Kai Slater has become unignorable

But what draws me to break my dry spell with journalism is an interview with Demo Magazine. Towards the end, interviewer Sachith Abayakoon speaks with Slater about the activism that has sprung naturally from the Hallogallo project, and the role Marxism plays in his mindset. Notably, he frames a dichotomy between zine culture and journalism. “Zines are also largely antithetical to journalism,” he states. “As journalism can often be a tool for the market to flourish and for musicians to get more money off their album by marketing to buzzwords. A zine is often made for fanatics, and written in a very direct, honest way. For me, it’s always documentarian and archival in its purpose, because you don’t have any limits on what you can say. You’re not going through any censorship or big music journalism company. It’s just you and a paper. Just trying to get through all those fuckers, you know?”

As one of those fuckers, there’s something incredibly refreshing about this level of opinionated frankness that still skirts any sort of pettiness, coming from a young musician that has managed a sort of breakthrough without a machine behind him. Two months prior to this interview, Slater’s second (yes, second) Sharp Pins album received a reissue and a Best New Music plaudit from Pitchfork, from a writer primarily engaged with mainstream pop in the firmly post-rockist, Mano Sundaresan-era of the publication. Slater isn’t backed by a major PR firm, instead receiving support from the hardworking but humble one-man operation Stereojunk PR, run by Dummy’s Joe Trainor.

You could definitely make the argument that Slater grew up in a healthy environment: Chicago’s Hyde Park is a nice neighbourhood right near the University of Chicago, where his father works as a political science professor. But speaking with Slater only affirms that this environment – and his father – instilled within him the importance of community effort at a young age.

“He [taught me about] Southeast Asia, democratization, dictatorships, counter revolutions, stuff like that,” Slater says. “I knew all about Mao [Zedong] and [Vladimir] Lenin and Angela Davis. Hyde Park has a pretty large chapter of the Black Panther Party. So you can’t really escape that because, I mean, it’s the reason why we have breakfast in schools. So that sense of communalism was very early in my mind. My grandpa was a hippie communist. He had two spoons in his house and three kids.”

I joke that they probably could’ve sprung for that third spoon.

“It made everyone wake up early because they wanted to eat cereal without having to use their hands. That’s almost like a caricature example of a radical leftist. But I was just glad that I was raised in a household where I was not closed off to all of that stuff. I know a lot of friends that grew up in areas where they didn’t know anything about any of that stuff until they were in college or whatever. So I had kind of that jumpstart. When I started music, it was very much a busking socialist, almost like Billy Bragg-inspired [thing]. I was singing ‘The International’ on the streets.”

When I ask if he’d ever consider making a protest album in the style of a Bragg or Woody Guthrie, Slater notes that he’s hesitant to make overtly political music of his own, citing a potential for preachiness. Instead, he’s more inclined to tie activism into zines, events, and releases. The first press of Radio DDR, for example, benefitted the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. Nearly everything about how Slater navigates the space of others and the space he creates for himself points towards a rare and admirable “don’t just speak, do” attitude. Though he does highlight one song he considers to be political.

“I released a Bandcamp-only song on my birthday [October 9th], which is a very anti-ICE song,” he tells me. “And I thought I did it in a novel way. It’s called ‘I Wonder Where You Hide All Your Love’ and it’s about people who hide emotion, and having to wrestle with the things they do and the violence they cause. I feel like the most powerful ways to do that sort of protest music are in those universal ways, in which a song like that could be taken as talking about a lover or talking about a bigger concept, like what ICE is doing right now.” All Bandcamp proceeds go to the Immigrant Defense Project.

It feels like there’s always a pandemic story these days. But while for most artists it was either a major disruptor or the inspiration for exactly one album, the then 15-year-old Slater used his isolation as the impetus to begin songwriting and building the Hallogallo community, desperate for connection and artistic exchange.

“There was this explosion of creativity and inspiration in my mind, and a severe push back to everything we could do,” he says. “So it forced me to find any way that I could have a sense of community. When I made the zine, I was looking for anyone else that was making cool music. Because I was socially starved and wanted connection, and it was especially important to me when I was starting. When you start writing songs, it’s a very exciting thing. You’re discovering yourself, and how you want to communicate to the world, and it’s a bummer to not be able to share that with other people and play shows and hear other people’s music. I was making a lot of tapes at home and busking to no one and then making this zine with a couple of friends I was lucky to have met before the pandemic. Then it kind of just spiralled from there. Once the pandemic ended, it had amassed a sense of [community]. I started doing Hallogallo Fest, which is a zine fair/[fest] – young bands, mostly from Chicago, but starting to do international bands and stuff like that.”

Slater undersells this explosion of creativity. In 2020 alone, he released albums with Dwaal Troupe, Lifeguard, and Sublime Jupiter Snake Duo, an experimental record under the name The Miror Gala, and a single with A Towering Raven (Dwaal Troupe under a different name – think The Dukes of Strastosphear to Dwaal Troupe’s XTC).

These projects run a stylistic gamut. Dwaal Troupe is what you’d most likely think would catch wind. It predicts Slater’s solo work as Sharp Pins to the highest degree as fuzzy, pop-melody-oriented rock music, though it indulges more in the zeitgeisty slacker ennui of modern times. Lifeguard, who just released their second full-length earlier this year with Ripped and Torn, is often more reminiscent of the bands that were coming out on the Dischord label back in the ’90s when looking at their EPs, though the new album reaches further back towards the likes of Glenn Branca and This Heat. And while Sublime Jupiter Snake Duo – Slater’s earliest project with Desi Kaercher – has been quiet in recent years, they went on an absolute tear of productivity in 2020, perhaps most notably releasing COLOUR LOADER, an album of tripped-out dance music recalling The Residents and Renaldo & the Loaf.

