The “post-tour musings” album should be a privilege to make. It typically arrives a few years and releases into an artist’s career — that is, if they’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go out on the road. This is the very moment we find the Chicago-based trio, Stuck, in now. Off the back of 2023’s Freak Frequency, the band ventured overseas to perform their frenetic entanglement of janky post-punk guitar riffs across Europe and the UK, a prospect that’s becoming increasingly challenging for the majority of artists today. It seemed as though Stuck’s stock was rising. Therefore, it might come across as odd that within the first five minutes of their contagious new record Optimizer, we hear frontman Greg Obis exclaim, “My life was in decline!”