serves a niche community. I\u2019m more familiar with Seven Days than the other extant alt-weeklies Levitt mentions (my in-laws are Vermonters), but I can\u2019t imagine they\u2019re still thriving by prioritizing celebrity runoff over local arts coverage.<\/p>\n

I cover local music year-round. For more than a decade, I\u2019ve been wrapping up the year with some version of this list of overlooked Chicago releases. It\u2019s an opportunity to reflect on the past year, address my blind spots, and dream of how I might improve my work. I also get the chance to introduce lesser-known acts (or complete unknowns) to a larger audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

People seem to like year-end listicles (they definitely like skimming them, at least), so you\u2019ll still see plenty of them out there, despite the general dwindling of arts and culture journalism. But few of these lists focus explicitly on smaller acts, like this one does. And frankly, it\u2019s more fun to use this space to convince people to give, say, Heet Deth\u2019s Bad Reading a try than it is to be the umpteenth person to put Geese\u2019s Getting Killed on a top ten.<\/p>\n

Bad Reading isn\u2019t on this list. I\u2019ve covered Heet Deth in the past, which is a strike against the band in this context\u2014when I think about Chicago music that\u2019s been overlooked, I try to confine myself to music that I personally have also overlooked. With any luck, that means you\u2019re about to learn about something you\u2019ve never heard before. I hope you love it as much as I do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nThe top five<\/p>\n

In alphabetical order\n<\/p>\n

I\u2019m breaking one of my own rules by including With Many Hands. I mentioned it in passing in October as part of a Gossip Wolf item on Hannah Frances<\/a>; Clausen is musical director of Frances\u2019s band, in which she plays alto saxophone and bass clarinet. With Many Hands is outstanding enough to warrant the exception. Its slow-moving, almost ambient songs, built largely from reeds, electronics, and voice, span a kaleidoscopic range of moods and textures. On \u201cCry,\u201d Clausen uses an effects pedal to stretch out a resonant woodwind note like a fitted bedsheet, providing a canvas for her somber singing to move across the song in a dramatic, elegant sweep.<\/p>\n

This is easily the most \u201cknown\u201d release on this list, thanks to Coleman\u2019s long relationship with Scottish archival label Athens of the North, which has already reissued music by two of his other projects: 70s funk band Rasputin\u2019s Stash and 80s soul combo Crystal Winds. In the early 90s, Coleman recorded a collection of background tracks for the Weather Channel, which Athens of the North compiled for this album. (Coleman says they were only played on the air a few times.) For most of its history, smooth jazz has had a pretty lousy reputation\u2014it\u2019s been maligned as a marketing-driven musical equivalent to a weighted blanket. But the genre has been rehabilitated over the past 15 years or so via remixes by vaporwave artists and the efforts of reissue labels who heard something distinctive in it. So it\u2019s a fine time for The Weather Man, which showcases Coleman\u2019s sophisticated touch as an arranger and performer.<\/p>\n

The debut album from cheeky alt-rock band Crisis Actress thrashes, lunges, and stomps in inexplicable directions. The knuckle-dragging opening track, \u201cFor Gary,\u201d plays like a no-wave take on Krautrock. The rhythm section digs into hypnosis on the psychedelic opus \u201cSniff,\u201d which piles on backmasked recordings, electric vibraphone, synths, and swirling vocals.<\/p>\n

Ryan Davis drums in noise-pop group Astrobrite and leads heavy shoegaze group Sleepwalk, and he also makes dreamy, hard-hitting alt-rock with guitarist and bassist Tyler Gargula under the name Juicin. Their quick-hit debut EP, where Davis plays guitar, bass, and drums, goes out to Deftones fans who fiend for lush, concise, no-nonsense rippers with serene, slow-motion vocal melodies.<\/p>\n

South-side industrial group Rigid are well suited to update the Wax Trax! vibe for Gen Z. The trash-can clang of their electro percussion aims to bruise, and the big, honking riffs on Scanner won\u2019t just rattle your rib cage\u2014they\u2019ll stick to your bones.<\/p>\n

Honorable mentions<\/p>\n

Seth Beck<\/strong>, Soft Heaven<\/p>\n

Damen Silos<\/strong>, Far From God<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Huxeti<\/strong>, This Summer Was Like Saline Rinse<\/p>\n

The Ineffectuals<\/strong>, The Serious One<\/p>\n

Toddo<\/strong>, No Room for the Blues<\/p>\n