Ten Years of Sooper Records, the Basement Label That Ate Chicago

Ten years ago, two Chicago multi-hyphenates named NNAMDÏ and Sen Morimoto started a cassette label out of the city's DIY basements, mostly as a way to put out their own weird, uncategorizable music without asking anyone's permission. Sooper Records is now in its tenth year, its roster reaches both coasts, and on August 22 the label throws itself a 10th-anniversary blowout at the Empty Bottle with Iris Temple on top. It is, quietly, one of the most Chicago success stories in independent music.

Sooper's whole identity is the refusal to pick a lane. This is a label whose catalog runs from Morimoto's cinematic art-pop to NNAMDÏ's genre-blender rap-rock to KAINA's soul, to Brooklyn's Grammy-decorated Water From Your Eyes, to the bedroom-folk of This Is Lorelei and the crunch of veteran rockers Pile. The connective tissue is not a sound; it is a sensibility — restless, funny, allergic to being told what a "Chicago artist" is supposed to make. FLOOD Magazine once observed that Sooper's founders "wind up succeeding as activists without thinking too much about it," and that phrase does a lot of work. NNAMDÏ was named a Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune in 2020 for exactly that kind of unglamorous, off-stage community work.

The timing of the anniversary is almost too on-the-nose. Three weeks before the Empty Bottle party, on August 2, Water From Your Eyes headline that very same room as a Lollapalooza aftershow — a Sooper act playing the Bottle on the strength of a national festival booking, then the label returning to the Bottle to celebrate a decade of making that kind of moment possible. If you wanted a single venue to tell the story of Chicago independent music in 2026, you could do a lot worse than 1035 N. Western in August.

What Sooper proves is that the old Chicago virtues still scale. Start small, stay weird, put your friends' records out, take the long view, and treat the city not as a launchpad to somewhere else but as the whole point. The label never had a mission statement grander than "release music we love," and ten years later that has quietly produced one of the deepest, most genuinely diverse rosters in American indie.

So go to the Empty Bottle on the 22nd. Watch Iris Temple. Buy a record from a label that started in a basement and never once pretended to be from anywhere but here. Then go home and put on something from the catalog you have never heard of — statistically, given this roster, there is a lot of it, and statistically, you are going to love it.

Sources: Sooper Records — About; Empty Bottle on Do312