January 30 • Woodward Theater
Singer/songwriter/guitarist Kai Slater is a wisp of a guy armed with shaggy hair, stylish thrift-store clothes and enough memorable melodies to make Bob Pollard stand to attention. The 21-year-old Chicagoan is having a moment, the result of two stellar 2025 solo albums as Sharp Pins — Radio DDR dropped in May, followed by Balloon, Balloon, Balloon in November — as well as contributions to his other band, Lifeguard, a post-punk outfit that also put out a well-received album last year.
Sharp Pins fuses the lo-fi, DIY ethos of punk and indie rock with the catchy songcraft of classic rock and pop, yielding tunes both familiar and idiosyncratic.
“I got really inspired by The Jam, Television Personalities, The Times, Dolly Mixture,” Slater said in an interview with Demo Magazine early last year when comparing Sharp Pins to his other projects. “I’ve always been influenced by The Beatles and The Who. That was the core of what I was trying to write for a lot of my life, so I was like, ‘I’ll try to hone in on that in my solo music.’ ” Balloon, Balloon, Balloon is especially ear-wormy — 21 songs in 44 minutes, each a brief but distinctive world of its own. Album opener “Popafanout” burrows into one’s cortex via jangly, Byrds-like guitars and Slater’s affecting delivery of oblique lines like, “All the silverstone creep/Sludging around on the Puget Sound/Oh, what it means to me.” Yet there is little doubt about the topic of “I Don’t Have the Heart,” which sounds like A Hard Day’s Night-era Beatles, a Rickenbacker guitar ringing as Slater sings, “I’ve waited so long to be near you/But I don’t have the heart/To show how I feel.”
Slater’s touring version of Sharp Pins features bassist Joe Glass and drummer Peter Cimbalo (per the album’s liner notes, “two young freakbeats of America”). Like those of their creative forefathers Guided by Voices, Sharp Pins songs explore a different dynamic in a live setting — the sound of lo-fi gems breaking free into a new realm.