Chicago trio Luggage serve as model representatives of their city, wielding the standard components of their trade-guitar, bass, drums-while stripping away any hint of excess until they arrive at the most austere manifestation of rock n' roll: magnets picking up the vibrations of nickel-wound strings, wooden sticks striking polymer skins, laconic sung-spoken vocals. On their fourth album Happiness, Luggage offer up their starkest work yet. Across their first three albums-Sun (2016), Three (2017), and Shift (2019)-Luggage took post-punk's tonal palette and frequency assignments and put it under a microscope. On Happiness, Luggage pushes even further into their ASMR-level hyper-lucid fixations, making every note and percussive strike feel like a definitive statement while simultaneously expanding their stylistic range. Their music has always had a feeling of existing in a kind of vacuum, and there's ample reason for their new album to feel even more like a hermetic experience. Happiness was tracked in just one day at Electrical Audio in Chicago by Jeremy Lemos (Jim O'Rourke, Stereolab, Bill Callahan) and mixed the following day. Bob Weston mastered it at CMS. Together, the six tracks on Happiness create an immersive experience-an aural representation of cabin fever, of being an organic body in a rigidly geometric environment and a dynamic entity in a static world. RIYL: Unwound, Seam, Bedhead, Sonic Youth, Polvo, Codeine, This Heat, Rodan, Bastro