With a new album, NC’s Superchunk faces burnout head-on
We were supposed to be creating things the last two years. That’s how artists felt they should react to March 2020, when COVID-19 started spreading across the United States and our lives restarted on Zoom calls and kitchen tables. Other pandemics — the bubonic plague, influenza in 1918, the AIDS crisis — had visible impacts on art and literature of the time. Also, it seemed like there wasn’t much else to do.
Turns out, many of us could do anything but create.
“Either I had no desire or brain space to sit down with an acoustic guitar and write a song,” says Mac McCaughan, lead singer of the longstanding indie rock band Superchunk. When it came to recording her parts, bassist Laura Ballance ran into similar mental blocks.
“The early stages of the pandemic really put me in an isolationist funk,” she says. Aside from being drawn to other hobbies, Ballance no longer joins the band on tour for health reasons and doesn’t play bass between album recordings, since “playing bass by yourself isn’t that fun.”
In spite of pandemic burnout, Ballance, McCaughan, and bandmates Jim Wilbur and Jon Wurster managed to create something new. Wild Loneliness, the newest record from North Carolina’s preeminent indie authorities, premieres Feb. 25.
You can hear the album on streaming platforms, on pink and green vinyl at your local record store, or on stage at The Ramkat in Winston-Salem. Locals can catch them at Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro the following night.
Superchunk is a band built on combating burnout. Ballance and McCaughan started the band in 1989; Wilbur and Wurster joined the group a few years later. They survived the 1990s, when record labels were trying to pinpoint “the next Seattle,” where the next Nirvana could be the next flannel-clad cash cow. They survived a seven-year break from recording in the 2000s. They continue to survive marriages and raising children and creating Merge Records, a Durham answer to Seattle’s Sub Pop that launched Arcade Fire and Neutral Milk Hotel. To Ballance, the early years were important in sealing that bond.
“We wouldn’t have made it as a band if we weren’t a unified unit, because all the suffering that we had to go through for the first 15 years, riding around in a van together for six months out of the year: if I was just some hired hand, I would have been like, ‘No, I’m out.’” she says.
McCaughan feels the band’s endurance also helped in the writing and recording process, since he has a “baseline” for what the other three will likely sound like when he writes.
“It is an intuition thing, and when you know all that is going to work out, then it allows you to try different things.”
Wild Loneliness is undoubtedly a Superchunk record, something longtime fans will enjoy. McCaughan has a voice you’re unlikely to forget, whether he’s yelling lyrics in the 1990s or singing them in 2022. But unlike their 2018 politically-charged album What a Time to be Alive, the anxieties have been left to simmer, a sustained dread versus a burst of anger. McCaughan found his gratitude for his family, friends, and work could balance out the rage.
“We all feel this anger and disgust and dismay at what’s happening to democracy,” McCaughan says, “but at the same time, in order to make it through the day or the year or the pandemic or whatever, you need to access some other kind of energy.”
After re-releasing their 1994 record Foolish as an acoustic album in 2019, McCaughan wanted to make something with a similar sound. In a departure from the last several decades, he plays an acoustic guitar almost exclusively. The album also revisits the band’s early-career experiments: McCaughan compared the production and use of orchestral instruments to the group’s 1998 album Come Pick Me Up, but with wisdom allowing them to fuse the elements more seamlessly. It’s satisfying to see the band come full circle.
Wild Loneliness feels like the right album to come from burnout, or at least the fear of it. Even after 33 years together and two years of isolation, Superchunk still finds challenges to overcome and waters to test. They may not be screaming, but they’re not stopping.
