PREMIERE: Cafe Racer Gets You to Shoegaze with their New Single “Faces”

By Colin Smith

Cafe Racer are Chicago’s resident shoegazers. The five-piece band intertwines several layers of guitar work and washed-out vocals alongside a steady, motorik beat, until they build to the peak of a cathartic crescendo. After building up a wall of sound, Cafe Racer tears it back down, thanks to Michael Santana’s improvisational style of playing guitar.

Cafe Racer calls from generations of indie-rock and art-rock — The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, Sonic Youth, and Spacemen 3 all spring to mind — but the band also grounds their songwriting in contemporary culture that fits in with our anxiety-ridden times.

“Faces” is the first single of Cafe Racer’s upcoming record, Shadow Talk, on which Adam Schubert and Andrew Harper fill out the textures with jangly guitar playing. Their music almost goes beyond just listening — their walls of sound becomes fully immersive.

Part of this is due to the ever-steady rhythm section, provided by bassist Rob McWilliams and drummer Elise Poirier, who could very easily play alongside a Neu! record together. The rhythm is so steady that it's easy to get lost in a trance when listening to Cafe Racer.

The band has released two albums — their self-titled via Dumpster Tapes in 2016 and Famous Dust via Maximum Pelt in 2018 — and will release their third full-length off of another one of the citie's favorite indie labels, Born Yesterday Records, on May 8th on Born Yesterday Records.