No Expectations 125: Moon Eyes
Excellent new albums from Good Flying Birds, Cusp, and more. Plus, gig recaps of Geese at Thalia Hall and Hannah Frances at Constellation.
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Headline song: Glyders, “Moon Eyes”
Thanks for being here. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve received a few emails from publicists asking me to consider their clients for the No Expectations annual year-end list. I have to admit that my knee-jerk reaction reading those requests was, “Wait, what? It’s October: far too early to be thinking about EOY season.” This newsletter always runs its Best Of roundup in mid-to-early December, and that won’t change. Just last year, holding off a bit later than most other outlets allowed me to include Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal, Twine’s New Old Horse, and Smino’s Maybe in Nirvana. Sure, I could’ve beaten the rush and published before readers inevitably experience list fatigue, but I would’ve missed out on covering stellar, arguably classic LPs. Even in the doldrums of the release calendar, there will, without fail, be incredible things to discover.
Still, the more I thought about those PR reps already gearing up for list season, the more I realized, “Shit, I really should start thinking about this.” So far in 2025, I’ve recommended around 150 new albums in this newsletter. A quick scroll through the archives has the total at 142 (including the three featured below), and there are already over a dozen forthcoming releases I plan to get around to before the holidays. That’s a personally shocking number, and there’s still so much I haven’t heard. While dozens of those LPs have been on near-regular rotation all year, I’m going to have to revisit several over the coming weeks. The prospect of revisiting so much music is daunting, but it’s honestly really exciting.
As someone who has chosen a career where I basically give myself homework in perpetuity, my weeks are consumed by deadlines. I’ll go to work Monday through Friday, relax and see friends over the weekend, listen to music and read books when I can, and write up a new edition of No Expectations every Tuesday night. Don’t get me wrong: this is extremely fun and rewarding for me. I’m doing exactly what I want to do with my time. That said, I tend to move on to the next thing rather than savor what I loved last week or a month ago. Beyond the obvious reasons for compiling and posting a year-end list (people love them), it gives me a chance to reflect on 2025. I get to remind myself why something resonated so much, and usually, I’ll find new reasons to love what I dug then.
While I plan to spend the next month going back down the rabbit hole of 2025 LPs, I’ll still highlight the new-to-me favorites here. Lists are supposed to be fun, and ultimately, they’re not that serious. In this case, it’s just one guy’s opinion. At the same time, I figure giving myself the space to return to old favorites, take a birds-eye view of 2025, and finally get around to some of the year’s blind spots will be a fun listening exercise. It’s been a chaotic year, but so much amazing music has brought me joy and comfort throughout it all. As we approach the holidays and the impending blitz of EOY lists, take some time to return to some of your early-year favorites, and remember the good moments they inspired.
Here’s the spiel for new subscribers: Each week, you get a wildcard main essay (often new album recommendations), a 15-song playlist, as well as updates on what I’m listening to, watching, and reading. Sometimes you’ll get an interview with an artist I love, and other times it’ll be a deep dive into one band’s discography. Since I’m a Chicago-based writer, this newsletter is very Midwest-focused. So, if you live in this city too, you’ll also receive a curated roundup of upcoming local shows to check out.
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It’s my birthday on Saturday. While 34 is not a particularly monumental year to celebrate, I’m stoked to be around buds and drink a beer or two with them this weekend. If you sign up for the paid tier, I’ll definitely use the $5 to buy a Miller High Life.
3 Albums Worth Your Time This Week
Cusp, What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back
There’s a great newfound tradition of bands that combine anthemic, ‘90s-inspired rock with emo and twang who found their footing in Chicago. Like Madison, Wisconsin’s Slow Pulp and Indiana’s Ratboys, who both are now essential pillars of this city’s music communities, Rochester, New York’s Cusp have already made waves since moving here a few years ago. 2023’s You Can Do It All was a newsletter favorite that year, and when they followed it up with an EP last year, the opening atmospheric track “The Alternative” was one of my most-revisited songs of 2024. Now with an expanded and solidified lineup, their latest full-length, What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back, is their most confident and cohesive release yet. Highlights like “Oh Man” are peppered with squiggly synths and sugary backing vocals, while “The Upper Hand” detours is golden country thanks to pristine pedal steel from Chicago’s Red PK. Singer Jen Bender has a knack for breezy, effortless-sounding melodies that float over the eclectic arrangements that span indie rock’s multiple flavors. On “In a Box,” over interlocking guitars and a propulsive rhythm, Bender claustrophobically sings, “With all of the love on the planet / You’d have me sit in a box / Lock it up tightly, just me and my thoughts / So safe and comfortable, gnawing my nails off.“ Throughout, lyrics of anxiety, insecurity, and yearning are imbued with grace, wit, and heart. This LP will give you a new favorite Chicago band.