This is all to say the Slater is well-studied, despite frequently reducing Sharp Pins to a “Beatles-esque” project, or more accurately, an approximation of what modern music might sound like if it had continued to progress more linearly along the lines of popular classic rock. In this sense, certain streams don’t cross: Slater assures me that it’s unlikely Sharp Pins will ever release an acid house record. That said, he notes that his new record, Balloon Balloon Balloon, is a little more liberal than Radio DDR.

“I’m always thinking of different projects, because I’m obsessed with the idea of the story that a band tells. I think for Sharp Pins, I do want it to have that progression of a band. But I’m definitely not going like, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s. Especially on [Balloon Balloon Balloon], I really tried to tap into just my subconscious or something, and not think too hard about the stylistic cohesion. I come from the school of R. Stevie Moore and Cleaners from Venus – people like that, who are just constantly working. They’ll do a doo-wop song into a synth song. I really like that kind of ethos of just always working and trying to have that variety.”

Conversely, when speaking about Radio DDR, Slater notes a process that is perhaps slightly more typical for others, but less so for himself.

“[It’s] kind of an outlier in my discography,” he admits. “When you write a song, you record it: you don’t demo or any shit like that. That’s too much time wasted at that point. For Radio DDR, I was playing a lot of solo shows, and then I realised that I had to write more songs because people were returning. And so all those songs that I workshopped, that’s what became Radio DDR. That year was so busy and I wasn’t really recording that much. Then I realised, ‘Okay, it’s been a year, I have to make an album.’ I had one song recorded so I was like, ‘Okay, I’m just gonna put it out and say that I have a full album done at the time.’”

He almost seems to have mixed feelings about Radio DDR and at one point expresses a very slight, very reasonable frustration with the proliferation of the idea that the album is his “debut.” I interpret it as a sense that, spiritually, Radio DDR is just a little close to journalism for his liking, while Balloon Balloon Balloon sees him get back to the zine music he established on his true Sharp Pins debut, 2023’s Turtle Rock.

“It wasn’t a ‘soulless’ recording process, but it was very different from how I usually do it,” he says. “I know exactly what the arrangements need, just a question of getting the performance right. There was not much experimentation. I’m very proud of that album for what it is. But in terms of the process, I really wanted to get back to what I do, which is more all things go.”

Balloon Balloon Balloon is definitely a more stylistically sprawling album, though not entirely unidentifiable as the same artist who nabbed that red BNM circle. But even the album art will tip you off to the differences: Radio DDR’s cover gives off the impression of a lost classic late-’80s college rock record. Balloon Balloon Balloon is pure classic psych, with a late-’60s/early-’70s pop art look. The immediate impression it gives me is that of The Dukes of Stratosphear’s Chips From the Chocolate Fireball: a little cheeky, but still accurate enough to suggest near 100% earnestness. And you really get a sense of the Dukes on opening track “Popafangout”, which features likely the most bombastic – and wettest – pedal effect across his discography.

Slater uses the word “bombast” to describe Balloon Balloon Balloon often, and it feels appropriate. What it loses in poise or wistfulness compared to Radio DDR, it makes up in fun at least two times over. It’s scrappy, it’s silly, it aligns with Buddy Holly and Robyn Hitchcock subconsciously in equal measure. It still feels more unified across its runtime than, say, a Lemon Twigs record, where that band’s origins as a cover act have almost become “the point.”

Slater rarely feels like he’s “doing” an artist but instead feels like a contemporary thrust forward through time. What would Buddy Holly’s unknown musician friend be making in 2025 if he didn’t age? Maybe something like “Talking In Your Sleep”. It’s another album that firmly aligns him with a new class of young rock musicians who seem to get why classic rock was actually classic. If Cameron Winter is the current poster child of Velvet Underground/Modern Lovers-style NYC art school rock’s evolution, Kai Slater is transforming the paisley underground into something that looks forward as much as it appreciates the past.

All this and we’ve yet to touch upon the “other” record Slater put out this year, supporting Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard on his debut album Happy Birthday. Slater’s good about making his own luck, but if there’s an advantage he does possess, it’s location. Slater recalls connecting with Wolfhard due to the latter’s love of Chicago band Twin Peaks.

“I’ve been friends with Cadien [Lake James] for a while and he’s around in the scene, and Finn grew up as a huge Twin Peaks fan,” Slater says. “When he started recording, he was like, ‘I have to record with the Twin Peaks guys.’ And obviously he was famous enough to do it at that point.” Eventually, James convinced Wolfhard to attend a Lifeguard show, where Slater and Wolfhard hit it off. Slater shared Turtle Rock and Wolfhard told him that he wanted to make a record that sounded like it.

“And I was like, ‘Well, I know a guy that can help you do that’ [laughs]. It’s a really amazing working relationship: I helped write a lot of the parts and melodies and played drums and guitar. We had to just figure out how to track the songs together as a two-piece.” I bring up Wolfhard’s forthcoming Replacements biopic and we agree it’s going to be tough to find the right Paul Westerberg, but we’re interested to see how it plays out.

When thinking about all that Slater’s managed in just five short years, by the age of 20 – dubbing cassettes, making Risograph zines, putting on benefits, cultivating a real community that has made a tangible positive impact within the Chicago music scene, really doing it the “right way” – I can’t help but blow a little smoke up the kid’s ass. Maybe it’s sloppy journalism, maybe it’d be better in a zine. I tell Slater that even without the machine, he’s made himself “unignorable.”

“Unignorable.” He smirks. “I like that.”