Chicago alternative-pop auteur Nnamdi you’ve picked a hell of a band to open their New Year’s Eve show at the Empty Bottle: hardcore four-piece Stress Positions. Earlier this month they released their debut album, Harsh Realityand it’s one of this wolf’s favorite punk records of the year!
Stress Positions formed in early 2021. Guitarist Benyamin Rudolph, bassist Russell Harrison, and drummer Jonathan “Jono” Giralt had played in hardcore band CHEW together, which split in 2020, and they started writing material together and finishing unfinished CHEW songs to fit a new lineup. The trio needed a singer, and after trying out a few, they asked a friend they’d met when they all lived in Orlando: Stephanie Brooks.
“She tried it, and it felt fuckin’ perfect,” Giralt says. “It was a pretty seamless composition—the fact that we were already all friends and knew each other forever. Steph had never been in a punk band of any sort, but she has an incredible set of pipes. “It was super easy to just get up and go.” The new band recorded a batch of songs in November 2021 with engineer Seth Engel, who’d previously played with Rudolph and Harrison in indie-rock group Great Deceivers. Stress Positions dropped their debut EP, the unrelentingly driving Walang Hiyain May 2022.
Harsh Reality was recorded during the same five days of sessions that produced that EP. “We wrote all of those songs off the bat—we recorded all of those tracks at the same time,” Giralt says. “We had never tried that method before, and we wanted to see what it would be like to record multiple records at the same time. I think we all kind of realized, like, ‘Ah, cool, glad we tried it. Don’t want to do that again.’”
Stress Positions released Harsh Reality through Three One G, the long-running San Diego punk label run by Justin Pearson of the Locust, Swing Kids, and Retox. “We just sent Justin a cold email,” Giralt says. “We talked about a couple labels that we would want to put things out with. We’ve worked a bunch with Iron Lung, previously as CHEW, and they rereleased the Walang Hiya EP. But we wanted to try something new.”
In July, a 2022 documentary about Pearson, Don’t Fall in Love With Yourself, screened twice in Chicago. Pearson came to town for the occasion, and Stress Positions opened the screening at Color Club. “We got to meet him, hang out, and bullshit for a few hours,” Giralt says.
A lot of time passed between the recording and release of Harsh Reality, but the songs on the album remain as urgent to Giralt as the day he began writing them. The world is still just as fucked-up, if not worse, and that gives Stress Positions material to work with. “Everything is always seemingly grim,” Giralt says, “so it was really nice to be able to talk about everything as a group and fantasize what we would’ve liked to do.”
Stress Positions recorded Harsh Reality in November 2021 but didn’t release it until December 2023.
Chicago DJ Cloudy, known to his friends as Dayjahvell, grew up in an Afro-Latinx household in Humboldt Park, educating his musical palate with multicultural dishes like reggaeton, hip-hop, and R&B. He calls himself “Cloudy” because DJing lets him shapeshift like the weather and the clouds that make it visible. “Being a DJ gives you the opportunity to maneuver the room and kind of set the tone for what’s about to happen,” he says. On Saturday, December 30, at the Whistler, Cloudy will spin a set dedicated to lo-fi hip-hop, underground vaporwave, dreamy vibes, and upbeat dance sounds. Before picking up a controller, Cloudy emceed shows for rappers such as Semiratruth and Flowurz at the city’s hypest venues—an experience that taught him crowd control and how to read the room, because he could see how folks responded to what he added to the atmosphere . This performance will kick-start Cloudy’s monthly residency at the Whistler, where you can catch him every third Saturday in 2024.
The Black Metal Cowboys are a local crew of Black punk and hip-hop artists assembled by musician Harley Omega, and their next show is at Cafe Mustache on Thursday, December 28. Omega calls herself the Harley Quinn of the crew, most likely to cross into metal, industrial , hardcore, and alternative. Rizzi Konway wears a creepy Slipknot-inspired mask onstage, but behind it he’s an exuberant rapper. “He is kind of the Lil Wayne of the YMCMB,” says Omega. “He’s a monster on a mike.” J Heavy is the Cowboy for pure hip-hop fans, playing to the crowd while experimenting with his flow. Marky McFly is the group’s Green Ranger, charismatic and energetic—an extrovert among introverts. “I went my whole life loving goth culture, emo aesthetics, alternative music, and metal and not really having a lot of peers of color to share that with,” Omega says. “And now as an adult, [I] “have that.”
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