Kai Slater is a twenty-year-old musician from Chicago, Illinois. He currently releases music solo as Sharp Pins and is guitarist and sometimes vocalist of the band Lifeguard. Lifeguard’s music is loud, dancy post-hardcore that’s guaranteed to make you want to kick something the moment you hear it. Sharp Pins’ music is jangly, life-affirming power pop, with sickeningly sweet melodies and harmonies galore. Kai is also a member of a new DIY rock scene in Chicago, which also includes bands like Horsegirl and TV Buddha. This is all documented in his zine, Hallogallo. Originally self-released in 2024, the latest Sharp Pins album, Radio DDR was rereleased by K Records on March 21^st, 2025, gaining new praise including a Pitchfork Best New Music. Lifeguard’s debut album, Ripped and Torn, is set to be released on June 6^th, 2025, through Matador Records. I got to speak to Kai after Sharp Pins opened for Stephen Malkmus’ band The Hard Quartet, at the Danforth Music Hall. We talked about how he got into music, making zines, organizing shows, politics in DIY music, and much more.

SA: There [are] so many songs that I love on the new [album], Radio DDR. It's so great to hear them live like this. The rendition of “Storma Lee” is really interesting, Kind of slower.

KS: It's been cool to translate the songs, stripped down to [their] bare necessities with the trio format. Especially with that one because I put a lot of stuff on that track.

SA: What was the process like recording that one?

KS: With the re-release of Radio DDR, I could add a few songs to the vinyl. “I Can't Stop,” that first one, I did it really quickly and off the cuff. “Storma Lee” was a song that I felt was a good contrast because it was a song that I had finished almost completely writing when I was seventeen and it was a song that I felt had a lot of room for creative direction and overdubs.

I recorded on cassette tape and did a lot of bouncing down so there's a lot more instruments than just eight. There's like fourteen harmonies and a lot of percussion and stuff like that.

SA: Oh, that was all done on [an] 8-track Portastudio?

KS: Yeah! I use the Tascam 688. It's so crazy doing eight tracks on cassette because you’re splitting fourths of inches on an eighth of an inch surface, so it's a miracle that it works at all, but every record I make I make on that for the most part.

SA: One of my friends has a four-track and we've been experimenting with that. We were trying to do bouncing. I think we were at five or six tracks and even that gets kind of grungy and…

KS: Fucked up sounding?

SA: Yeah!

KS: Yeah, I do a lot of four-track recording because the workflow of it is so intuitive to me, because there's only a certain level of tracks you can bounce together. The degradation gets so crazy. Unless you're going for a really degraded sound, which sometimes I do, but I love working with limitations because I'm kind of a perfectionist at heart. Having limitations and things that make the workflow more simple [sic] is great for me.

SA: I feel like your music wears its influences on its sleeves. With Lifeguard, it's very influenced by ‘80s, ‘90s hardcore [and] post punk, like Dischord type stuff. Sharp Pins, it's ‘60s Mod Pop and 70s Punk. This is all obscure, older music and you're a younger person. What was your music discovery evolution like?

KS: My parents were cool, but they weren’t musicians. My dad worked at the University of Chicago, and there was a record store in Hyde Park. I would just go there while my dad was teaching and check out records. I mean, CD's, not records. But yeah, I just picked a lot of records from the cover, like Rubber Soul and The Kids are Alright. 

SA: You discovered the punk stuff and all that [other] stuff, just from going to the record store? 

KS: Yeah, just the record store. And then I started playing bass guitar. And then I was in this really horrible pop punk band. It was very restrictive. So, I started looking towards much more crazy music. At that point I was really getting into garage rock, freakbeat and more psychedelic music. Far out stuff like Zappa and The Residents.

There was an explosion of just finding music. I really wanted [it] to take me to different places from the standard rock band format that I had been accustomed to in my first band. So, then I was like, “Well, I'm going to play guitar, cause bass is so limited.” I've since taken that statement back because bass is such an amazing instrument, but societally it's often not. I got a Wah-wah pedal, and my amp had a tremolo and a reverb on it, and I was just like WAWAWAW [psychedelic guitar noises] making psychedelic music in my room. Guided By Voices helped me hone in on a lot of things. I'm just a guy who is a nerd about music and you can tell, probably. 

I got really into Punk and similarly to how the Mod Revival happened in the late ‘70s, people got bored of boneheaded punk music, [though] I love boneheaded punk music. I got really inspired by The Jam, Television Personalities, The Times, Dolly Mixture. I’ve always been influenced by the Beatles and The Who. That was the core of what I was trying to write for a lot of my life, so I was like, I’ll try to hone in on that in my solo music.

SA: How did you start going to punk and DIY shows in Chicago?

KS:  I didn't that much before the pandemic because I was so young. I was like fourteen, fifteen, before the pandemic. During COVID, there was this need to create and then after that I was like, “Well, there's a need to share spaces and find DIY culture.” It really took a while after COVID to see DIY venues flourish and they're still getting back there. It's still not how it was before the pandemic. 

Yeah, it was just me and some friends in Horsegirl, and Lifeguard forming. We would find whatever we could play and meet other young people. There have been a lot of DIY venues that have come and [gone]. Right now, it's not the same as when I started. But yeah, as long as there's people like me that have the DIY mindset, it will keep going. It's self-sustaining in a really beautiful way.

SA: What are some of your favorite DIY Venues in Chicago?

