Pressing Concerns: Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, The Disassociation, Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac

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Hey there! It’s a Monday Pressing Concerns! It features new albums from Stuck, Miscellaneous Owl, and The Disassociation, and a new EP from Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac! Check them out below!

We will have a Tuesday post this week (it’s been a minute, I know!).

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Stuck – Optimizer

Release date: March 27th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage punk, synthpunk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Sicko

Stuck has been a fixture in Chicago indie rock since their formation in the late 2010s. Guitarist/vocalist Greg Obis’ history making noisy post-punk goes back even further, to his time in the underrated trio Yeesh alongside Babe Report drummer Peter Reale and Alex Doyle. After that group’s demise, Obis linked up with drummer Tim Green, guitarist Donny Walsh, and bassist David Algrim; albums Change Is Bad (2020) and Freak Frequency (2023) followed, as well as an EP called Content That Makes You Feel Good in 2021. Optimizer, Stuck’s third album, is their first as a trio (Walsh left the group in 2022), and the three of them tapped Andrew Oswald (Marbled Eye, Public Interest, Blue Zero) to record the album at Electrical Audio. Obis is a mastering engineer himself, taking over Chicago Mastering Service from Shellac’s Bob Weston and working on a bunch of albums I’ve written about (just in the past year: Wishy, Ducks Ltd., Maneka, Will Stratton, Winter, and Shallowater), but it doesn’t take a studio professional to guess that Oswald’s finely-honed, sharp-edged, greyscale post-punk background is an inspired pairing with Stuck’s blunt-force noisy Windy City punk rock.

Believe it or not, Optimizer is about as adventurous as this kind of music gets (without transforming into something else entirely). Opening track “Totally Vexed” ought to be Stuck at their noise-punk pummeling best, but swirling keys and strings are surprising touches–and then the absurd Devo-y synths of “Instakill” throw something completely different at us, as does the surging, blaring garage-punk anthem “Sicko”. Combine the skewed perspective of labelmates Landowner with the bleakness of Meat Wave and just a bit of the experimentation of FACS, and that’ll get you in the ballpark of Optimizer, one of the most “Chicago underground rock” albums I’ve heard in recent memory (and I’ve heard a lot of them!). The trio sound kinetic and volatile on tracks like “Net Negative”, “It Isn’t”, and “Punchline”, post-punk songs that provide some limber acrobatics in between tough, chewy noise rockers like “Fire, Man” and “GG”. “It’s hard to see it now, but looking back somehow / You’ve changed, you’ve changed, you’ve changed, you’ve changed,” Obis sings in the latter, over a mixture of post-punk and swelling, symphonic indie rock that’s somehow become “classic Stuck”. (Bandcamp link)

Miscellaneous Owl – The Wanting Chemical

Release date: March 6th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, bedroom pop, twee, power pop
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Walling Up the Train

This is the third year in a row that I’m writing about a Miscellaneous Owl album that came out in March after the project’s mastermind, Huan-Hua Chye, spent February participating in the February Album Writing Month exercise. This time, however, it’s not even the first Chye album album of the year: the Wisconsin singer-songwriter’s five-piece indie pop band Gentle Brontosaurus broke an eight-year gap between LPs in February with Three Hares. The Gentle Brontosaurus LP had plenty of great Chye-penned material on it, but if you missed the Midwestern bedroom pop auteur in solo mode, playing with acoustic indie folk and Magnetic Fields synths and all other manners of tinkering, The Wanting Chemical has us covered.

The Wanting Chemical isn’t Gentle Brontosaurus levels of full-band power pop, but perhaps the return of Chye’s band has trickled into Miscellaneous Owl’s latest album–there’s a bit more electric guitar, some of which I’d even describe as “chugging”. Still, an album that starts with a glittering indie pop song about “American Death” and a power pop stomp about how “You Can’t Save Everything” (beginning with “three dead shrews in a line beside the walking trail”) is classic Miscellaneous Owl. Elsewhere, Chye uses the rockers to serenade the apocalypse (“Em-Dash Shibboleth”, which is indeed the “AI lament”), reminisce on more turbulent times (the Paisley-ish “Camel Crush”), and to get a bit literary (with “Walling Up the Train”).

