Chicago-based group COURSE latest album, “Tight Feathers” was released in October. Tight Feathers balances a series of delicately contradictory emotions, both buoyant and foreboding. More elaborate than past COURSE releases, it’s laced with sharply written reflections on embracing the chaotic onslaught of life, savoring its complexities, while protecting your inner self. The resulting album demonstrates a particularly relatable kind of existential anxiety—hovering tone-wise between carefree and swamped, happy and overwhelmed, light-as-a-feather and unavoidably ominous. At times, the album drifts into nostalgic territory in the vein of acts like Best Coast or Tennis, but the songs are never saccharine: There remains a familiar hint of anxiety at the root of each track, grounding the music firmly in the modern confusion of the real world.