In 2013, Alison Sudol put aside her band A Fine Frenzy to focus on her acting career, which has included roles in the television show Transparent and the film franchise Fantastic Beasts. In the past year, she’s returned to music with new material, and the time off has done her good. Her early singles, such as 2017’s “You Picked Me,” were the sort of breathy, surging, hooky, anonymously pleasant indie pop you’d expect to hear playing during intense moments on teen TV dramas....

ARTIST: Jay Ryan SHOW: Andrew Bird and My Brightest Diamond at the Hideout on Fri 12/15 MORE INFO: thebirdmachine.com

Andrea Bauer Slayer at Riot Fest this past summer One year ago, heavy metal royalty Slayer released their first new song into the world since 2009’s World Painted Blood LP, and this weekend we get one more, when they unleash a picture-disk seven-inch for “When the Stillness Comes” for Record Store Day. This will be the first official single off the long-awaited upcoming record, whose production has been bogged down with dramatic personnel shifts that included the departure of founding drummer Dave Lombardo and the passing of guitarist Jeff Hanneman....

Whether you’re decorating your lockdown living space, buying unique clothes only your COVID bubble will see, or trying to replicate that long-gone thrift shopping high of snagging a one-of-a-kind piece before anyone else, Instagram start-ups are a surprisingly simple and engaging way to shop secondhand from home. The accounts are highly curated, and many sell out quickly, meaning there’s an addicting rush that comes from sending a DM and a Venmo payment and suddenly owning whatever just appeared on your feed....

This has been a summer of discontent for Chicago cyclists. On the morning of the crash Kuivinen, 20, had been biking southeast in a green-painted stretch of the Milwaukee Avenue bike lanes in West Town, police said. Near 874 N. Milwaukee, truck driver Antonio Navarro, 37, veered into the bike lane while making a right turn onto southbound Racine Avenue, striking and dragging Kuivinen. Reached by phone the day after the crash, 27th Ward alderman Walter Burnett said a Chicago Department of Transportation official told him the department was investigating the TOD bike lane blockage and would have a report by the end of the day....

We brought Savage Love Live to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, and the Pantages Theatre in Minneapolis over three nights. As is always the case at live shows, the crowd had more questions than I could possibly answer in a single night. So in this week’s column, I’m going to tear through some of the ones I wasn’t able to get to. A: I’m fine about relationships with seemingly set end points, as relationships don’t have to be open to or become long-term in order to be a success....

Last Thursday, a small group of people gathered in a sun-drenched storefront on Kedzie Avenue in Irving Park. Brought together by the grassroots group Healing to Action, they came to discuss their mounting discontent about Chicago Public Schools’ sexual health education curriculum. Though the event welcomed anyone with kids, grandkids, or other relatives at CPS, and even just interested community members, no men showed up. “The biggest problem we have in our neighborhoods is violence, gender violence specifically,” Margarita Miranda, one of Healing to Action’s leaders said in Spanish, as an English-language interpreter streamed her words into the headsets of attendees....

Say what you will about 2016 as a whole—the cover of our Year in Review issue sums it up—but Chicago hip-hop had a great year. And while December has traditionally been a quiet month for musicians, no one around here seemed to get the memo. Just look at the past week: Chance the Rapper and Jeremih released a joint Christmas mixtape buoyed by collaborations with Chicagoans from a diversity of scenes, including street-rap phenom Lud Foe and Teklife producers DJ Spinn and Gant-Man; King Louie dropped the long-gestating (by his standards, anyway) Tony 2 on the first anniversary of his near-fatal shooting; and Vic Spencer put out his second full-length in two months, The Ghost of Living, produced by Internet sensation Big Ghost....

You probably know about Charlotte Corday. She assassinated the bloodthirsty French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. You certainly know about Marie Antoinette, the Vienna-born French queen famously separated from her head during the Reign of Terror. All you can possibly know about Marianne Angelle is what playwright Lauren Gunderson tells you in The Revolutionists, running now at the Greenhouse in a supple, often amusing Organic Theater Company production. Gunderson invented Angelle to represent Caribbean women who fought French colonial rule even as the French themselves were massacring one another in the name of liberté, egalité, and fraternité....

