The songs on Gia Margaret’s new debut album, There’s Always Glimmer (Orindal), glow with the warmth of a flashlight hidden in a blanket fort. She understands how to use music to portray the complexities of intimacy, and her wispy vocals, delicate guitar strumming, gentle piano melodies, and pitter-pattering electronic percussion suggest she’s the kind of bedroom artist who’s at her creative best within the cozy confines of her home. Indeed, at the beginning of her career six years ago, it seemed like her material might well remain locked in her bedroom—Soundcloud was the only public repository for her lo-fi self-recorded demos....

Let’s see, what upcoming Southern Lord release recorded by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou at his GodCity Studio can I hype with today’s 12 O’Clock Track? I’m going to go with the sophomore full-length by Vancouver foursome Baptists—and only slightly because Dave Grohl has gushed about how Baptists drummer Nick Yacyshyn is his “favorite new drummer by far.” Due out on October 14, Bloodmines is a fiery wreck of a hardcore-punk record, with the metal attitude of old-school Botch (if they would have ever shifted into warp speed)....

Donald Trump is still president. America’s immigration policies have become the shame of the planet. Climate change is turning our oceans into globe-spanning acid baths. We’ve got to suffer through several more months of ads from two billionaires running for Illinois governor. The future of the U.S. Supreme Court almost hurts too much to think about. If you’d like to stop thinking about the impending apocalypse for a few minutes, though, may we suggest our annual Pitchfork Music Festival cover-illustration contest?...

Anna Blessing Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan In the introduction to Locally Brewed: Portraits of Craft Brewing from America’s Heartland, Anna Blessing writes, “In part this is a book about beer, but mostly it is a book about people: the craftspeople and artisans who brew the beer.” And—spoiler alert—that’s exactly what it is. Blessing has deftly pinpointed what’s most interesting about each brewer’s story and spends several pages, illustrated with photos of the brewers, beers, and breweries (taken by Blessing herself), telling it....

When 15-year-old Dontrell showed up at the Reader‘s offices for an interview, he was fresh off a delayed return flight after his first trip to New York. He’s better known as Kidd Kenn, Chicago’s most popular openly gay male rapper, and he was exhausted—his whirlwind trip east had included a meeting with Def Jam and a music-video shoot. He went on to list four schools—one of which he attended two separate times—and explained in generous detail exactly why he left, or was kicked out of, each one....

Laetitia Sadier has been pairing honeyed, seductive melodies with lyrics that read like strident Marxist tracts since her days in Stereolab. On her new solo album, Find Me Finding You (Drag City), the tactic still works for me, more or less—I qualify that judgment because I often don’t bother paying attention to what she’s singing about, preferring to bask in the beauty of her rarefied hybrid of Brazilian pop and French chanson....

Any Cubs fan who was a veteran of the 1969 campaign was asking only one thing Tuesday night: to crush the Mets. Was that too much to ask? Bad enough, yet he homered again in the third inning Tuesday night against Kyle Hendricks with two outs and nobody on, a perfect time to stick one in his ear and then walk him. That might put the Cubs down 3-0, right where head honcho Theo Epstein might want them, considering his 2004 curse-breaking Boston Red Sox went down 3-0 to the New York Yankees, only to pretty much run the table after that, but it does’t give a Cubs fan much heart....

Alinea What happens when babies run freely at Alinea Did you hear about the worst people in the history of the planet? Alinea chef Grant Achatz tweeted about them on Saturday evening: Michael Nagrant: Now, there are some real issues here having to do with Alinea’s unique approach to being possibly the most acclaimed restaurant in America—specifically, its ticketing system. Many high-end, much-in-demand restaurants extract a credit card for reservations, but as the chef and manager of an almost equally acclaimed restaurant in Chicago admitted to me, nailing people with a several-hundred-dollar charge for not showing is not exactly a way to make customers love you and speak highly of you to others, and they rarely actually do it....

With Tim Cawley recently leaving his high-ranking Chicago Public Schools central office position, I started to wonder whether there were any survivors left from the original dream team Mayor Emanuel assembled to save public education. Before I take you through the list, though, let me remind you that the mayor’s dream team didn’t actually save our public schools. But back to that article in my scrapbook, which includes head shots and snappy bios of the mayor’s seven key school appointees and hires....

The term of the latest contract between the city of Chicago and the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, the union that represents some 12,000 rank-and-file officers in the Chicago Police Department, expired on June 30. The city and the union are now supposed to be negotiating the next contract, but because the process is confidential it’s impossible to say where these negotiations currently stand. Until a new contract is agreed upon and ratified, first by the FOP membership and then by the City Council, the terms of the previous contract remain in force....

