Luggage: Happiness (Husky Pants)

Luggage’s Happiness stands as one of the great rock records of 2021. Major props to Jeremy Lemos for capturing this amazing and dynamic session.

Happiness owes much to Chicago, especially bands like Jesus Lizard and Tar. But so much space exists between even these two reference points and Luggage has done a good job of carving out their own identity and sound. Most obviously, there is no Yow in Luggage. And there is, musically speaking, more musicianship in Luggage than Tar.

From the one-sheet:

“[…] 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. And on their fourth album Happiness, Luggage offer up their starkest work yet.

To a certain degree, the sonic brevity of Luggage stems from the disparate musical backgrounds of their members. The rhythm section of Luca Cimarusti (drums) and Michael John Grant (bass) came up through the ranks of the underground playing in noise-punk bands while guitarist/vocalist Michael Vallera cut his teeth in the world of experimental ambient music. These might seem like drastically different styles with diametrically opposed aims, but both approaches embraced minimalism. 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. ‘We wrote Happiness over the pandemic and it was largely the only interaction we had with people other than ourselves,’ Vallera says. ‘It’s a very raw photograph of a particular moment in our lives.’

Isolation shaped the album in other ways as well. Shelter-in-place measures and self-imposed quarantines meant that writing sessions were less frequent and the creative process was often interrupted. ‘Each time we would link back up, only the strongest ideas from the previous sessions stayed,’ Cimarusti says. ‘The time apart allowed us to really cut out anything that wasn't the absolute best thing we came up with. At the root, these are our most minimal pieces as far as parts and structure goes, but once we got into the studio, we were able to flesh them out with a wider sound palette than ever before, so it comes across as our most layered work, despite the stripped-down foundations’ […]

It 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.