Hallogallo Grows Up: Chicago's Youth Rock Scene in 2026
A compilation, a sophomore album and a fuzz pop debut show how a pandemic-era teen scene in Chicago kept its homemade habits after the label deals arrived.
Most scenes get named by a magazine after the fact. Chicago's Hallogallo named itself, borrowing the title of the opening track on Neu!'s 1972 debut for a loose crew of teenagers who started making noisy, homemade indie rock around 2020. Six years later its best-known bands sit on Matador and ATO, and the people who stayed behind are still booking shows in a church and dubbing cassettes. 2026 is the year the scene tried to document itself without freezing in place.
The yearbook
The clearest statement is Red Xerox: Chicago Youth Beat 2020-2025, released March 18 and compiled by Eli Schmitt, a drummer and organizer whose New Now project records the all-ages shows and puts them on YouTube. Brooklyn comic and zine shop Desert Island pressed it as the first release on its new label, with a 24-page zine tucked inside, according to Stereogum. The twelve tracks run from Horsegirl's early 7-inch cut "Sea Life Sandwich Boy" to Uniflora's "Two or More." Kai Slater's liner text insists the record is a present-tense document, and the Bandcamp notes make the point in capital letters.
The sequencing backs him up. Lifeguard's "Crate" is a six-and-a-half-minute live take that The Fire Note singles out as the standout, and it sits next to bands most listeners outside Chicago have never heard: Current Union TM's "Dukkha Coca," which leans on texture and screaming more than words, P. Noid's two-minute power-pop sprint "Go Somewhere Else," and Amaya Peña's soft, folk-shaped "Song for Avi." FLOOD hears '60s psych-pop in Sharp Pins' "You Turned Off the Light" and a folk lean in Post Office Winter's "Mother, Sister, Nurse." A companion cassette, Red Xerox Tape Expo, adds 19 more local acts, with profits going to a legal clinic, per Stereogum. Release shows ran at Union Pool in Brooklyn and an all-day bill at the Empty Bottle on April 5.
Where the shows happen
The Chicago Reader's long survey from last November is the best map of the ground floor. New Now shows have moved out of Schmitt's apartment to Color Club and, more often, the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. Zines like Slater's Hallogallo and Schmitt's Unresolved still circulate. Slater runs a Hallogallo cassette label, and North Carolina tape label Trash Tape Records relocated to the city. The paper also tracks the drift outward: Horsegirl now live in New York, while musicians from Minneapolis, Texas and North Carolina have moved in to join.
Hallogallo's answer so far has been to keep the output cheap and fast.
That second wave is where to listen. The Reader describes Current Union TM as dubby postpunk, notes that Kira and Reid Isbell also run the shoegaze duo Twin Coast, and counts Uniflora, Starcharm and Make Like Marigold among the acts that arrived after 2022.
The bands to know now
- Friko. The scene's most visible export released its second album, Something Worth Waiting For, on April 24 through ATO. John Congleton produced, and the nine songs push the band's chamber-folk roots toward noise-rock and '70s-style orchestral balladry. WBEZ reports it is the first record by the current four-piece, written in short stretches between tours, with a release show at Metro.
- TV Buddha. Schmitt and Johnson Rockstar's fuzz pop duo released Hallelujah Anyway on October 2 through Ever/Never and Hallogallo, its first vinyl LP. Rosy Overdrive hears early Olivia Tremor Control and Apples in Stereo across 15 tracks, from hissy slacker pop to a seven-minute Velvets-style rave-up, with Slater and Lifeguard's Asher Case among the guests.
- Sharp Pins. Slater's solo project put out Balloon Balloon Balloon on Perennial in November 2025, per the Reader, and his live bassist Joe Glass released Snakewards on Hallogallo this year, according to The Fire Note.
- Lifeguard. Slater, Asher Case and Isaac Lowenstein released their Matador full-length Ripped and Torn in June 2025 and still anchor the live circuit.
What to watch
The risk for any scene this documented is that the compilation becomes the headstone. Hallogallo's answer so far has been to keep the output cheap and fast: tapes, CD-Rs, church shows, a duo LP co-released by the house label. Friko and Horsegirl will keep getting the press. The better test of whether the scene is alive is whether Current Union TM, Uniflora and the Tape Expo names are making records in 2027.