Stef Chura

Stef Chura’s debut studio album, Messes (out 1/27 on Urinal Cake Records), is born of her years of experience playing around the Detroit, Michigan underground, setting up DIY shows in the area, and moving around the state nearly 20 times. “Right when it starts to feel like home / It’s time to go,” she sings literally on its opening cut, “Slow Motion,” a twisty, dim-lit guitar pop song where she curls and stretches every word. There are worlds of emotion in the ways Chura pronounces phrases with twang and grit, alternatingly full of despair, playfulness, and abandon. Chura calls her music “emotional collage,” eschewing start-to-finish story lines in favor of writing intuitively about feelings, drawing from experiences and references related to a certain sentiment.

A few friends getting together to write some songs is not an unusual story. And while lineup changes, stagnancy, and moving apart are often the death-knell of these friends turned into bands, that hasn’t been the case for Lansing’s Small Parks. In fact, the opposite is true. 2016’s Honest Light is Small Parks’ first full-length album, and the result of four years of song-writing. It speaks as a mission statement for the four-piece: this is who we are, and this is what we love.

Peter J Hochstedler plays new folk for the old at heart, tongue-twistingly lyrical tunes of the road, tunes of resistance.

Lucy is a three-piece rock n’ roll band from Lansing with punk, folk and jazz influences. Together, they make sweet sweet music. They are Dakota “Dakattack” Peterson, who wails on the drums and studies jazz at MSU; Duncan Tarr, who slaps the bass now and formerly for the MSU jazz program before recently graduating this year; Michael Gerstein, who plays guitar, sings and is a political reporter for The Detroit News in his spare time.