Dead Stars throbs and "Crawls" with life.

Photo by Danny Krug courtesy the band.

I really wanted to post this on Chicagoist but keep holding out hope Dead Stars will expand their summer tour and travel farther west than Cleveland to play Chicago this summer. If they don't make it out, I'm still planning on reviewing their album for the site when it comes out in June, so it's not like I won't write about them at all on Chicagoist, right?

Too much inside-my-head-baseball there. My apologies.

I wrote about Dead Stars just about this time last year, earmarking them as one of my favorite unexpected discoveries of 2013 until that point, and their debut full length Slumber does not disappoint. It's all '90s indie-rock guitar jams—big slabs o' sound—and I love it. And just like the bands they emulate, who cherry-picked the stuff they liked best of their heroes and mixed it all together, they take the sounds they love and smear them all over their own canvas to make something that's their own. The band just released "Crawl" from the forthcoming LP and I think you should definitely give it a listen, and download it for free, should you so choose.

And yes, you should so choose.