KS: My favorite one is probably The Orphanage in Pilsen. It's kind of an anarchist squat that’s been going for a really long time, but it's come and go[ne]. It's often under threat of eviction because it's a squat in the sense that they don't pay rent and it's not legal, technically. Which is awesome because fuck landlords. They do amazing stuff. They do immigrant dinners, immigrants come in and they make dinners for other immigrants. They do book drives for prisoners. They have great values, they do the right things, and they put on great shows.

SA: Any memorable shows? Shows where interesting stuff happened?

KS: We just played a show at this place called Bricktown. It was the most people I'd ever seen crowdsurfing, I'd never seen that at one of my shows. And then this old guy came with his wife and started making out and throwing beer on us. And then Joe [Sharp Pins’ live bassist] started skating everywhere. It was just kind of a fever dream. 

I’m trying to think of good stories. I don’t know. Definitely not success stories of security guards finding people and being mean. We’re just excited if it works out, in general.

SA:  Along with the music you make, you have the Hallogallo Zine. I really love it. It's calling back to the zine culture from the ‘80s. What's the process of making one of those Zines?

KS: I don't use any computers, and I've been using Risograph mostly recently, just because my friend has one, Miguel. I just don't like doing computers because it looks bad and it's no fun, so I just put everything in a scanner and move it. Risograph is cool for adding colours and overlapping. I used to do it at UPS and just tell them “I’m making twenty copies” and then I'd make way more than twenty copies and they would get mad, so I stopped doing that. I've done it at home. I've done it a few ways. It just feels like the right thing to do. Printed matter is so important for revolutionary optimism and action because it goes through any type of censorship and that's really relevant, especially in America right now. 

SA: In the Hallogallo zine, you [present] a lot of activist groups. For the original release [of] Radio DDR, the proceeds went to the PCRF (Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund). What do you feel is the role of politics in DIY music?

KS:  At the basis of it, you’re existing outside of the capitalist time frame. Capitalist time is a concept I've always thought is powerful. When you're making independent music, you're bypassing the capitalist market because you’re disregarding “When should I put this out? Like when should I get…” You're just doing it. It's not the way to make money, which is obvious. It’s for other reasons, it's to reach people and to have a purpose.

There's way too much capitalist culture in musicians. It’s still all about getting signed to a big label and making as much money as you can. It's shocking how much people claim to be socialists and they're musicians and they sell out for lack of a better word. It's so important to exist outside of that culture, especially right now because we're under threat of fascism in a very real sense. Bypassing all of that is really important to me with everything I do.

SA: I think when you're talking about making things on a different time frame, it's based on use value, as Marx would say, instead of exchange value.

KS: All of this is based on this time frame that is created by the capitalist market and that exists with everything, and it totally exists with music and journalism. Zines and DIY music are a way to bypass that. If you're succeeding in DIY music, you're disregarding that and you're just doing your thing, and that's an incredibly revolutionary act.

Zines are also largely antithetical to journalism, 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?

SA: What is it like to organize shows? 

KS: I'm still under twenty-one so it's kind of the exact same as when I started. You don't have the same amount of respect that you get if you're an older musician. Even on this tour, some bigger venues talk down to you a lot. It's fine. We're still going to do what we're going to do and DIY venues are still where my heart is, as much as it’s fun to play bigger venues. 

I was playing this venue a few months ago in San Diego. It was a POC-run building, a lot of young people went there, they [had] abortion kits, and stuff for homeless people. Really important community needs. My grandparents came and they were like, “Well, you're gonna play bigger venues on this tour, right?” And I was like, “I don't really care, this is kind of what I do it for.” It's not really about the size, as fun as it is. It's nothing compared to actually being part of a community space like that.

[Now] it's a bit easier, getting a name out there, but venues are still pretty strict about the twenty-one-up thing. We did a show in San Francisco, and they kicked me out of the whole thing because I was under twenty-one. I could only go on stage and then I had to go off the rest of the time. So, I was outside, and I got a cold. Sometimes, it’s a struggle. But organizing shows with my friends in DIY spaces, I hope I can do that forever.

SA: I really love the songs on this album [Radio DDR]. Comparing it to your last album, Turtle Rock, how did your songwriting evolve? Were there any conscious decisions that you made?

KS: Both albums [were] written pretty differently. At the core of my songwriting, I usually start with [a] vocal melody because it feels like [a] window to my soul. I get a lot of ideas just from random phrases or ideas of words, or something someone says that's funny and that turns into a song. That's remained the same. My first record was more a recording project. I had three songs, and the rest I came up with as I was going along, like, “oh, I have these three songs, I'll write like a more folky song, or I’ll write a really weird song.” It was really a creative explosion. I felt really free because I was like “I’m solo I can do whatever”. This second one was much more thought out. The writing took a long time. [When] I usually write songs, I sit down and do it, but I had a whole year of playing solo shows after I did the first one. Every time I was like, “I should do a new song for the people that are here, so they have something new to listen to.” 

SA: What are your favorite spots in Chicago?

KS: I live around Logan Square. It's a really nice park; everyone goes there when it's warm. Hyde Park is where I grew up. Hyde Park Records was my record store as a kid. Village Discount Outlet is my favorite place to thrift clothes. The Orphanage in Pilsen. Humboldt Park, great place to get Cuban sandwiches and stuff. I love going to the lake. Yeah, Chicago's the best.

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You can buy Kai’s music on Bandcamp https://sharppins.bandcamp.com/album/radio-ddr, https://lifeguardband100.bandcamp.com/album/ripped-and-torn, or stream them on whatever streaming platform you use. You can also follow Kai on Instagram: @hallogalloinc.

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