Dicot, Disaster Kid, Cause & Control

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Dan Stewart

The four members of Disaster Kid in a pine forest.

Disaster Kid

Chicago-based quartet Disaster Kid features the songs of Seamus Kreitzer, set to amiably country-fried rock music. The band’s bio calls their new EP, Rare Bird, “a collection of notices and observations,” and that’s an apt description; songs like EP opener “Interstate Runner” feel like a moment in a life transformed into something universal and instantly familiar. With a pair of Madison projects: grungey-shoegazey Dicot (who released their own excellent EP, Like You Don’t Know, last October) and emo-adjacent heavy rockers Cause & Control (also with a solid recent EP, Coyote).

media release: Chicago indie rock artist Disaster Kid recently released their EP Rare Bird  and will be on tour later this month, taking the twangy rock quartet out to Madison's Mickey's Tavern on Thursday, 4/24 along with Dicot and Cause & Control. 

Rare Bird is a collection of notices and observations. Each song was written with meticulous patience, allowing songwriter Seamus Kreitzer to stitch together prose to completion, like pulling a ball of thread until it’s all laid out. Lyrically, Rare Bird stems from ideas, writings, and journal entries from as early as 2020. Rare Bird’s conceptually inspired by attempting to digest the present moment in an attention-demanding world and pinpointing the small details that sometimes strike us in large ways.

The EP’s voice is not only shaped by the musicians involved but also by the places that cultivated its creation. Old Town School of Folk Music became the host to many writing/practice sessions allowing the EP to take shape. In April 2024, the band (Seamus Kreitzer, Connor Criswell, and Mason Stahl) set off with longtime collaborator, producer and engineer Andrew Tereick to a cabin owned by a mutual friend’s family in northern Wisconsin where the EP would be recorded. After five days of recording, the band left their reclusive makeshift studio feeling accomplished and grateful to be creating with their closest friends. Over the next few weeks, the EP went through final overdubs and additions made by newest member, Max Berg, and soon after mixed by Andrew Tereick and mastered by Mike Altergott.

The EP was just recommended by the Chicago Reader, and Chicago blog Third Coast Review wrote in a review the opener "Interstate Runner" is "destined to earn a place as the soundtrack to an indie film road scene in the next five years." Indie-rock blog Rosy Overdrive wrote, "there’s a delicate side to Kreitzer’s writing that gives the EP a unique spin" and "Rare Bird is as good as it is because of the strong reading the group give to Kreitzer’s words and melodies."