Chicago Reader36%
Herr God summon righteous rage with slow-burning shoegaze 72%
By Monica Kendrick86%
7/24/2026, 8:10:00 AM
Keywords: Listings, Reader Recommended
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Recency Bias, and Negativity Bias, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 44.6% saturation with 135 hits. Analysis detected 977 faulty-reasoning hits from 303 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 58.6% and a BS Rank of 72% (7,285 of 25,730 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 71.70% of the article peer group.
Herr God are named after a line from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus,” which channels female rage and decries the patriarchal subjugation of women.
The Portland slowcore band’s dreamy, introspective songs contain a ferocity that lies dormant until summoned, as it is on “Wet Hair Cigarette,” one of the group’s two tracks on last year’s split EP with House of Warmth, *Dawn Summers Is Dead*.
It’s titled in tribute to the late actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who played the Lady Lazarus–like character Dawn Summers on the TV series *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*.
The band is primarily the project of front woman Chloe Gallardo, who moved from Southern California to Portland to participate in the city’s music scene.
Herr God made a soft splash in 2024 with their debut EP, *Grief and Calamity*, whose deeply personal, atmospheric songs were partly inspired by the tumult of emotion Gallardo experienced upon uprooting herself and starting fresh.
The roiling undercurrent of tension in “Jesus Candle in the Liquor Store” raises goose bumps and gives Gallardo’s incantations a prickly spine, “222” has a beat-driven swirl and spin, and the confessional “The Killer and the Caviar” tells a slow-burning tale of regret and yearning that leads up to the droning, elegiac closer, “Poem of a Dead Bird.”
Herr God’s latest single, the July release “Slow Green Water,” is a little masterpiece of droning shoegaze that packs a lot of power into just over two minutes.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it left me wanting more.
The band headline a stacked bill at Cole’s Bar that also includes three promising local acts: Widemouth, Indent, and Hearthands.
I expect we’ll hear much more greatness from Herr God in the future, so come out to catch them while they’re still getting started.
Analysis
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