#freak frequency

The sound is tight and disciplined and full of agitated doom, not that far off from Protomartyr but spikier and more architectural. A band that got its start during the worst of COVID sees trouble everywhere, and keeps it at bay with relentless, four-four battery. If they just keep going, keep slamming, keep shouting, keep tangling desolate lyrics in pogo-ing ecstasies, it won’t happen again. Will it? “They’ve got good news,” Obis yowls in “The Punisher,” “There’s new life springing from a death cult.”

Stuck came, er, unstuck from Chicago’s feverish punk underground in late 2018 with a Three Song EP, which featured just three of the current line-up (Obis, drummer Tim Green and additional guitarist Donny Walsh). They emerged in their present form about a year later on the People Pleaser EP, adding David Algrim on bass, then started to really get some traction with the full-length Change Is Bad in early 2020 (which was, in retrospect, not the best time to be building up a head of steam). Freak Frequency is the second LP full-length, and holy moly, it’s a banger, a 37-minute continuous anxiety attack that makes you want to dance and break things. Possibly at the same time. Possibly not.

The title track is the best thing about it, all corrosive propulsion and sirening guitars, and, in the best part, Obis hurling the phrase “again and again and again and again” out into the void. It turns out that the “freak frequency” in question is a shepherd’s tone, a pair of sine waves separated by octaves. The tone operates as a sort of auditory moebius band; it seems to ascend along a scale, but somehow gets no higher or lower. (This will make more sense if you hear it.) The idea of continual motion with no actual progress can, of course, resonate in any number of ways, not least with this band’s furious flail against all aspects of being Stuck.