Kelsey Montanez

Guitar at fourteen, songs written behind a closed door

Montanez is from Chicago and has never really worked anywhere else. She picked up a guitar at fourteen and learned piano mainly as a writing tool rather than a performing one, and in a 2013 interview she described composing alone in her apartment bedroom, preferring nobody within earshot while a song was still being assembled. The record she named as a childhood fixture was Fiona Apple's Tidal; Adele was the other reference point she offered, and among contemporaries she pointed to Lianne La Havas and Lana Del Rey. That combination — a confessional writer with a large-voiced pop instinct — accounts for most of what she has put out since.

The economics around it were ordinary. She has held a string of unrelated jobs to fund the music, including a stint at a bingo hall in Oklahoma, and the Chicago club circuit rather than any industry machinery is where the craft was actually built. Venue copy still files her as one of Chicago's best kept secrets, which is flattering and also an accurate summary of a career spent almost entirely inside one city's small rooms, with a sound variously described as blues, pop and psychedelia depending on which single a writer heard first.

A contract, a Chance verse, then silence

Her first release was the four-track EP A Delightful Sadness, which appeared in late 2012. It did enough to bring a record contract and the sort of local profile that gets a new name onto Chicago radio: she was played on KISS FM and POWER 92, appeared on both The Voice and American Idol, and worked her way onto stages at Metro and the House of Blues. The most durable artefact of that stretch is Out of Sight, a track featuring Chance the Rapper, cut when he was a Chicago teenager rather than a national name.

Then the releases stopped. Nothing new came out for the better part of a decade, a gap long enough that every piece written about her since 2022 opens with it. She has not built a grievance narrative out of the lost years, and the published accounts of what happened are thin. What restarted the work, by the account given around her return, was heartbreak during pandemic isolation — which produced not a confessional ballad but a run of guitar records.

Rebuilding in singles, 2022 to 2025

The comeback was deliberately incremental: singles rather than an announcement. Four arrived in 2022 — Let Me Love You, Everything is Fine, I Sold My Soul and Rolling Stone — followed by Right Time To Win and Mr. Crybaby in 2023, Infinite Bloom and Kick the Habit in 2024, and Everly, All There Is and River of Light in 2025. The pacing suited someone paying for her own sessions and tracking musicians separately rather than booking a studio block.

I Sold My Soul, reviewed in January 2023, was the oldest song in the batch: she wrote it in high school, during her MySpace years, and said the concept was still a feeling she wrestled with regularly. The doo-wop-tilted arrangement and pedal-effect guitar on that record set the pattern of taking an old idea and giving it a harder finish. Kick the Habit, out in September 2024, pushed further — country-western verses with slide guitar collapsing into an electric chorus — and reviewers at the time described it as the eighth track of an album in progress. Everly, in March 2025, was billed as the ninth, and went the other way: disco-inflected, synth-lit indie pop built for dancing rather than brooding.

All There Is, released on 6 June and reviewed later that month, was the most straightforwardly bright thing she had issued — jangling guitars, hard drums, and a lyric she summed up as being about choosing the life that makes you feel alive even if it does not look perfect on paper. By September 2026 a reviewer was referring to All There Is as her debut album rather than a single, which is the clearest public signal that the long-trailed record had landed under that title. Live work in this period was similarly unglamorous: she played Chicago's NASCAR street race in heavy rain to a small crowd dancing in bin bags and ponchos, and wrote a song called Dancing in the Rain out of it.

Big Machine, and the turn towards a band

The 2026 releases mark a tonal shift. High Speed Lover came first; Big Machine followed in September, produced by Noam Wallenberg, and is the darkest thing in her catalogue — western-tinted guitar figures, a cinematic sense of movement and unease, and a subject that circles money, consumption and power without resolving into explicit politics. It keeps a kind of classic-rock swagger while leaving a lot of empty space in the arrangement, which is new for her.

On 28 September 2026, in a Car Con Carne episode recorded outside an Evanston Starbucks, Montanez set out where that was heading: a band called CHANNELS, a three-piece with players she named as Hannah and Jesse, pitched somewhere between Interpol, Queens of the Stone Age and Hole. She described the group coming together through playing, long arguments about ideas, and a shared interest in tarot, which is a more honest origin story than most. Studio sessions were under way, the next single was named as Isolation, and she talked about putting the band in front of audiences at rooms including the Cubby Bear.

That pivot reframes the solo singles as a long apprenticeship rather than a stalled comeback. The heavier, more experimental material is where the writing appears to be going, and Isolation is the test of whether CHANNELS becomes a catalogue rather than a side project.

Where she stands, November 2026

There is one date on sale: 6 November 2026 at the Cubby Bear in Wrigleyville, a four-act bill tagged rock, country and pop, with Cat Merkle at the top, and The Animal second, Montanez third and J-Line opening. That is the shape of her touring now — shared local bills rather than a run of her own headline shows. The comparable gig in February 2025 was at Reggies' Banananas Shack, doors at seven and music at eight, ten to fifteen dollars, over-21s, alongside The Alright Maybes, Aly Jados and Mario McClean with Andrye hosting.

Her press is almost entirely independent blogs and Chicago outlets; there are no chart placings, awards or national reviews to report, and no dates outside Illinois on sale. What she has instead is fifteen years of the same city's rooms, a dozen singles released in four years after a decade of nothing, and a band to put behind them.