by Mariah Noonie (@mariahnoonie)
Chicago four-piece Stuck is a torrent of biting guitar riffs and desperate vocals twisted and held together by a precise, curious rhythm section. Their stripped-down and raw approach is evident and effective on their debut album, Change is Bad, which was released on April 3, 2020. It is available through Born Yesterday Records.
I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with them via video chat.
Mariah Noonie: Were y’all playing a lot of shows before you recorded Change is Bad?
Greg Obis (vocals, guitar): We did play the record [live] for about a year beforehand.
Tim Green (drums): We were pretty much playing every song from the record before we even recorded it.
Greg: We went on tour with Pile in November [2019], which was a couple months after we recorded it, just for like a week. I feel like our live stuff came together pretty quickly, faster than most bands I’ve been in. I love playing live. For me it’s been fun because I’ve been doing a lot more goofball stuff on stage and having fun with it.
David Algrim (bass): I think this band in particular is kind of made for that setting. It’s really fun, it’s really energetic. I joined this band and haven’t played bass in another project beforehand. Playing bass in this band in particular has been really fun and rewarding, especially during the live shows. I usually play guitar and have to think a lot more or as a singer, do something else with it. But this is like eating a candybar, it’s very comfortable.
Tim: Once as a band we started to get more tight and, like Greg said, just goofing a little bit more, our live energy started, I don’t know, I feel like I feed off of everyone else. If everyone else is going crazy on the stage, I do the same.
Donny Walsh (guitar): I miss that.
Greg: For me, a big influence on the band from the beginning, or what I had envisioned a band being, was Jesus Lizard. I saw them play at the Metro a couple months before I started writing stuff for the band. I don’t think I’m anywhere near the front person that David Yow is, but I’ve always wanted to be in a band that had a fun and energetic live presence and not have to dial it in.
Mariah: Do you structure the songs so that you don’t have to overplay guitar as much live or could drop out if you wanted to?
Greg: Yeah, I’m always trying to shovel off the harder parts to Donny. When we wrote “Wrong Question” I think that was the first time we had a moment in the song where there were vocals without me playing guitar, and that allowed me to do some kind of very punky, Jello Biafra things, and I think we started trying to find ways to integrate more of that into each song, so like I can moonlight as a hardcore frontperson or something.
Tim: I keep telling Greg that for “Dimed” we should just lose his guitar, because it’s sort of just a one-guitar song for the most part.
David: We’ve had a long-running sort of joke, sort of not joke, about Greg no longer playing guitar and just being the standalone front person.
Greg: I don’t know if I’d really be good at it. That’s the thing. I want to not play guitar anymore and just sing, but I don’t know if I’d be good at it. At the same time, a lot of things in this band I decided [to do] because it’s things I hadn’t tried before or didn’t know were gonna work. I don’t know. Maybe now’s the time to do that.
Tim: You can practice in front of the mirror, man!
Greg: Yeah. I won’t even play shows! I won’t even write any of the music anymore. I’ll just sing along.
David: I remember when I joined, I wasn’t there for the beginning of the band, your big talking point about, “I just want to play guitar in a band.” And then a few months later you’re like, “I don’t want to play anything!”
Greg: It’s only a matter of time until I refuse to be in the band at all.
David: The band guide.
Mariah: You could just be a conductor and orchestrate everything.
Greg: I did that in college a couple times. I wrote a couple pieces of music that I conducted, and that was super fun, but it was super goofy, though. It was very undergrad.
Mariah: Did y’all hangout all of the time before quarantine started?
David: I mean, we toured and practiced on a regular basis. It went from a group of people meeting two or three times a week to none.
Tim: I wasn’t friends with any of you guys before this band. Me and Greg were introduced through our mutual friend Ben, who was in the band originally, and then Donny joined, and then David. Now we’re all friends, I would say.
Greg: And we’re not gonna be friends after the band, either!
Tim: I hope not! [laughs]
David: You’re catching us in a golden era.
Mariah: Change is Bad has the consistency and idiosyncrasy on the level of the first Metz album or any given Protomartyr record. Each of these tracks, to me, sort of compounds on the last to solidify and strengthen the overall themes and feeling of the album—you know, these ideas of helplessness and determinism that I think the majority of people have been having for years now and that are only being heightened lately. Did you start out working on these songs with this as sort of the goal or was this just naturally what y’all were going through?
