Author Sophia Shen

What happens when the Asian-Canadian thought daughter of our generation goes through a breakup? Luna Li's latest and greatest LP When a Thought Grows Wings (2024) provides a lush, heart-shattering answer. Captu...

Stepping across the red plush-carpeted threshold of Bimbo’s 365 Club on Sunday night felt like turning back seventy years’ time. No longer were we college students adrift in the San Francisco of 2024—we h...

Friday, April 12, just before the latest round of rainfall would begin to kiss the streets of San Francisco, synth pop princess Alice Phoebe Lou delivered a heartfelt and cathartic set to an entranced audience ...

Last weekend, right on the heels of San Francisco’s multi-day, multi-venue Psyched! Fest, we crossed state lines for a Pacific Northwestern analogue: Freakout Fest in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. The ...

Working as a stagehand at a music venue, you see enough middle-aged men whose bands you’ve never heard of strut across a stage. Thus, attending the Breeders’ 30th anniversary tour of their 1993 album Last S...

On Thursday night, after submitting my two half-baked Session A finals and thus closing the door on a veritable lifetime of summer school, I slicked my hair back, donned a blazer, and set off towards Rickshaw S...

Characterized by dreamy doubled vocals and temperamental time signatures, Berkeley-based indie band Chammeili’s 2022 record Icy Blue provides listeners with a bird’s eye view of the trials, tribulations, an...

Friday, October 14 at Rickshaw Stop saw a radiant, arresting performance by the rising Asian Canadian indie sweetheart Luna Li, accompanied by the playfully moody up-and-coming Los Angeles project zzzahara. Emb...

On Thursday, April 14, indie punk group Mannequin Pussy rocked Upper Sproul, sparking a daytime mosh that triumphed over the gloomy weather conditions and chased the rainy day blues away. This was an unexpected...

In the wake of her sophomore album Valentine (2021), an LP that marked a sonic shift in the Snail Mail catalogue, Baltimore’s Lindsey Jordan and her band voyaged west to pay a visit to the Fox Theater on Apri...

In the words of Clem Zimmer, Cal alum and synth punk virtuoso, the Bay Area has a rich DIY music tradition. Zooming in on UC Berkeley and its adjacent co-op houses, backyard stages, and student stomping grounds...

By the time my friend and I arrived at the Fox for the Mitski concert on March 5, the formidable line was already snaking down the block, terminating on the far side of the adjacent parking lot. With Mitski’s...