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The last time Canadian twin-sister duo Tegan and Sara came through Chicago, they were on the road celebrating the tenth anniversary of 2007’s The Con. At the time, it seemed like a fairly standard move—lately it seems like practically every long-running band has dusted off a fan-favorite album for a special show or tour. But what could’ve been just a victory lap became the catalyst for a revitalization. According to an interview the duo did with Apple Music, revisiting The Con inspired a burst of introspection that led to two major projects, the first of which is their recent memoir, High School, which looks back on the sisters’ adolescence....

The Old Believer The Atlas Moth, the massively heavy, always-on-tour local experimental-metal quintet celebrate their homecoming tonight—having just returned home from a huge trip out with Between the Buried and Me—with a headlining show at Cobra Lounge (Northless and Rollo Tomasi open). Formed in 2007, the band has perfected their spacey sludge metal over the years, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “The Sea Beyond,” off of last year’s The Old Believer (Profound Lore), showcases the band’s tremendous growth....

One of the most difficult moves in professional figure skating competitions is a triple axel, which requires the skater to leap forward from the outside edge of one skate blade, rotate three and a half times in the air, and land on the back outside edge of the opposite foot. Only eight women have landed the jump in competition, and Tonya Harding is one of them. In director Craig Gillespie’s new biopic I, Tonya, Harding (Margot Robbie) reminisces about having been the first American woman to accomplish this feat in 1991....

Soundcloud rap is shaping up to be the site of the latest music-biz gold rush. Lil Pump, Lil Skies, and Lil Xan already have major-label deals, and last week Billboard broke the news that Interscope had signed Chicagoland rapper Juice Wrld to a deal allegedly worth $3 million. That dollar amount comes as a lil shock, given that Juice remains fairly unknown and relatively green. He’s been uploading music to Soundcloud for about three years, but as he told rap podcast No Jumper earlier this month, he’s played only a couple shows—and it wasn’t till a year ago that one of his tracks managed to accumulate 10,000 Soundcloud plays....

From an early age, Ariel Couzan was fascinated by the ancient Egyptians, whose skin was the same shade of brown as hers. The 27-year-old Loop transplant smiles and rattles off stories about gods and goddesses and their legendary adventures. Couzan incorporates elements of this obsession into her style with feline earmuffs and a Cleopatra­-like bob with gold dreadlock cuffs, topped with a hat whose brim is adorned with a hieroglyphs-inspired design; her zip-up windbreaker has a sphinx face....

How do you write dramas about dystopia and alienation in the middle of a pandemic, especially when the people in charge have seemingly signed a blood oath to a nihilist death cult? Isn’t doomscrolling Twitter enough to make most of us imagine the worst? Langford was inspired in part by Westinghouse’s 1930s foray into creating prototype robots designed to look like Black men—one of whom was actually named “Rastus” and was also referred to as a “mechanical slave....

“I want all the kids to be super cool!” says Aisha Burris, owner of Kool Kidz 2144 in Beverly. The 23-year-old opened the children’s clothing store in December 2018. Burris says that after getting pregnant as a teen, she didn’t want to be a statistic. “I wanted better for my son, for myself. I wanted the young girls to know that just because you have a baby young, your life is not over....

Nothing says summer like a cold beer—or any kind of alcoholic beverage really. Catch a buzz and maybe a tan at these ten local bars with beer gardens and patios, and see our Bar Guide for a full list of places to drink. 770 N. Milwaukee, 312-666-9292. Old Oak Tap | Ukrainian Village The 1,500-square-foot front patio gets jammed, and every third patron seems to be bouncing a baby between sips of Saison DuPont, but the craft beer list showcases a lot of crowd-pleasers—Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, Firestone Walker Union Jack IPA, and a rotating Solemn Oath tap—as well as a couple of intriguing curveballs....

Despite endless debate, Chicago seems no closer to addressing the consequences of gentrification today than ever. Even though the City Council recently advanced a Rahm-backed measure to force developers to build more low-income housing, other efforts, like another measure targeted at obligating developers to pay demolition taxes along the 606, never received a hearing in council chambers. While a handful of Chicago neighborhoods such as Pilsen and Humboldt Park are the sites of skyrocketing rents, other areas of the city remain disinvested and overpoliced, getting none of the benefits of redevelopment as austerity measures continue to gut resources for education and other public goods....

All Hallow’s Eve is coming up, and it’s a fun time filled with much more than candy-corn martinis and masked children leaning on the doorbell. If you’re looking for trick-or-treating times for the kids, traditional haunted houses, or bars with drink specials that will let you show off your sexy ex-cabinet-member costume, please check out our Agenda listings online at chicagoreader.com/chicago/Agenda. For now, read on for some events that capture the spirit of Samhain season but may have escaped your notice....