Greg: I think that was definitely what we set out to do. It’s kind of funny, I think at some point when we were writing the record that sort of vision came into view. It’s interesting with a first record from a band, because it’s like, you know, some of the early things we wrote like “Wrong Question” and “Era,” were us figuring out what our sound and aesthetic even was. I think those songs really touched on those feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness. I think, over time, it seemed to become clear that was what, for me at least, I wanted to be writing about and exploring. Every other band I’ve been in before, I don’t think we’ve ever had a really clear—well, I don’t know, I’ve never been in a band where I was writing the music where I had a really clear vision of what I wanted the final product to kind of be, and so I think when I saw the opportunity to tie some threads together between songs and have more of a theme, I just went for it. I think the group is all kind of on the same page in terms of the themes, as well as everybody playing weird dissonant shit. [laughs]
David: The overall tone I feel like is set [by Greg]. Most of us have a structural input more so than the content. That’s very much Greg’s wheelhouse: the content, the tone, the lyrics, and all that. I don’t feel like I can really comment on like, “What’s the tone of the record?”
Tim: I feel like a lot of the tone is just from Greg’s lyrics, too, even outside of how we sound sonically.
Mariah: I found the album on a road trip, and it gave me those same feelings without me knowing what most of the lyrics were. But once I started dissecting the lyrics, really reading and rereading them, that only brought those feelings out more. Like the lyrics and y’all’s playing reinforce each other.
David: I think we accentuate that thing.
Tim: Even just listening to Greg’s early demos, even the songs that didn’t change a ton, it still sounds so much different when everyone plays their parts.
David: To go back to the studio, we didn’t change too much about the actual content, but a lot of the studio is more like tones and textures and making it a specific thing. We recorded with Doug Malone [owner of Jamdek Recording Studio], who’s really touchy. He’s much more specific about getting the right tones and getting the right takes, and I think there was more of an emphasis on that than like, “Should we play with a different part?” We came in with it, more or less, front to back, we knew what we were going to do. We used the studio more as a way of cementing what the sound of the record was going to be. Greg, does that sound right? [laughs]
Greg: No, totally, yeah. I always told myself I wanted to be doing more goofball stuff in the studio, adding parts and stuff. I know that Spirit of the Beehive, a band that all us really love, exemplifies that kind of studio goofballness. I feel like it always just comes down to like, time.
Tim: It was like, four or five days total? And most of the first day was setting up the drums.
Greg: We really got down to the wire with guitars. It wound up being one of those happy accidents. I think we thought we’d have more time for laying down the guitar tracks, and we didn’t. I think one of the reasons “Anniversary” sounds so big is because there’s tons of bleed between me and Donny’s mics, which gives it more delay and makes it sound larger. That was the one song, that and “Bug Song,” which also benefits the same way, we were just like, “Okay, we only have like three hours to do this, these two songs we can play at the same time, we don’t need to track them separately, let’s just get them done.”
Mariah: So was there a lot of experimenting with mic placement and equipment?
Greg: Yeah, Doug [Malone] is a highly-particular engineer and gets really in the weeds with moving the microphone a couple of millimeters, in and out of the kick drum, and if a mic doesn’t work for him he’s going to change it three or four times. Which is great! It’s his studio, and he really understands the equipment there, the space there, and the console and outboard gear way more than most people, you know? Also, I’m an audio engineer, too, so I was being highly opinionated about stuff. It took a good bit of time, but I think it was worth it. It was a lot of fun.
Mariah: This single, “People Pleaser,” was that written before or after the Change is Bad? It feels very distinct from the album.
Donny: It’s funny you said that because we recorded that song with the rest of the songs on that album, but we decided that that one kind of, stood out or something, right?
Tim: It’s honestly one of my favorite songs, but it didn’t fit the rest of the ones on the album.
David: Tim, I feel like you had this specific idea with the sequencing, in terms of which songs should and shouldn’t be on the record, and that one in particular didn’t have the right tone or energy. It’s a little bit more minimal, almost like wiry, that bassline in particular, that kind of sound that doesn’t quite go with the rest.
