Chasing Fridays: Slide Away Chicago recap, Smerz, coolant Q&A, more

I continue to be busy as fuck trekking around the country for Slide Away festival, which began in Brooklyn, then hit Chicago, and is currently wrapping up its 2026 edition in L.A. I'm in L.A. right now, probably jetlagged as hell, but if you're at either of the gigs this weekend and see me running amok, come say what's up. I'm continuing to do a bunch of silly video interviews in collaboration with the fest that are living on Instagram. I've shot a fuck-ton of them and they'll be dribbling out throughout the year, but you can see the first compilation of fan/band goofery below. Oh, I also reviewed the new Salem compilation, Red Dragon, for Pitchfork last week. I would've written about it either way, so go peep my thoughts on that if you're so inclined.

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And now for this week's Chasing Fridays. I scribbled a few thoughts about what I saw at Slide Away Chicago, weighed in on the new Smerz EP, wrote about seeing Cryptopsy for the first time, and then did a super in-depth mini-Q&A with Colin Joyce, a fellow music scribe and songwriter behind the band coolant, who just released an awesome new EP that all of my readers need to check out. I asked Colin about his music and his band's evolved lineup, as well as a bunch of questions about his taste: in slowcore, in Spencer Radcliffe, in cloud-rock, in phonk, and much more. I rely on my wonderful subscribers to make this newsletter possible, so I really appreciate everyone who continues to sub for $5/month, which gives you access to every interview in the archive – over 60 at this point – as well as playlists, lists, and other writings. ​

Slide Away Chicago: 5/22 and 5/23

Following last week's kickoff in Brooklyn, weekend two of Slide Away consisted of two nights at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom. The venue is designed like a medieval palace, with castle-like spires built into the balconies and a night sky painted on the ceiling. It was a really cool space for a bunch of shoegaze bands to play, and I caught almost all of the sets that I was most excited to see (excluding Lovesliescrushing, who I sadly missed, but who I heard were polarizing among all the grunge-gaze Hum fans in attendance). Crate, a NYC shoegaze band whose first song landed in my 2024 shoegaze list, but whose second track disappointed me, played a really solid set of mostly unreleased material. Then Total Wife overcame some technical difficulties to demonstrate why they're one of the best shoegaze bands going.

However, I've got to give it up to She's Green, who I missed in Brooklyn but made a point to see in Chicago. The Minneapolis band are one of the fastest rising groups in the genre right now, and although I was lukewarm on their live show in Pittsburgh the first time I saw them, they were really locked in last week and sounded fantastic up there. Compared to bands like Total Wife and Sunshy, who played a great set the following night, She's Green's regal, spacious shoegaze songs are better suited for a venue like Aragon. Zofia Smith's sustained vocal notes were able to fill the room, and her bandmates carried themselves with a confidence that made their set feel, for lack of a better word, professional. Not in a stilted, corporate way, but in a, "Wow, this band are really going for it" way. Impressive.

The slower middle portion of Chapterhouse's set was beginning to wear on me a bit after seeing it for a fourth night, but hearing them glide through "Breather" after opening with "Treasure" continues to trigger an incomparable flutter of elation in my gut. It's clear that the majority of the fans at this fest are coming out for Hum, especially at their quasi-hometown show in Chicago, but I pray that some of these zoomers are listening to Whirlpool on the train ride home. Truly one of the best shoegaze records ever. Anyways, yes, Hum played. People lost their shit. The pits were violent and many heads in the crowd were surfed upon. The whole building seemed to rumble when they pulled out "Stars." Alas, still a "meh" from me, dog.

Smerz - Easy EP

I want to like Smerz, but contrary to the title of this new EP, they don't make it easy. The Norwegian duo of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt are probably the most popular and critically acclaimed cloud-rock band, given their LP from 2025, Big city life, landed on basically every publication's year-end list. However, other than its immortally cool lead single, "Feisty," I thought the record was tremendously boring. All arch posturing without any of the wobbly hooks (Fine), warped musicianship (ML Buch), or oneiric weirdness (Chanel Beads) that makes Smerz's feint, foggy contemporaries so much more appealing to squint through. I really enjoyed a bunch of tracks on the accompanying remix LP, but this set of new originals aren't winning me over.

