The (partial) new direction of Brain Graffiti Zine

We Weren’t Invited live at a Bricktown show (put on by us!) on April 12, 2025.

Since starting this project, we’ve been able to do a lot of cool things in the music scene, including show promoting, meeting new people, working with bands that we really admire, traveling around the Midwest, and- most importantly- connecting with people through music. No matter what we do with Brain Graffiti, we always push towards a connection through music and building a community around safe, inclusive music spaces that act as havens for self-expression. That is the scene that we both fell in love with, and with many spaces in the suburbs going away for different reasons, we hope that our shows can continue that feeling.

With the summer coming up and a lot of shows booked on our end, we aren’t stopping any of our momentum. With Issue #4 in the works as we speak, we also wanted to get back into utilizing our Substack as a way to get more content out.

We had this cool grand idea of having our Substack operate as a free DIY newsroom writing on the happenings in Chicago’s scene as well as across the Midwest, and this is the direction that we hope to take with it this summer. There are hundreds and hundreds of bands and talents that we want to highlight and we see our Substack as a way to do that with our zine acting as the bigger, quintessential achievement.

Here are some new things to expect from us in summer 2025: 

1. (Hopefully) weekly stories on our FREE Substack, ranging from feature stories to personal essays, opinions and how-to’s.

2. A lot of shows across Chicago and the suburbs.

3. Annoying memes on our Instagram.

4. Brain Graffiti Zine being sold in a bunch of record stores across the Midwest.

With the addition of our Substack, it is important to point out that our physical zine is not going away anytime soon. We see Substack as a semi-virtual way for people to get interested in buying our zine, as that is the quintessential way to support us besides going to a show.

We will try our best to keep up with these points, as we are both in school and will have two jobs on top of Brain Graffiti. We are both still young and able to put this amount of work on top of us, so we’re excited to see where it goes.