RIYL: Ratboys, big choruses, big riffs, and bigger heart
Good Flying Birds, Talulah’s Tape
At the beginning of the year, Indianapolis indie rockers Good Flying Birds released a cassette called Talulah’s Tape featuring “scattered demos … recorded at home between 2021-2024.” Those who heard it early realized it was one of the best collections of pristine, thoughtful jangle-pop 2025 would have to offer, which is why it’s now already reissued via the great indie label Carpark. While you’d expect efficient, scrappy, and well-written tunes from a band named after a Guided By Voices song, these songs’ sturdy and impeccable core transcends their four-track-recorded presentation. At 16 tracks, Talulah’s Tape is relentlessly paced: a constant onslaught of quality hooks, delirious riffs, and surging punk energy. “Wallace” is anchored by a squall of guitar noise, “Golfball” is wistful slacker rock, while the standout “Every Day Is Another” slows things down with cascading acoustic chords and delicate falsetto. Fronted by Kellen Baker, the Midwesterner has few peers when it comes to airtight and timeless songwriting.
RIYL: Midwestern jangle, timeless power-pop, short songs
Shutaro Noguchi & the Roadhouse Band, On the Run
The Japanese songwriter Shutaro Noguchi spent nearly two decades in America, splitting his time between Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Louisville, where he immersed himself in that city’s music community and linked up with Ryan Davis. He’s been releasing music via Davis’ Sophomore Lounge label since 2014, and this year, he collaborated with Davis and his Roadhouse Band for a knotty, unpredictable, and lush collection of tunes in On The Run. Now that Noguchi’s back in Tokyo, this LP feels like a bittersweet ode to cross-continental collaborations and a swan song to finding community in unlikely places. With lyrics mostly sung in Japanese, the eight exploratory songs here are potent doses of lounge-y psych, mesmerizing krautrock grooves, and welcome oddball experiments. The instrumental title track is cinematic in its intensity, with swirling synths, pops of searing lead guitars, and rhythmic playfulness. Elsewhere, while the opener “Olympic 3.5” extends past the eight-minute mark with a brooding jam, “Melody” is laid-back pop bliss. Dense with surprises and gleeful left turns, this is an album that you can easily live in. It’s for twilit comedowns, relaxed weekend mornings, and ambling strolls around the neighborhood.
RIYL: knotty synth-pop, unlikely collaboration, Jefferson County J-Pop
What I listened to:
The No Expectations 125 Playlist: Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal
1. Winged Wheel, “Speed Table”
2. Good Flying Birds, “Eric’s Eyes”
3. Geese, “Bow Down”
4. Glyders, “Moon Eyes”
5. Cruise Control, “So Long Carolina”
6. Cusp, “The Upper Hand”
7. Whitney, “Damage”
8. Shutaro Noguchi & the Roadhouse Band, “Melody”
9. Lala Lala, “Does This Go Faster?”
10. SML, “Chicago Four”
11. Helado Negro, “Protector”
12. Hannah Frances, “Steady in the Hand”
13. villagerrr, “All Right”
14. Devin Shaffer, “I Guess I’m Crawling”
15. Anna von Hausswolff, “Struggle With the Beast”
Gig recap: Geese, Racing Mount Pleasant at Thalia Hall (10/16)
Geese are the band of the moment. While their stratospheric ascent is well-deserved and exciting to watch, it must be bewildering for a group of early-twenty-somethings to experience. Whatever whirlwind emotions they must be feeling, seeing their work validated by a super-sold-out tour, 9.0 Best New Music designations, and ubiquitous memes featuring their songs, was translated to one of the tightest and most cathartic shows I’ve seen all year. Getting Killed is likely the year’s best album, and these young New Yorkers were locked in to match the hype live. While they were loose, chaotic, and excellent in early tours and last year opening up for King Gizzard, this is a band transformed in its current iteration: masterful, exhilarating, and still volatile enough to add a feeling of unpredictability. I haven’t seen Thalia Hall this packed since Twin Peaks played there in 2017. They’ve only stuck to their uncompromising indie rock vision and I hope they continue to do so going forward.
