Last week, Chicago hardcore five-piece We Weren’t Invited dropped the EP Killjoy, whose pulverizing, sludgy sound has enough low end to open a sinkhole under your house. Vocalist Johnny Wynne credits the EP’s raw nastiness to local engineer Adrian Kobziar of Humboldt Park studio and label Ohmstead. “We really liked the tones we got with Adrian—definitely gonna go back,” Wynne says. “We threw it all together in a span of three, three and a half months.”
Wynne says everyone in We Weren’t Invited was dealing with a personal loss while working on Killjoy. “For some of us it was really prevalent, how tough times were—it was hard getting up every day, hard to fuckin’ brush your teeth,” he says. “It’s fuckin’ depressing out here. Tough having more responsibility in life, and rolling up in this confusing-ass world. Everybody’s trying to tell you what’s right and wrong, and you’re just confused and sad. I felt like this EP, I wanted to distance myself from a lot of things with this. I know our band wanted to separate ourselves from everything going on around us and just make something that we fucked with.”
We Weren’t Invited owe their existence to Wynne’s job at Hammerhead Tattoo in Bridgeport. In 2021, while he was tattooing guitarist Isaac Rodriquez, they made a connection that turned out to be crucial to the formation of the band. “The song ‘The Big Parade’ was the first song we ever wrote as a band,” Wynne says. “That was, like, the second time I tattooed [Isaac] at his crib.” Since then, We Weren’t Invited’s lineup has changed a bit (Clinton Coronado has replaced their original bassist), but the band’s goals have stayed consistent.
“I just want to confuse people,” Wynne says. “I’ve confused myself with the direction, sound-wise. But as a group, I want to do things with a community.” We Weren’t Invited headline Thalia Hall on Friday, March 1, and the bill they’ve put together for the show checks both those boxes: it includes hardcore bands Snuffed and Si Dios Quiere, pop-punk group Scarlet Demore, and alt-pop artist Tatiana Hazel.
“If you are brutally honest with people they won’t like you,” say We Weren’t Invited. “Some would call that type of person a killjoy.”
Twenty years ago, Chicago indie hip-hop label Galapagos4 issued Potholes in Our Molecules by Brian “Robust” Kuptzin, and he’s celebrating that anniversary by headlining Reggies Rock Club on Saturday, March 2. “It was my first commercial release, and it was the start of what I wanted to accomplish,” Robust says. “It took a while for me to figure out what I really wanted to do. I was just throwing stuff out there. But people always tell me that’s their favorite album I did.”
Robust says he was floundering in the early 2000s when he hooked up with rapper Qwel of Galapagos4 group Typical Cats. Robust appears on a couple tracks from Qwel’s 2001 solo debut, If It Ain’t Been in a Pawn Shop, Then It Can’t Play the Blues. “After I did that, Galapagos took me to the side, asked me if I wanted to do an album,” Robust says. “I said yeah. I saw they were going on tour to Europe, I didn’t see anybody else in the city doing that.” He recorded part of Potholes on reel-to-reel tape at a studio built into a three-bedroom Andersonville apartment that the label called the Galapagos4 Island Resort Retreat Recording Recreation Center. He also used a home studio run by two of his beat-making collaborators, Dreas and Meaty Ogre.
Potholes in Our Molecules brought Robust a career boost that included a big tour in France. “I was headlining the tour—I wasn’t used to headlining,” he says. “Out there, everybody had my album. I was signing copies; they knew the lyrics. They had a store called Fnac—they had listening stations there, and my CD was in the listening station next to 50 Cent.” These days Potholes is harder to find, since it’s not on streaming services—not that Robust minds. “If you want it, it’s a CD,” he says. “There’s a limited amount of copies left.”
Robust’s Potholes anniversary party also includes sets from Qwel, Defcee, Max Julian & IAmGawd, Nightwalker & A.M. Early Morning, Dreas, Meaty Ogre, and Shazam Bangles.
On Friday, March 1, Chicago singer-songwriter Ryan “Hoagie Wesley” Ensley will release Sonny Falls, the fourth full-length (and first self-titled record) from his rootsy indie-rock group Sonny Falls. Ensley began working on it late in 2020, around the time he dropped the ambitious double album All That Has Come Apart / Once Did Not Exist. Ensley had gotten used to rushing to record and release material, anxious to have something new to tour behind, but at that point touring was off the table due to COVID. So he gave himself permission to spend more time working on what would become Sonny Falls.
“In the past, I’d written in a pretty linear way—I would write the first song on the record, and it would just kind of follow me down a path,” Ensley says. “With this record, I was able to overwrite for the first time, because we had more time. I wrote more material; I was a little bit more intentional with rewrites.”
Ensley made the record at Bim Bom Sound, a Portage Park studio run by his longtime friend, engineer Michael Macdonald. “We’ve been working together since we were 19, and we’re both 32 now,” Ensley says. “I try to always improve my ability to write songs, and he’s improved as a producer and engineer. We’ve grown together in this way. [We’ve] kind of figured out how to make something that feels more close to what I want to be as a songwriter.” Ensley says he decided to call this Sonny Falls record Sonny Falls because he feels it’s the best document so far of his vision. “I’ll always be trying to bridge the gap between Sonic Youth and Townes Van Zandt or something. Still haven’t done it, but I’m working on it—this is part of the bridge.”
Sonny Falls is the first album in Ryan Ensley’s career that he could take his time making.
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