The Hoyle Brothers wind up the after-work crowds with an old-school honky-tonk throwdown at the Empty Bottle every Friday at 5:30 PM, and for the past ten years, nearly all their shows have included local dance instructor Jeffrey Cannon. A Texas native who studied ballet in college, he’s also a lifelong lover of country music. He met the Hoyles in 2001 after his favorite country bar, Whiskey River (now the PAWS adoption center), closed down; a friend suggested he get his fix at their Hideout residency instead, and he’s hung around them ever since....

At this point it’s clear that the Internet has become at least as important to a pop song’s success as old-school terrestrial radio. When Billboard began including digital streams in its formula for determining placement on the Hot 100 in late 2012 it radically altered the chart’s makeup, and since then songs that haven’t been promoted by their labels as singles (including meme-connected songs like Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” and Ylvis’s “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?...

Drummer Allison Miller has paid her dues—after years on tour with popular singer-­songwriters such as Ani DiFranco, Brandi Carlile, Erin Mc­Keown, and Natalie Merchant, she’s comfortable calling herself a road dog. Those experiences inspired her to follow her instincts in her own music—what she admires most about artists like DiFranco, she says, is their realness. “The person onstage is the same as they are offstage,” she explains. “They didn’t change. They were true to themselves, and there’s a fine line of being yourself and being an entertainer....

One of the best things about jazz is its openness—its language and its improvisational ethos make possible the kind of spontaneous collaborations that help propel the tradition forward. Free improvisation often happens in unrehearsed encounters whose supposedly nonidiomatic output long ago congealed into the idiom of “free improvisation,” but it can also take place in more conventional settings. Chicago saxophonist Ernest Dawkins, a longtime face of the AACM, has built a career balancing postbop fundamentals and free-jazz prerogatives; he emerged from a vaunted tradition and holds tightly to its roots while circumventing its orthodoxy....

The combination of nostalgia and cultural canonization has, at this point, consistently inundated clubs with veteran guitar bands playing “classic” albums. I use scare quotes partially because I wouldn’t consider, say, Senses Fail’s Let it Enfold You a “classic” album—but that didn’t stop the saccharine posthardcore group from building a ten-year anniversary tour around it last year. The phenomenon is prominent in rock but not exclusive to it. For the latest example head to the House of Blues on Tuesday to see Raekwon and Ghostface Killah perform all of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx ....

The sign outside Más, a new West Loop Mexican restaurant, makes the place look a bit like a Swedish health clinic. “Más,” of course, is the Spanish word for “more,” and on the slate-colored board there’s a red plus sign. The symbol is repeated inside the sleek restaurant too, where it’s topped by an accent mark and printed on the menus and on the backs of the servers’ black shirts; from the corner of my eye it prompted a few double takes as I imagined I was glimpsing the satanic cross....

If we take Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2015 off-Broadway hit Gloria as an accurate satirical reflection of the contemporary American white-collar workplace—and much of the critical praise heaped on it insists we should—the new normal in cubicleland is cynical solipsism, unfocused ambition, and millennial entitlement. Gone entirely, at least in the office of the unnamed New York magazine where the play is set, are collegiality, decorum, purpose, and any semblance of work ethic....

When my Twitter buddies Kim Kelly (metal editor at Noisey) and Ed Blair (cofounder of the zine Black Metal of the Americas) both talk about the same band, I pay attention. And this winter their tweets convinced me to check out A Pessimistic Doomsayer, the current release by a duo from St. Catharines, Ontario, called Vile Creature. “Pessimistic is about utilizing fantasy in all of its mediums (books, comics, TV, film) as an escape from the harshness of reality,” says guitarist and vocalist KW....

Earlier this summer alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella celebrated the release of his trio album Ultraviolet (International Anthem) with a performance at Constellation. The group—with bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Frank Rosaly—has been the one that Mazzarella has played with most often during the last half-decade, and its third release is also its strongest. On Monday the trio plays a free concert at the Empty Bottle with Health & Beauty and Marrow—once again celebrating the release of the new recording (this particular evening fetes the emergence of the vinyl version of the album, so I guess the earlier show was just for the CD)....

This two-night metal festival, curated by metal and beer enthusiast Alexi Front (also the beer director for Kuma’s Corner restaurants), operates in both Chicago and Gothenburg, Sweden. In just seven years it has racked up an impressive ten installments. This year’s Chicago edition represents the heavy music of our hometown along with plenty of visitors. The lineup features two of our best exports, Lair of the Minotaur and Yakuza, with Swedish doom faves Monolord, who make their return following their ground-shaking performance at Scorched Tundra VI in 2016....