In 2023, Chicago singer-songwriter, journalist, and performance artist Kira Leadholm released her first album with the new project Madame Reaper. Madame Reaper’s Gentlemen’s Club creates a mysterious fictional backstory about a murderous strip-club owner, and its atmospheric, seductive music draws on 40 years of postpunk and synth pop. Leadholm’s clear, radiant voice and imaginative persona-shifting evoke the likes of Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Siouxsie Sioux, and sometimes Lady Gaga—if Gaga had remained accessible to regular folks at the club. Leadholm and her collaborator and partner, guitarist Kevin Sheppard, write catchy, infectious melodies, and with an extra push from Leadholm’s poignant lyrics, they sink their hooks deep in your heart.
Madame Reaper’s brand-new second album is called This Is an Album Because the Industry Says It’s Not. Whatever the industry has to say, it feels like a cohesive record to me. “Satanic Tango” flirts with flamenco, and its playful sounds and spicy themes remind me a little of Ann Magnuson’s 1995 cabaret classic “Sex With the Devil.” “Feast” tackles street harassment with an icy, deceptively cheerful-sounding veneer atop a current of simmering rage, while “Falling Apart Again (It’s)” and “Gluing Myself Back Together (Not)” address trauma in haunting laments that could play alongside Julee Cruise tracks on an episode of Twin Peaks. Leadholm’s strong songwriting threads the needle between personal pain and a world that makes hurt inevitable and healing difficult, on a political scale as well as an individual one. “Utopia (The Industry)” is an impish-sounding cry for clarity in a climate designed to obscure truth, with a spirit similar to Leadholm’s sentiments in an Atwood Magazine guest column for Women’s History Month: “Be f*ing angry, and then channel it into doing something productive. No one is coming to save us; we have to save ourselves.” From the wrong mouth, that could come off as an empty platitude, but Madame Reaper has a great skill set to be a cheerleader for resistance: She’s unapologetically upbeat but under no illusions.
Madame Reaper Liska and Miss Misery open. Fri 4/11, 8:30 PM, the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $15, $12 in advance, 21+
