Kali Masi

Kali Masi occupy a specific and valuable position in the Chicago punk ecosystem: a band with the urgency and speed of punk, the emotional architecture of emo, and the melodic instincts of indie rock, all filtered through a DIY sensibility that has kept them grounded in the scenes they came from. Vocalist and guitarist Sam Porter, alongside Anthony Elliott, John Garrison, and Wes Moore, built this sound in Chicago over the course of two acclaimed full-length records before a period of extended quiet that made their 2026 return feel genuinely meaningful.

Their 2017 debut, Wind Instrument, introduced the band's voice at full volume. "Her Palms Were Read," an early highlight performed on their Audiotree Live session, showed the combination of melodic ambition and punk directness that would define their catalog. The song arrived like proof that Kali Masi knew exactly what they were doing. "Some Friends," a 2017 single, carried the same energy: specific, emotional, reaching toward something honest about the social fabric that holds people together or fails to.

[laughs], released on March 26, 2021, through Take This To Heart Records, represented a significant step forward. Thematically organized around self-empowerment and identity, the album pushed their songwriting into more complex territory without losing the kinetic energy that made the debut compelling. "Guilt Like a Gun" arrived as a pre-release single via Stereogum, described at the time as moody and churning, a signal of the album's emotional terrain. "Trophy Deer" and other tracks on [laughs] confirmed a band that had used the years between records to develop something more ambitious.

Then five years passed. In the interim, Sam Porter and the rest of the band were quiet publicly while the broader scene they helped define continued to grow around them. The return came in May 2026 with "Searching for a Sunbeam," recorded at Headroom Studios in Philadelphia during the summer of 2025, produced and engineered by Joe Reinhart, and mixed by Dave Alcan and Jay Maas. The credits themselves tell a story about the care invested in the record. Reinhart has worked with some of the most compelling bands in this corner of the American underground, and his involvement with Kali Masi speaks to the seriousness with which they approached the return.

"Searching for a Sunbeam" as a title is characteristic of what Kali Masi has always done: take something difficult and look for the light inside it, not naively but with clear eyes and a melody that makes the searching worthwhile. Chicago made them. The rest has been proof.