Singer/guitarist Ralph Lee “Mac” McCaughan, bassist Laura Ballance, guitarist Jack McCook, and drummer Chuck Garrison formed Chunk in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1989, upgrading to Superchunk a few months later.
McCaughan and Ballance co-founded Merge Records to release Superchunk’s early singles, and after attracting national attention with the breakthrough underground hit “Slack Motherfucker,” the band released their first three full-lengths on another fast rising indie rock label.
After the departures of McCook and Garrison in the early ’90s, Superchunk’s definitive lineup was filled out by Pennsylvania-born drummer Jon Wurster (The Carneys, Psychotic Norman) and Connecticut-born guitarist Jim Wilbur. Superchunk began releasing their own music through Merge with 1994’s Foolish, building the band’s reputation with constant touring while the label grew alongside indie classics from Neutral Milk Hotel, Magnetic Fields, and Arcade Fire.
From 1994 onwards, Superchunk’s albums were issued on Merge, and as the band built its reputation on constant touring, the label grew bigger as well, releasing indie classics by Neutral Milk Hotel, Magnetic Fields, and Arcade Fire.
Superchunk’s music publishing company is self-deprecatingly named All the Songs Sound the Same Music, and there’s a trebly, hard driving signature sound unifying college radio staples like “Hyper Enough,” “Precision Auto,” “Throwing Things,” and “Learned to Surf” throughout the band’s 37-year history. But the band’s sonic palette has gradually expanded to include synths, horns, and strings, with McCaughan’s lyrics getting more personal as well as more pointedly political over time even as his voice remains an eternally youthful yelp.
Superchunk have released 13 studio albums as well as four compilations. What’s their very best release?
17. Here’s to Shutting Up (2001)
A lot of records released on or around 9/11 took on some eerie subtext after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers. Superchunk’s eighth album, which came out on September 18, is a particularly striking example: multiple songs refer to air travel, most pointedly the chorus of “Phone Sex” (“Plane crash footage on TV / Oh yeah, I know that could be me”). The band’s 2003 documentary Quest for Sleep chronicled the uneasy experience of touring internationally in the months after 9/11, but there’s an entirely different kind of depressive malaise hanging over the album they recorded before the tragedy in New York. Besides “Out on the Wing,” the greatest example of Superchunk incorporating synthesizers into their guitar-driven ragers, too much of the album is lost in a midtempo haze. Still, I saw Superchunk live for the first time that fall, in a little bar in Baltimore, and it was an amazing show. The band didn’t break up after Here’s to Shutting Up, but they did shut up for a while, taking nine years to release their next studio album.
16. Tossing Seeds (Singles 89-91) (1992)
B-side compilations are a hallowed tradition in indie rock—countless alternative bands have tucked away great music on collections like this for diehard fans to discover. And nobody is more devoted to the format than Superchunk, who have released four different collections of tracks from singles and EPs. Tossing Seeds was the first full-length CD released by Merge Records, and its best songs are “Cast Iron,” “Seed Toss,” “My Noise,” and Superchunk’s career-launching working class anthem “Slack Motherfucker.” All four of those songs all also appear on proper albums, some in superior re-recordings, rendering the compilation a little redundant. But Tossing Seeds also includes one of Superchunk’s most enduring covers, Sebadoh’s “Brand New Love,” and a thrashing barn burner that the band still often throws into encores 30 years later, “Fishing.”