It’s apparently not enough to just be a good idea. What I learned about ideas at Monday night’s session of Chicago Ideas Week is that it’s all in the presentation. Maybe we should have slunk out together. Instead, I tried to reason with myself. Why had I been discussing Trump? Wasn’t it because he was running for president? And wasn’t the election an event? Surely my mind was average at worst!...

Michael Gebert Chef Erik Anderson at an El Ideas collaborative dinner in 2013 Imagine if there were a day when crazy stuff right out of Wackyland could be reported as real news. That’s what it’s been like in Chicago the last day or so! Chefs leaving, chefs coming, chefs getting awards, places closing, pranks backfiring . . . • A Chicago-born chef is coming to Intro—to preview his restaurant that will be in Minneapolis!...

Last fall Governing magazine published a survey of America’s first-year governors. Most were doing well, but two were “struggling.” One struggler was Nebraska’s Pete Ricketts, the other was our own Bruce Rauner. You might suppose Illinois would chew up Pete Ricketts and spit him out, but his family history suggests something different. I asked managing editor Shamus Toomey about DNAinfo’s biggest accomplishments, and he sent me an interesting list. It ranged from Mark Konkol’s trailblazing coverage of the Jackie Robinson West Little League scandal to Tanveer Ali’s imaginative data-visualization projects—such as this one that lets readers draw their own Chicago neighborhood maps....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. On the subject of Return of the Jedi, he writes, “Interestingly, the advent of sexuality in the Star Wars universe (with the revelation of Carrie Fisher’s navel) is coupled with a resurgence of infantile imagery (with the swarms of teddy-bear Ewoks).” Perhaps naked Chewie finally broke him....

On their new self-titled debut album, Muzz simultaneously challenge listeners and envelop them in gentle, sublime atmospheres. The New York-based trio formed out of the long friendship of vocalist and guitarist Paul Banks (Interpol), multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman), and drummer Matt Barrick (Jonathan Fire*Eater). Individually, these artists are known for their musical malleability, and their chemistry together is undeniable. Banks is a master at concocting disarmingly murky anthems tinged with just the right amount of melodrama, and in Muzz he leans into malaise with precision....

On a sunny afternoon last week, a couple of men walked into Jessica’s Western Wear, a large store stocking rainbows of cowboy boots in every type of leather, button-down shirts, wide-brimmed hats, and a variety of other clothes, shoes, and personal grooming items. They spoke in Spanish with owner Rigo Romero, 56, about getting some patches on their ripped, light-wash jeans. Afterward, Romero, who’s run the shop near the corner of Clark and Lunt in the 49th Ward for 25 years, said the alterations “keep the store open because the retail business has been so bad....

We’ve heard both versions of the story too often, tragic trajectories that begin with being a young Black man in Chicago and end in murder, either by police or by somebody else. In March 2016, as the city was reeling from the Laquan McDonald scandal and entering what would be its bloodiest year in two decades, 22-year-old Courtney Copeland wound up with a bullet in his back in front of the 25th District police station in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood, on the northwest side....

There’s a difference between liking seafood and liking food that tastes like the sea smells at low tide. I’ll probably never entirely appreciate bottarga, a delicacy of salt-cured fish roe that’s powerfully fishy even in minuscule doses. Blame whatever neurochemistry shaped my preferences and aversions—you certainly can’t fault my seafood-rich Floridian upbringing—but when a server at Sink | Swim placed on our table an order of cracker-crisp lavash covered in shavings of bottarga (“batarga” on the menu), I could almost hear that classic-cartoon sound effect of a garbage scow’s foghorn blowing and seagulls cawing....

Mary Halvorson Octet, Away With You (Firehouse 12) Last year guitarist Mary Halvorson released one of her best albums, a peculiar solo recording of jazz standards and cover songs rendered in her own inimitable style—Meltframe privileges her wonderfully jagged improvisational approach as she reimagines the structure and scale of the tunes. This year she’s dropped an even better record that showcases her continuously improving skills as an arranger and writer....

QWhen I was 15, I had a three-month-long sexual relationship with a 32-year-old woman. She was a friend of the family, and my parents were going through a divorce. I stayed with her for the summer, and she initiated a sexual relationship. Looking back, I can see that she had been grooming me. We used to have conversations online and via e-mail that were very inappropriate considering our age difference. The relationship ended when I went home, but she remained flirty....