We’re celebrating Best of the Bay 2026 with a multitude of Editors’ Picks of things we love. Please join us at our 13th Annual Gala on October 27 to celebrate even more!
San Francisco is known for expanding sonic tropes. Mike Schulman’s one-man operation Slumberland Records has built up a 21st-century mini-empire of an imprint that involves him working with his friends and represents the Bay Area now with its fog-pop fixation and indie-jangle twang, advertising to the world the types of bands you can see on a Wednesday night at any independent venue in the Tenderloin, The Mish, or North Beach/Chinatown.
Listen, Fog City remains a real fickle cross-pollination of a metropolis when it comes to the music that it represents. Like its weather patterns, the Bay Area is flush with microclimates—bass-heavy hip-hop from the East Bay, chillaxed or very intense electronic music flowing from the Western Addition down to the slower Haight—and so much history surrounding the Grateful Dead’s mysticism that it has made Haight-Ashbury a rite of passage for Deadheads worldwide, where that monetized fascination has turned Golden Gate Park and the bordering environs into a $200 million bonanza in tourism for the city over the past couple of years.
Yet, Slumberlands’ bands and sounds operate outside the moneybelt; that’s where the art thrives.
From the way Glenn Donaldson presents his album cover art for his band The Reds, Pinks & Purples‘ creations, so close to the way the big little town of San Francisco looks in the Richmond district, you can smell those magnolias blooming just beneath the frame as he spins yarns about bands, artists, and writers who had to leave SF on Greyhound, returning to small towns anywhere in the USA because they couldn’t cut it.
Or observe The Umbrellas, with their winsome, heart-on-sleeve presentation—even if it’s a bit difficult at times to make out what Matt Ferrera is exactly enunciating with that grave baritone. Formed in 2018, the festive four-piece has associations with the almighty San Francisco vinyl record consortium, Amoeba Music, but in concert and on wax maintains that identifiable aesthetic of ripping solos, squelching feedback, and playful energy.
Or Chime School, the solo project of San Franciscan Andy Pastalaniec—former drummer for the now-defunct Seablite—a melodic, perfectly Fogust-appropriate guitar-pop entity initially created using a gifted cassette four-track portastudio “almost as a dare,” by and from his partner, compelling him to step out of the drum kit and into the spotlight. Dares advance progress, right? That launch manifested and bespoke an ongoing, ceaseless, bountiful, many-sided Bay Area jangle-friendly movement.
Add to this treasure trove of soundscapes: reissues such as 2025’s Evolver, from the Oakland outfit Lunchbox, which at times feels like Stereolab’s Dots and Loops, but cooked, boiled, and simmered just a bit longer, so the sound, aka flavor, goes more experimental than conventional.
Yes, the Slumberland imprint tells a bit of a different tale from these mist-swept area codes. Something a bit more daily and “chill” from the area that actually feels like an early winter come 4th of July in Alamo Square Park.