It wouldn’t be a Miscellaneous Owlbum without some garish synthpop, a role filled by “Counting the Breaths of a Ticking Clock”, and the gaps between these attention-grabbers are filled with the quiet stuff (I’m partial to the lo-fi, fuzzy murmur of “Metaphorical Snow” myself). The twinkling folk-pop of “Centering” closes The Wanting Chemical on a curious note, a pretty pottery and seasonal metaphor which nonetheless has some gore in it, too (roadkill, of course). Chye has a few different recognizable musical hallmarks as Miscellaneous Owl, but a just-as-defining aspect of her albums is her surprising and oftentimes challenging writing, veering from opaque to diaristic (simultaneously, sometimes, I might even say). (Bandcamp link)

The Disassociation – Losing Is a Luxury

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Shrimper
Genre: Lo-fi pop, 90s indie rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Five Miles to Mexico

Thirty-something years after their initial formation in 1990, right now is a fruitful time for fans of the cult Inland Empire, California indie rock group Refrigerator. The quintet (Chris Jones, Daniel Brodo, Mark Givens, Allen Callaci, and Dennis Callaci) put out their fifteenth album in late 2024, and the past couple years have also seen two collaborative releases by Dennis Callaci (one with Heimito Kunst and one with L. Eugene Methe). The latest Refrigerator-related project is called The Disassociation, an eight-piece “collective” featuring all five band members as well as Amy Maloof (of the Pomona band Falcon Eddy), the novelist (and bassist) Jonathan Lethem, and Sam Sousa (a radio host who supposedly once played in a hardcore band called Bring Your Brain).

Callaci’s side projects hew towards the experimental, but The Disassociation’s first LP, Losing Is a Luxury, largely retains the warm, casual, folky lo-fi indie pop of Refrigerator’s proper records. It also just happens to contain a bit…more than that, too. The winding, delicate lo-fi pop of opening track “Five Miles to Mexico” is vintage Refrigerator, but Maloof’s vocals and the showy bass guitar parts on “Breaking Glass” take the song into new terrain. I would categorize some of the material on Losing Is a Luxury as more Refrigerator-like (“The Map Ain’t the Territory”, even with Maloof’s vocals, and “One Willful Act”) and some a little further afield (like the rootsy tinges to “Merle” and–especially–“Beer Commercial”, or the piano ballad “The Rat in My Kitchen”), but it’s not like there’s a huge gap between these different “sides” to The Disassociation. If I wasn’t so well-versed in Refrigerator (a great investment for one to make, by the way), I’d likely just think of The Disassociation as one big, weird, in-sync family. Maybe that’s what Losing Is a Luxury is, regardless. (Bandcamp link)

Louisa Bénâtre & Barbara Bessac – Two Heavy Hearts

Release date: January 30th
Record label: Hidden Bay
Genre: Indie folk, lo-fi folk, indie pop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Pull Track: Brighton’s Hills

Toulouse-based label Hidden Bay Records has put out a fair amount of French indie pop in recent years, and the imprint kicked off 2026 with another entry in their ongoing project. Louisa Bénâtre is a musician who may be known to some as the drummer of Toulouse “crunch pop” quartet Vemberlain, and she’s also the sister of Camille Bénâtre, who’s put out some solo records on Hidden Bay. Her latest release is a four-song cassette called Two Heavy Hearts that she made with “longtime friend” Barbara Bessac, stemming from a period of time in late 2021 where Bessac, in Britain for an extended period of time, sent Bénâtre three poems as a way of keeping in touch. Bénâtre set these poems to music, the duo wrote a fourth song together after Bessac returned to France, and they then recorded what would become Two Heavy Hearts (with help from Camille).

Bénâtre’s lo-fi pop influences (Broadcast, Au Revoir Simone, Sibylle Baier) range from “dreamy” to “actively sound like they’re fading away”, and this is reflected in this low-key EP.  Two Heavy Hearts opens with a simple folk-ish song called “Brighton’s Hills”, leaning heavily on an acoustic guitar and a meandering vocal performance; Bénâtre & Bessac don’t set out to grab us, but we’re welcome to witness what they’re creating. “A Choir” is much in the same manner, although the minimal Casio and harmonies are small but difference-making additions. The drum machine/Casio-organ dream pop of “Fine” is probably the EP’s black sheep, although the barebones bossa nova pop isn’t all that far removed from the stark bedroom folk of the rest of Two Heavy Hearts. “Fluffy” wraps the dozen-minute EP up much like how it begins–spare but beautiful to anyone paying attention. (Bandcamp link)

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