I get what they're going for here. Slowing a pop song down to half speed, bashing its knees so it lopes with a hobbling gait, and then swiping its phone, wallet, and keys to give it an empty-pocket lightness. Smerz hollow out a song until there's barely anything left, and that blank space creates a nagging tension that never fully relaxes. It's an interesting concept that Fine executed more attractively on songs like "Run" and "I could," which are admittedly fuller and more intentionally blissful than Smerz's music. I just think that, like Easy's cover art, Smerz believe there's more beauty in their orchestrated disorder than there actually is. Gutting pop songs for parts might be a fun exercise, but when they cease to function as such, I have to wonder: what's the point?

Cryptopsy, Necrot, Spirit Adrift, live @ Preserving Underground

Cryptopsy are a band who are currently experiencing what I'll call the Dying Fetus Effect. As in: a veteran extreme-metal band whose late-90s credibility waned in the 2000s, bottomed out in the 2010s, and is now rocketing back up among young people in the 2020s. Cryptopsy's 1996 LP, None So Vile, was always a tech-death tentpole within that niche fandom, but over the last year I've seen more chatter about it online than ever before, including a retrospective review from Anthony Fantano. Dying Fetus experienced a similar resurgence within the hardcore scene a couple years back, and Crowbar are also currently benefitting from a seemingly random curiosity among zoomers who wouldn't have been able to pick Kirk Windstein out of a lineup just two years ago.

I'd never seen Cryptopsy and frankly didn't care to before this recent uptick in engagement. None So Vile is a brutally brilliant all-timer, but only one member from that record's lineup, drummer Flo Mounier, still plays in Cryptopsy, and I'm not a fan of the hyper-slick, robo-synthetic sound of the band's modern material, which is why I'm not really into any tech-death these days. However, when I saw they were coming to Pittsburgh on the Decibel Magazine tour with Necrot, Fulci, and Blood Monolith, I figured it was time to journey into the tech-death trenches. Sadly, Fulci dropped by the time the tour started, and power-metal revivalists Spirit Adrift, who I find painfully boring, were their replacement. But otherwise, this was a worthwhile night out.

Cryptopsy's current vocalist Matt McGachy has been fronting the band for nearly 20 years, and he's developed an acrobatic ability to deliver sustained shrieks and gorilla-like lows without losing his composure. The way he stood poised at the front of the stage, mouthing mosh commands to the audience without speaking into the mic, and calmy describing the "reciprocal relationship" between Cryptopsy onstage and the crowd before them, was hilarious to watch. Throughout the set, I was thinking about the difference between a performer and an entertainer. Most of the musicians I see live are performers, but McGachy is an entertainer. The animalistic faces he was making with his abnormally large mouth were endlessly amusing, and he'd swiftly snatch phones from the front row, scream into the selfie camera, and toss it back to the fan without missing a note. The dude is a natural.

The rest of Cryptopsy's band sounded incredibly tight. Too tight for my liking, to be honest. I like my death metal to be a little uglier, a little wilder, a little rougher around the edges. Which is why Necrot were my favorite band of the night. I'd seen the Oakland band once before back in 2024, and their last two records are sitting on my record shelf right now, but this was the most fun I've ever had with Necrot's music. I stood a few feet from bassist-vocalist Luca Indrio and watched the drool seep from his mouth and soak his long, stringy hair while he gargled demonically into the mic. His facial expressions were also entertaining, except Indrio's grins were more wicked than McGachy's, and his band's onslaught of gnarled old-school death metal – nothing fancy, but played with extraordinary tact – had me mesmerized for the whole set.

The abundance of teens in the audience were there for Cryptopsy, but with the energetic reaction Necrot received, maybe they'll be the next recipients of the Dying Fetus effect. They deserve it.

Chasing Down

Colin Joyce
of
coolant

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

coolant began as the slowcore solo project of NYC musician and music blogger Colin Joyce, but in the time since last year's Pest EP, coolant has since expanded into the trio of guitarist-vocalist Joyce, bassist Timm Jones and drummer Rylie Stolze. The band have also gotten way better, which says a lot considering I really enjoyed the achey plods on Pest. coolant's new EP, daemonlover, is a tremendously evolved set of songs that revamp the stoic quietude of Pest with a newfound dynamism. Musically, the songs still sit at the crossroads between the catalogs of kranky and The Flenser: ambient, gothic, doomy. The writing is just stronger, the performances more engaging, and the atmospheres richer. I fuck with these three tracks a whole lot.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Joyce about Coolant's new members, 17th century folk songs, his slowcore Mt. Rushmore, adoring Spencer Radcliffe, why cloud-rock is fake, and much more. Read the full interview below – and the 50-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.