Leor Galil

Pilsen taco joint Casa Cafe has become the most important space for the youth wing of Chicago's hardcore punk scene.

I'm not sure I could've invented a better gateway jam band than Taper's Choice. For the jam-band curious who are bored by Widespread Panic, baffled

Vivian McConnell hoped that making her third V.V. Lightbody album, Period Piece , would be more carefree than it was. “I had a migraine for, like, a

Claudio Velez, aka the Tamale Guy, as seen by the musicians, club owners, bar staff, and regulars sustained by the contents of his magical red cooler

. It's a barrage of jigsaw-puzzle riffs, thrashing beneath Stanley and Green's cascading vocals—and it's also a silly love letter to San Diego band Heavy Vegetable, lovingly goofing on the mathy postpunks' cheeky attitude and bite-size songs. (P.E.E. drummer Andee Connors also played in A Minor Forest, a postpunk group he started after moving to the Bay Area from San Diego, and the whole band admired the San Diego scene.) P.E.E.'s aesthetic makes them potentially appealing to fans of any style where musicians play their instruments like they've got the zoomies, and in the decades since their demise in the late 90s, P.E.E. have accumulated a new fan base among young emo heads. P.E.E.'s current reunion tour includes some of the exciting bands powering the genre's newest wave, whether you call it sixth-wave emo or second-wave emo revival. The unfussy looseness of Las Vegas five-piece the Ritornello Form fits right in with P.E.E.

Suzy Sheer make electroclash for pillow fights. The duo splatter their gauzy, ethereal synth melodies with harsh electronic percussion as though

Chicago artist Sen Morimoto perpetually tinkers with and reinvents their sound. No matter what instrument they play—saxophone, guitar, keyboards, drums—they

Chicagoan Ryan Davis drums in noise-pop project Astrobrite, led by American shoegaze lodestar Scott Cortez.

on the postmodern and extremely online world of hyperpop, Pitchfork declared it one of the most exciting new underground sounds of the decade and also a failure. This contradiction struck me as similar to the one at the aesthetic heart of hyperpop: At its most interesting, the genre's inversion of pop music is noisy, disorienting, over-the-top, and even annoying, but it's always oriented toward unbelievable hooks. Great hyperpop has continued to come out since Pitchfork proclaimed it a bust, including two albums by Chicago-based artist

Do you hate it when huge music festivals gate off public parks and render entire swaths of them unusable for weeks or months?