Back in January, I was introduced to Racing Mount Pleasant when they opened up for Cameron Winter at Sleeping Village. Where that last show found the sprawling Chicago-via-Michigan art-rock collective without a drummer, here they had a full lineup that showcased the explosiveness and raw emotionality of their repertoire. If you’re lucky enough to have tickets, this might be the tour of the year.
Gig recap: Hannah Frances at Constellation (10/17)
The first time I saw Hannah Frances play with a full band, it felt like Chicago’s best-kept secret. At small club shows, well before her breakout 2024 LP Keeper of the Shepherd came out, she’d perform with a sprawling cast of collaborators with horns, strings, and more, vividly enlivening her rich folk tunes. It was stunning every time. Now that Frances lives in Vermont, I’m lucky I got to witness an expanded nine-piece ensemble bring her new album, Nested in Tangles, to life at Constellation, my city’s best venue for jazz and avant-garde music. Over two sets, led by musical director and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Clausen, Frances played the entire album in full. The scalpel-like precision and attention to detail Frances and Clausen exuded to transform these intricate songs for the stage was inspiring. There were no opening acts, just one of the best albums of 2025 reimagined for a sold-out crowd.
What I watched:
Mussolini: Son of the Century (streamed on Mubi)
Streaming on MUBI, the eight-part TV series Mussolini: Son Of The Century tracks the violent, turbulent, and swift political ascent of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. It chronicles the five years from the 1919 origins of his fascist movement to their illegal rise in parliament and the assassination of their biggest rival, socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti, in 1924. Directed by Joe Wright, who is most known for his take on Pride on Prejudice with Kiera Knightley, this series is vividly rendered, a grotesquerie of brutality, corruption, and naked avarice that finds the cartoonish villainry intrinsic to historic despots. Lead actor Luca Marinelli, whom I know from his more charming and handsome role in 2019’s Martin Eden, is transformed to be the balding, gross, and perpetually huffy Il Duce. This is a show that takes multiple creative risks. It’s impossibly stylized, colorful, and experimental. Marinelli breaks the fourth wall so much it feels like if Fleabag was a pathetic fascist. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but other times it’s astoundingly potent. Worth a watch if you want to see an enthralling acting performance from Marinelli and an immersive period piece of a horrific time.
What I read:
Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (by Bridget Read)
In August, the direct selling industry, also known as multi-level marketing, claimed that it made $34.7 billion in U.S. retail sales in 2024. By comparison, that’s a few billion more than the legal cannabis industry, which reported $30.1 billion in U.S. retail sales last year. But as Bridget Read’s wild, unpredictable, and thrilling book Little Bosses Everywhere points out, the totals the MLM industry trots out are actually what its own sellers are buying to sell, not what everyday consumers are spending on. By tracing the history of MLMs to traveling salesmen, Read exposes their deceptive business practices, weaving personal accounts with exhaustive reporting. (A 2011 study of 350 multilevel marketing businesses found that 99 percent of participants lost money.) While many of the companies featured have managed to skirt regulation and legal accusations of being a pyramid scheme, the evidence of their inherent scamminess is striking. You’ll devour Read’s account and wonder, “How is this legal?” Like most things, it’s because of aggressive lobbying and political donations. Growing up in Western Michigan, where major player Amway was founded and is currently based, I was constantly exposed to founders Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos’ names plastered everywhere, and friends’ parents who worked for the company. Being raised in an environment where it’s ubiquitous—though I am fortunate it never affected any loved ones—it was nice to get a broader understanding of how it works and its darker underbelly.
The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar:
The gig calendar lives on the WTTW News website now. You can also subscribe to the newsletter I produce there called Daily Chicagoan to get it in your inbox a day early.
I was lucky enough to see RMP/Geese a few nights after you in Denver and the energy in the room was palpable. Nothing makes me happier than seeing a sold out show where half the audience has x’s on their hand and are screaming the lyrics back at the band while finding any reason whatsoever to mosh.
Great as always, wasn’t aware of the Mussolini series, sounds right up my alley, cheers