Chasing Fridays: Slayyyter, She's Green, This House Is Creaking Q&A, more

I'll start this week by plugging my podcast Endless Scroll, which is now up and running again on a weekly basis. I've been having a lot of fun discussing new and old music on the show with my wonderful cohosts, and I'm trying to be intentional about not double-dipping too much between what I say on there and write in Chasing Sundays. Endless Scroll is, at its core, an indie-rock podcast, so I'll be using that platform to weigh in on prominent indie (and pop) records that I don't generally cover in this newsletter. I don't really have any parameters about the type of music I write about here – as this week's multi-genre issue clearly demonstrates – but I'm generally aiming to tackle stuff that most other outlets aren't, which means I don't often write about marquee releases – even ones I spend a lot of time with (Geese, for instance).

Anyways, you can hear my friends and I talk about all sorts of music on Endless Scroll, and if you really like what we do then you can subscribe to our Patreon to join our Discord and get a big bonus episode in your feed every month (March's covered the entire career of Mitski. It rules). Or you could completely disregard Endless Scroll and just continue reading Chasing Sundays. This week I wrote about shoegaze rising stars She's Green, my favorite pop album of the year, and my experience seeing Converge for the first time. Then, I interviewed the great up-and-coming Chicago band This House Is Creaking, who I'm quite enamored with and believe you should be too.

She's Green - "Paper Thin"

Despite the unfathomable popularity that Slowdive have experienced this decade, specifically among the Gen-Z fans who've been driving shoegaze's ongoing renaissance, there aren't actually that many fledgling bands out there who sound like Slowdive. That might be why She's Green have quickly become the genre's buzziest young prospects. The Minneapolis band's new single "Paper Thin" has the slow-motion splendor that distinguished their heroes from their more clangorous peers in the OG U.K. scene. It starts off at a lull and gradually builds to a cathedral climax that centers vocalist Zofia Smith's arresting pipes, which might be another reason why She's Green are so hip right now. Smith can fucking sing.

My opinion on She's Green has flip-flopped quite a bit over the last year or so. I initially didn't get the hype around their older material, but then began to come around after last year's "Willow" single dropped, a golden sunbeam of a song where Smith's falsetto was at its most luminous. It was around that time when She's Green began to lay off the white-out storminess of earlier songs like "graze" and "purple," which have actually grown to be my preferred mode of theirs at this point. "Paper Thin" is divinely pretty, and there're no other bands in the American scene right now channeling Souvlaki's sound palette with this level of proficiency. But I'm curious to see hear if this next EP of theirs, Swallowtail, still has some bangers. Everybody likes bangers.

Slayyyter - Wor$t Girl in America

I discussed this record with my friends on Endless Scroll last week but I couldn't let it go unmentioned in the pages of Chasing Sundays that Wor$t Girl In America is one of my favorite albums of the year thus far. In fact, I'm sifting back through my library right now to refresh my memory about what dropped in 2026, and I think it's fair to say that this is the best full-length album I've heard this year. There are albums that unravel new trends and there are albums that tie a bow around ongoing trends, and Slayyyter's new record is in the latter camp. If Brat flung open the door for a new era of raunchy sleaze-pop to flood the mainstream, then Wor$t Girl in America is the first post-Brat masterpiece that actually sounds like it could contend in the same tier of blockbuster pop (even though it probably won't – but who knows!)

I think this record is such an effective elevation of the sounds that've been circling the underground for a couple years now courtesy of The Hellp, Bassvictim, Frost Children, and the like. Smart pop songsmiths who lack the stupid confidence to sell indie-sl**** to the masses the way Slayyyter can. She's revealed that her soundboard for Wor$t Girl in America was Lana Del Rey, Chief Keef, and Justice, the first two moreso in vibes but the latter most definitely in sound, as tracks like "Dance," "Beat Up Chanel$", "Gas Station," "Old Fling$" – all the fucking bangers, really – are directly indebted to the style of electro-house Justice popularized just before EDM went mainstream. I find Slayyyter's maximalist raving more compelling than Snow Strippers' foggy vague-pop, and I appreciate how she skirts the pursed sensuality of Fcukers to instead mainline the feral bacchanalia of Kesha's Animal.

Lana, Kesha, Justice – these are entry-level millennial texts that Slayyyter re-writes with a contemporary jaggedness. The taste of another girl's cherry chapstick is much too quaint for Slayyyter, who'd rather skip the foreplay, glug the liquor, and get right to it. "She pick up, then we fuck, I get so gay off that tequila," she howls in "Crank," and then immediately starts scrounging around for another hookup. Slayyyter's insatiability for a good time is animated by a fiendish desperation to consume all the "sex, money, bitches, and the stickiest weed" she can before the night ends. She's trying to plug wounds that blot her dress on songs like "Gas Station" and "Unknown Loverz," and when the party's finally over and all the free champagne bottles are empty, she crashes out ("Brittany Murphy") and begins choreographing her impending funeral.

