TOPS is an indie pop band with an easy-going, gentle style that walks the line between a quirky and artsy sound and having moments of barely contained dream pop attack. There is an ethereal quality to their music that compares with more synth-oriented bands that work with electronic textures. Led by vocalist Jane Penny's soft voice and relaxed delivery, the band creates their atmospheric effects within a more conventional rock-type setup. They gradually adopted more of the '80s pop elements as they got deeper in their career, taking on a bit of a jangle along with bits of disco. The light and fluffy nature of their sound sometimes covers some heavier emotions underlying their songs.

Mark William Lewis is a singer-songwriter with a quiet demeanor and a contemplative tone who brings an almost hypnotic flow into his distinct mixture of folk and indie. His deliberate baritone deliver...

Though he likes to call himself a "very budget nepo baby", Baxter Dury is post-punk royalty. From his gruff voice and delivery style to the way he moves between speak-singing and spoken words in his p...

Dining Dead is a band that plays indie rock with a strong pop flavor and some jangle. Though not necessarily angular, their music comes with a bit of a twitch in its flow, and a tendency to mix things...

The core of These New Puritans (commonly, TNP) is the Barnett twins, Jack and George, who work with a handful of musicians who have been going in and out of the line-up since the late '00s. Their curr...

Composer, bandleader, and Jazz saxophonist Darius Jones plays a form of jazz that has an interesting collection of stylistic forces pulling from different directions. There is a thread of post-bop in ...

julie is a trio that puts two of the most prominent musical trends of the '90s into a blender and pushed the button to create a shoegaze 'n' grunge smoothie. They keep the overall haziness and moodine...

Little Mazarn is a folk trio that loves to operate on a lower gear in the way they prefer to keep their songs hushed and slowed down for the most part. They are led by multi-instrumentalist singer Lin...

SHOLTO (allcaps) is drummer and multi-instrumentalist producer Oscar Robertson, an artist whose rich sonic palette combines a variety of styles that bring out a loose, fluid sound. Jazz is a foundatio...

Jespfur, aka Jesper Vervoort, is an artist with a rough and fragmented sound delivered with a strong lo-fi esthetic in its production. Coupled with the woozy, slightly disorienting textures he creates...

Eric Yick Keung San, who works as Kid Koala, is a multi-instrumentalist, multi-faceted, multidisciplinary artist whose talent is in no way limited to the outstanding work he does as a scratch DJ and p...

Paris Paloma is one of those artists who are wedded to pop at a fundamental level, but appear to be always looking for ways to escape its gravitational pull to create something more personal. Her song...

Emily A. Sprague is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer who is also the vocalist and main songwriter behind their folk-oriented, quiet and hushed music of the band Florist. She kicks into ...

Telemakus is a prime example of a generation of jazz musicians who make beatmaking a core element of their approach. He is a pianist, composer, and a producer whose music incorporates breakbeats and f...

Parquet Courts are a band based in Brooklyn that has been producing music with an early post-punk vibe: their songs sound raw and have that punk energy, but they are also controlled and have richer te...

Kassi Valazza is a folk and country artist who has been going through some shifts: She started more in the classic country mode, not too far from the Patsy Cline mold that was evident on her debut alb...

Slow Pulp is an indie rock band with a nice pop bend and a gentle dream pop finish, the latter coming mostly from the sweet and misty delivery by their vocalist, Emily Massey. Their songs feel emotionally reassuring and melodically satisfying, occupying a relatively wide range in the scale, moving between pieces with a harder edge to toned down ballads that wear their emotions on their sleeves. The band is from Madison, Wisconsin by origin and Chicago by residence, and they fit well into the city's subset of bands and artists who turn the knob of angst and aggression a couple of notches down in favor of a sure-footed, easy-flowing indie sound. That said, they did crank up the volume a little on their 2023 album, Yard. So there is that too.