The Whole Music Club will welcome Freak Slug and Huron John Saturday night, two relatively niche indie acts who are still nothing to sneeze at.
The British indie rocker, real name Xenya Genovese, will be playing in support of her debut album, “I Blow Out Big Candles,” which came out last November. Its deluxe edition, subtitled “(But With A Cherry On Top),” dropped earlier this month.
With the support of a larger budget and more production capabilities, “Big Candles” is a radical departure from the bedroom pop sound that first earned Freak Slug 15 minutes of fame when her 2020 single “Radio” blew up on TikTok.
Instead, the artist adopts an ethos of following her intuition no matter what, according to Still Listening Magazine, yielding a debut record that’s delightfully eclectic, authentic and just plain fun.
“If people come to the show, they won’t find it difficult to become enraptured by the hypnotic sounds of Freak Slug’s new take on the indie genre,” Whole event planner Maddy Wittmers-Graves said in an email.
A Freak Slug fan themself, Wittmers-Graves named “Piece of Cake” and “Radio” as favorites.
“Piece of Cake,” which is also the artist’s favorite from “Big Candles,” laments dating people who seem attractive, but who are actually nothing good.
It begins with a sunny, saxophone-accented sound, but devolves into a heavier, rock-forward middle section with a backing track of the artist’s sobs — a microcosm of the album’s best sounds.
Opening track “Ya Ready” provides a similar experience. A gentle intro featuring acoustic guitar and saxophone transforms into something slower, harder and grungier that fans of Blondshell will appreciate.
Freak Slug leans into edginess on “Ya Ready” by adding vocal distortion and singing with her real British accent. She lets the freak in her moniker shine through, an energy she brings to the entire album.
Expect similar experimentation from Chicago-born, Nashville-based opener Huron John, whose two-disc opus “Indigo Jack & The New World Border” came out last February.
Huron John, aka John Conradi, produced, wrote and engineered his entire discography himself, a commitment to creative freedom that has yielded true genre-fluidity.
Like Freak Slug, Huron John goes where the musical winds blow him. “Indigo Jack” features both the funkadelic “BLOOD DIAMOND RING” and the more electronic “CALDERA.”
It’s difficult to find early-career artists with as much sophistication as Huron John, but he pulls it off gracefully.
The Whole has done an excellent job of booking exciting acts to visit the University of Minnesota. Rising indie stars Indigo De Souza and Sorry Mom graced us with their presence in the fall, and now with Freak Slug, it’s surprising to hear how easy the booking process seems to be.
“The student staff give names they would like to plan a show around, and mostly have free reign on who they pick, so there’s a lot more freedom with these types of shows,” Wittmers-Graves explained. “We’ve noticed that the indie/punk genres have been really popular lately, and those interests also happen to align with what our student staff are passionate about!”
It’s refreshing to see a space on campus run by direct student input, and the possibilities of who could play the Whole next seem endless.
Student tickets for the show are $5, while general public tickets are $10. They can be purchased here.