The Republican Party has a problem—no one doubts that. “Trump isn’t the cause of the problem,” said John Kass in the Sunday Tribune. “He’s merely a symptom.” Some of us might think Kass was selling Donald Trump short. Germany had all sorts of problems after World War I that Hitler wasn’t the cause of. But history doesn’t remember Hitler as a symptom. As Donald Trump hopes to, he came to power as the solution....

The new third full-length from Canadian doom duo Vile Creature, Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!, is everything I hoped it would be. The queer vegan band, formed in 2014, draw their fierce, efficient, and elegant rage from their experiences of oppression and resistance, and they use it to build strong support structures for their bursts and blasts of raw power. The tolling, far-off twangs of guitarist and vocalist KW on the elegiac intro to “When the Path Is Unclear” set the stage for an impassioned monologue that begins as the song opens up into raw, churning fury: “You’d do well to take heed of the subtlety of the winding stream, the spider of subversion....

Judging from contemporary accounts, Chicago founder Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black trading post proprietor for whom local African American leaders propose renaming Lake Shore Drive, was a virtuous, cultured, likable, and good-looking man. A 1790 account by trader Hugh Heward is the earliest record of DuSable’s trading post on the north bank of the Chicago River, just east of the present-day Michigan Avenue bridge, making him the first non-Native permanent settler of the area....

Local label Badluck Records is celebrating its first birthday with a showcase at a Logan Square DIY venue. (Direct message @badluck_records on Instagram for the address.) Badluck, whose garish yet artful sound takes Warped Tour to grad school, has invited the bands Nightfreak, Rapscallion, and Deep Crush to share the bill with Badluck rappers Chuck Trash and Saint Icky. Icky has hit his stride since joining the Badluck roster, releasing Saintiva Mixtape in July and Heavy Metal for Meditation, Vol....

The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smoky haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the current Chicago races—ward-level and, of course, mayoral. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past? Let Ben and Maya talk you through it....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Only accepting invitations to party on your island if you invite my friends Lakitu and Dry Bones.) What we’re not doing:

The cover article of last week’s Reader, “Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Propaganda,” tells a story Chicago’s heard before—how the police version of a police encounter in which officers shot someone dead turns out to bear little or no resemblance to the truth. Most famously, there was the night in 1969 when Fred Hampton, leader of Chicago’s Black Panthers, supposedly died in a gun battle with police. In reality, the police broke in and shot him dead in bed....

US Marshals Service/AP Pedro and Margarito Flores This post has been updated with additional information. For their help, the twins received 14 year prison sentences Tuesday from federal judge Ruben Castillo, far less than the life terms they faced for the scale of their drug trafficking. Officials have not revealed where the brothers have been detained, where they’ll serve the rest of their sentences, or what steps will be taken to protect them when they’re released....

Forgive Heroes on Deck: World War II on Lake Michigan—an hourlong documentary that will premiere Thursday—for the melodramatic note on which it begins: narrator Bill Kurtis intones that “this film contains rare footage of a U.S. Navy operation, just off Chicago’s shoreline, that changed the course of World War II.” No, it was war. “More than 100 World War II aircraft rest on the bottom of Lake Michigan,” reports Heroes on Deck....

Sun-Times Media Rauner, Rahm, or Madigan—who’s lyin’ when he oughta be truthin’? If we ever get around to having mandatory civics classes in public schools—and there’s a bill to that effect in the statehouse—I feel for any teacher who has to give a lesson on the recent CPS pension extension bill. With extra time, the mayor said, he’d have enough property taxes on hand to pay the pension bill and still have money for basics, like regular janitorial service....

I have to admit, I literally slept on going to Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake’s winter solstice concerts for the first 27 years (though granted, I was only 17 when the first one happened). Out-of-town friends even crashed at my pad to attend the early-morning shows, but as a former night owl, I always thought 6 AM was just too early. That finally changed last year, as this old dog has finally become capable of getting up at a decent hour....