Tim: I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the mixes and feeling where they should go in the album, and I feel like that one, I think we all agreed at the end, didn’t quite fit on the record. It’s one of my favorites, honestly, it’s just a little weirder.
Mariah: It’s almost like a really heavy Omni song.
David: We make that joke all the time! [laughs] You hit it on the head.
Greg: I refer to the band as “Evil Omni” sometimes.
Mariah: Were there other songs that were on the chopping block?
Greg: I was pretty lukewarm on “Dimed.” I feel like I dialed in the lyrics the most on that one. It’s a lot heavier and beefier than anything else on the record. It has a different kind of vibe, and I wasn’t sure about it.
David: I think we were on the fence, but I don’t know, since it’s been put out it’s also one of the songs that I’ve seen people post the most.
Greg: I’m recusing myself from the next record. [laughs]
Mariah: Y’all’s record, in particular, anticipated my mental state of being in quarantine.
David: You’re stuck inside! [laughs]
Mariah: You got really lucky with that name! [laughs] What do y’all think being a band looks like moving forward through the pandemic?
Greg: I have no clue. I spend a lot of time thinking about this because for me it’s very professional, because I’m a mastering engineer [at Chicago Mastering Service] and live sound engineer. I’m assuming the industry will turn back to some kind of normal, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen until there’s either a vaccine or widespread antibody testing, which won’t happen for a super long time. Depending on how long that takes, venues can’t keep operating on nothing forever. I hope venues stay open. If the venues stay open, when it’s possible, bands will come back to it, but I think it’s gonna be awhile before that can happen, sadly.
Tim: It definitely sucks not playing shows. That’s definitely my favorite part about this band. We just have to wait it out.
Greg: It’s so hard to imagine being in a room full of people right now. I think people are going to be really uncomfortable being around other people for a long time. Even if I could go work at a show three months from now, am I going to be comfortable being in a room full of people? There’s no way to know.
Tim: I wonder if they’ll have dots on the floor that are six feet apart and you’ll have to stay in your zone or something.
Mariah: I’ve been noticing this thing where, even when I watch movies, and strangers touch each other, it really freaks me out!
Greg: Same.
David: I think everybody has that same reaction of like, “What the fuck are you doing? He’s gonna get you! Don’t do it!” [laughs] The reaction now to this thing that’s very recent feels very natural. The natural response to be like, “Don’t touch them, you don’t know where they’ve been!” For normal life it sounds psychotic, but for this very specific situation it’s, unfortunately, the reality of the world we live in.
Greg: I’ve been watching The Sopranos for the first time, and Tony Soprano will shoot somebody and I won’t have any reaction, but I’ll see him hug somebody and my heart will skip a beat! [laughs]
Mariah: Who did your album art?
Tim: I do graphic design, so I did all of the design-side of things. I was originally going to try to do it all myself, but I wasn’t feeling super confident. Greg found this artist on Instagram named Tali Bayer. She does a lot of cool collage stuff, and we reached out to her. We ended up looking through her work and asking if we could use something that she posted.
Mariah: What’s next for y’all as a band?
Greg: I’ve been cranking out demos in quarantine. I think we’re probably gonna write a new thing or a record, I’m not sure yet. I’m working on that right now, we’ll kinda see. I want to make sure I can get it to the rest of the band to do their quality control stuff and make sure that everything is playable and everyone likes doing it. We’ll see when we get an opportunity to do that, but at least I’m trying to drum up the raw materials right now.
David: I think most bands and groups have this at this point where we're collectively going to come out of quarantine and everyone’s going to have their next three records written, but I think at this point we have the demos recorded for several songs and are probably close to another record. Because we don’t really have the opportunity to tour at this point and we don’t really have a show we’re practicing for, writing new material is at the forefront at this point.
Donny: I’d like to get another thing out pretty quick.
Tim: Work fast!
Greg: One of the frustrating things about quarantine is that I’m a really busy person all of the time, and usually I’ll go weeks and weeks without writing anything and then I’ll finally be able to sit down in ProTools and mess around with some stuff, and stuff comes really fast to me because I have this pent up creative energy. Now that I can do it all the time, I sit down and try to write stuff and I’m like, “Nothing today! Maybe tomorrow.” I just have spans of weeks that go on like that. I think I take for granted how much my day to day life impacts my life and how necessary it is.