Staying local means you never really lose touch with a band, even after they break up. Members scatter into new projects, or just drift out of the scene for a while, but you still end up meeting them at bars or venues, watching other bands together.
You keep showing up because the Chicago scene is worth staying close to.
Years ago, when she was still fronting her old band as Mickey Menace, she told me she'd been thinking about a return. She'd been turning the idea over for a while, plotting it as Mickey Dennis while Menace stayed dormant. In the meantime, she helped me on a shoot of my own, no fuss, just showed up, did the work, and was the nicest person to chat gigs and music with. Not long after, I was shooting a show and she was there working too, and I got to turn my lens on her for once.
Two years later, Menace made her return.
I hadn't caught her live in ages. So watching her back on stage this summer, fronting a project that pulls from grunge and its offshoots, grunge gaze, grunge punk, a sound she and her bandmates have fully claimed, dressed in a dark metal and goth aesthetic that read as grunge's shadow sibling in the 90s, has been the best part of my season so far. Her voice does the thing I love most in a performer, sliding from sweet and melodic into something with teeth. The room felt it every turn, old friends and new cheering loudest when her voice bared its edge.
I've called her smoky, dark, goth, cool to the point of intimidating. She's also one of the warmest, most enthusiastic people I know in this scene. For a while I had a sense she was building something without saying what. Then came the reveal she'd be playing Sleeping Village, and I kept thinking about what that meant for her and her bandmates on stage.
In conversations she'd mention pieces of it, a few band names she kicked around. Then one day she posted it. Gushy. Tyler, Maddie, Nate, and Mickey, pulling from an era I don't dig into often enough and making me want to live in it again.