Of course, all prolific party animals are using the dancefloor as a protective force field from what lurks on the other side of the bouncer's post. For all the majestic highs on Wor$t Girl In America, there's also a pained longing – a yearning to escape, to change, to drop everything and leave – at the heart of the whole affair that makes Slayyyter such an authentically tragic club rat. So much "recession pop" amounts to shallow vibes fodder, but Slayyyter knows that real American storytelling is about the hollowness of excess and the failure to achieve one's desired fame. The compulsion to seek "peace of mind" by doing "drugs that I'm not prescribed" in the overdose capital of the world. Slayyyter doesn't veil her dirtbag debauchery in a phony chicness or concern herself with projecting an aura of impenetrable cool. Her depravity is shameless, her crying-on-the-phone heartbreak is palpable, her fragile ego is flagrant. She knows the wor$t girls make the be$t pop music.

Converge, Spy, Balmora live @ Preserving Underground

In a recent episode of the No Disrespect podcast, my buddy David Anthony and his co-host Dan Ozzi were trying to decide why Converge no longer have the cache with younger hardcore fans that they once did. Dan and David theorized that Converge's unwillingness to market themselves on social media makes them feel inaccessible to Gen-Z fans, and I ended up leaving a long, rambling voicemail on the show's call-in number explaining why I actually disagreed with their assessment. For one, I don't think social media content actually matters very much in hardcore, and second, I think Converge currently have more respect among young hardcore fans than they have in nearly a decade. The band came through Pittsburgh last week on their co-headlining tour with Poison the Well, and I attended with the goal of surmising how correct I was in my assertion.

The main reason I think Converge are well-regarded among zoomer hardcore fans is because the ongoing old-school metalcore revival has spurred a ton of interest in Converge's pre-Jane Doe back catalog; the era of Converge when their music was moshier and angstier than the strident, striding band they'd become from You Fail Me onwards. The band who've done the most to resuscitate interest in Y2k metalcore is Balmora, who Converge and Poison the Well wisely chose to open this tour in support of the veteran headliner's new albums. That said, I was a bit surprised that only a small fraction of the room actually seemed to know Balmora's music. The usual moshing suspects from Pittsburgh hardcore were running the dancefloor, but there was a wall of teens up in front of the stage who bopped excitedly to what they were hearing despite their visible unfamiliarity with Balmora's songs.

The teens' presence became even more intriguing when the next band, Bay Area hardcore unit Spy, received a pretty muted reaction in the pit and a polite yet stilted response from the rest of the crowd, which was fairly evenly split between 35-and-ups and 25-and-unders. Spy were kind of a weird pick for this tour because they don't play metalcore and they didn't really seem to draw an audience of their own to this particular gig. That means all those zoomer headbangers were there for either Converge and/or Poison the Well – bands who they discovered independent of the Balmora-led return to metalcore fundamentalism within the modern hardcore scene. In other words, my hypothesis that Converge have a healthy amount of younger fans was correct, but not for the reason I suspected.

I have a complicated relationship with Converge's music for someone in my age bracket. I never really liked any of the band's albums during my formative metalcore years in high-school and college, and it wasn't until my mid-20s that I actually gave their later records (Axe to Fall, All We Love We Leave Behind) a proper try. I like them well enough, but I wouldn't use the word "love." It was really only within the last couple years that I've come to appreciate their unevenly brilliant 90s catalog, and even now I still don't care about Jane Doe, which I snottily called the most overrated hardcore album of the 2000s on a podcast a few years ago. That said, I have a lot of respect for Converge and was excited to finally see them live, given how renowned they are for putting on buckwild performances.

For a band of dudes pushing 50, Converge's set was pretty damn wild. Compared to Poison the Well's similarly aged singer, whose voice sounded rough for the few songs I caught before dipping, Jacob Bannon still has the stamina to scream and writhe for an entire set, and his bandmates are still the superbly pummeling musicians they've been for decades. Converge mostly played from their new album, Love Is Not Enough, who many fans in the room already knew the words to, while also sprinkling in a bunch of standouts from their 21st century oeuvre – plus 1998's "Conduit" to satiate the moshers. People of all ages stage-dove, danced, and grimaced happily. It didn't feel like seeing an iconic band many years past their prime. It felt like seeing a classic band who don't have to concern themselves with sounding contemporary because they sound timeless. No short-form videos needed.

Chasing Down

Micah Miller and Ehmed Nauman
of
This House Is Creaking

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

My first exposure to This House Is Creaking was seeing them play under a bridge last summer in Pittsburgh. At first, I wasn't sure what to make of the Chicago band, whose sound was being pulled in several different directions at once: noodly emo, scuzzy shoegaze, slick indie-funk. In the time since that gig, This House Is Creaking have seemed to developed a better sense of who they are and what they're best at. Their pair of fall singles, "2 LAMP (lava lamp)" and "Something Else," are quizzical fuzz-pop numbers with digi-dusted production and enchanting hooks that effectively skirt every worn-out cliché in modern indie. Their first offering of 2026, "There's a Stench in the Air," slots into the same mode of clangy, nerdy noise-pop – a sound that, at this point, belongs solely to This House Is Creaking. I love it.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked the band's primary members Micah Miller and Ehmed Nauman about their musical evolution, incorporating dubstep into indie-rock, their proximity to shoegaze, the sound of their forthcoming album, and much more. Read the full interview below.