With a tight grip in every rep within their split, Stuck have been hitting the gym and it shows on their sophomore album, Optimizer. No offense to the Chicago trio, but there are only so many ways you can bend the post-punk angle bar heard within their solid debut, Freak Frequency, before it begins to plateau, and by integrating heavier lifts into their sets, the trio have added some healthy, noise rock-hard muscle mass to their frame.

All of that said, Optimizer goes a lot harder than any other Stuck effort to date. The opening riffs on “Totally Vexed” are a bad omen to come, and that runs right through the grind behind closer “GG”, which drags everything before it into the ground. To get there, they recorded the effort at the iconic Electric Audio in Chicago — the house which legendary recording engineer and noise rock auteur Steve Albini built. It’s not just in the way this album sounds like it’s in his signature bold-face stomp, but they’re channeling the stylings of Shellac and Big Black, right down to the album title mirroring one of his own.

As with any Albini-istic work, at its core, humanity is viewed in decline. The listen imagines the current state of the world as one big commercial gym filled with people who are being brain-rotted by junk content and pulled into the latest influencer grift, all the while pursuing their own self-betterment behind its walls. There’s very much a huge overlap in the Venn diagram between fitness culture, influencer culture, and the atrophy of society (and art) going on out there. The screen-centered dystopia of “Deadlift” is dead on with that. 

Don’t mistake this for some kind of hyper-aggro workout listen, however. If there’s one thing vocalist and guitarist Greg Obis, bassist David Algrim, and drummer Tim Green are still, uh, stuck on, it’s that powering through the everyday drain that is our reward for being born on this timeline is a fete of strength with itself. “Instakill” and “Less Is More” twist sardonic, morbid egg-punk with blistered crashouts as best they can with fraying tethers. The hooks exploding throughout the world-stewing motions of “Sicko”, and “Fire, Man” are reminders that the novel advice to work on yourself doesn’t mean letting the rest of the world off the hook from doing so either. What’s left staring back at Stuck in the posing room mirror is Optimizer being the best version of themselves in spite of everything.

Highlights: “Deadlift”, “Fire, Man”, “GG”

Stuck’s Optimizer is available now on Exploding In Sound Records.

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