There is a particular kind of American rock and roll band that understands the form not as nostalgia or as escape but as a way of thinking out loud about the country that produced it, a band whose stomp and clap energy carries within it a genuine intelligence about what it means to be living in this specific place at this specific moment in its long and complicated history. Trickshooter Social Club, the roots-rock band from Chicago, is exactly this kind of band, and Porchlight Pie, the five-track EP released May 14, 2026, is their latest demonstration that whiskey-soaked and world-weary American rock can be oddly literate without losing an ounce of its physical power, that you can have a conscience and still make the meekest indie kid get worked up over a riff.
The band is led by guitarist Larry Liss and frontman Steve Simoncic, who drifted together after years of playing in various bands around Chicago and write all of Trickshooter’s songs. The origin story they tell carries the specific texture of the kind of authentic creative environment that produces genuine art, late-night sessions in a recording studio scented with the studio owner’s girlfriend making tacos, punctuated by the sound of nightly meth-induced shouting matches, the chaos and the realness of the environment inspiring Liss and Simoncic to develop a storyline of edgy Americana that The Social Club then brings additional musical flavor to. This is not the sanitized origin story of a manufactured band but the genuine account of music made in the actual conditions where genuine music gets made, the mess and the noise and the human reality being the soil that the songs grew from.
The mosaic of roots and alt-country and blues that defines Trickshooter’s sound is what they accurately describe as garage rock with a conscience, the garage rock energy providing the physical immediacy and the conscience providing the literate world-weariness that distinguishes the band from the more straightforwardly party-oriented end of the roots-rock spectrum. The Daily Herald captured the band’s central preoccupation precisely, the thinking of America as an experiment and an idea, complicated and messy and violent and ugly and beautiful and sublime all at once, living in really interesting and volatile times. This is the intellectual and emotional territory that Trickshooter inhabits, the band’s music being a sustained engagement with the American experiment in all its contradiction rather than a retreat from it.
We’re Better When We’re Broken opens the EP with a title that functions as a kind of thesis statement, the paradoxical assertion that brokenness is not simply a condition to be repaired but potentially a source of value, that the cracks are where the genuine humanity lives. This is a deeply American idea in some ways, the country’s own self-mythology being built around the redemption of the flawed and the second chances of the fallen, and Trickshooter’s opening track activates this theme with the kind of supercharged energy that BackSeatMafia identified in the band’s work, the riff and guitar work that gets even the meekest of indie kids worked up. The brokenness being celebrated is not despair but the acknowledgment that the perfect and the unbroken are frequently the least interesting and the least genuinely alive.
Wide Awake follows with the quality of heightened consciousness that its title suggests, the state of being fully present and fully aware in a culture that frequently rewards the opposite, the sleepwalking through life that allows the difficult realities to remain comfortably unexamined. For a band whose central concern is the honest examination of the American experiment, wide awake is the necessary condition, the alertness that the volatile times demand, and the track carries the energy of someone who has chosen to see clearly rather than to drift through in comfortable semi-consciousness. The contagious rhythms that Rawckus identified in the band’s work are the vehicle through which this alertness is communicated, the body woken up by the music as the mind is woken up by the content.
Slower Horses brings a change of pace and a different quality of reflection, the title evoking the choice of the unhurried over the frantic, the deliberate over the rushed, perhaps the wisdom of slowing down in a culture that valorizes speed above almost everything else. The image of slower horses carries the western and the rural American resonance that the band’s roots and alt-country influences draw on, the horse being the icon of a particular American mythology and the slowing of it being a kind of resistance to the acceleration that characterizes contemporary life. There is world-weariness in the choice of slower horses, the perspective of someone who has been moving fast enough for long enough to understand the value of a different pace.
Poppy and Harriet carries what sounds like the most personal and most narrative quality of the EP, the proper names suggesting specific characters and a specific story rather than the more thematic territory of the surrounding tracks. The name also evokes Pappy and Harriet’s, the legendary Pioneertown venue in the California high desert that has become a touchstone for roots and Americana music, and whether the reference is intentional or coincidental it places the track within the geography of the American music tradition that Trickshooter is working within. The storytelling impulse that Liss and Simoncic bring to their songwriting finds in named characters the specificity that makes the broader themes land, the American experiment being made concrete through the particular people who live inside it.
Jericho closes the EP with the biblical weight of its title, the city whose walls famously fell to the sound of trumpets and shouting, the image of barriers collapsing under the force of sound and collective will being a fitting closing gesture for a band whose stomp and clap energy is itself a kind of sonic force directed against walls. Jericho carries the theme of redemption that Trickshooter always leaves room for, the falling of the walls being both destruction and liberation, the old barriers coming down to make way for whatever comes after. The placement of this track at the EP’s conclusion gives Porchlight Pie an arc that moves toward the collapse of barriers and the possibility of what lies beyond them.
Trickshooter Social Club’s live reputation, built across stages from the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago to Pianos in New York to the Whiskey a Go-Go in Los Angeles, and through performances alongside national touring acts including Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members, reflects a band that has earned its standing the way roots-rock bands have always earned it, through the actual work of playing rooms and winning over crowds night after night. Their roster of regular Chicago venues, the House of Blues and Club Metro and Lincoln Hall, marks them as a genuine institution of the Chicago scene, and the support from Nick Digulio on WGN Radio alongside the music blog coverage demonstrates the kind of grassroots recognition that sustains a band across the long haul.
The list of artists Trickshooter is recommended for, from Wilco and Social Distortion through The Black Keys and Tom Petty and Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, maps the territory the band occupies, the intersection of roots-rock energy and literate songwriting and genuine American consciousness that all of those artists in their different ways have inhabited. Porchlight Pie is five tracks of evidence that Trickshooter belongs in that conversation, garage rock with a conscience served warm on the porch with room for redemption.
