Last year, the Sun-Times ran a splashy feature about Chicago’s booming rock scene, which seems to want to lump together every successful local guitar band formed in the past decade, regardless of style. As a common denominator, it offers the fact that all these groups have signed to reputable labels—and it glibly suggests that this hasn’t happened on such a scale since Billboard anointed Chicago the next Seattle in 1993. “Now, 30 years later, could it be happening all over again?” the story asks.

The thing is, it wasn’t the industry attention that made the old Wicker Park scene interesting. And in the 2020s, label deals just don’t say as much as they used to about a band’s popularity. True, when major-label A&R reps descended on Chicago en masse in the early 90s, they encouraged a f

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