Haters Gonna Hate

When Superchunk returned to the recording realm in 2010 with ninth album Majesty Shredding many people assumed that they'd reformed; in reality they'd never gone away. Frontman Mac McCaughan and bassist Laura Ballance were running their indie label behemoth Merge Records, and after more than a decade in the van they'd become somewhat tired of the 'record and release' cycle after 2001's Here's To Shutting Up, so they just took a break from the grind. Superchunk never broke up or went away and still played the odd show every year, but after years of treating the band as a priority the members began concentrating on other pursuits.

So when Majesty Shredding was universally lauded there seemed to be a need within the ranks to prove that it was more than a fluke, a notion that's been well-and-truly put to bed with the release of follow-up I Hate Music, a brilliantly vital collection of classic 'Chunk songs up there with the best albums of their remarkable career.

“With Majesty Shredding back in 2010 there wasn't really a lot of pressure from anyone but ourselves – I don't think that anybody was really expecting us to make a record anyway,” creative lynchpin McCaughan smiles. “But then that one was pretty well received, so with this one there was a little bit more expectation just in the sense that, you know, you can make one good record after taking eight years off, but can you make two in a row? That was the clincher.”

They didn't map out an agenda for I Hate Music, although they knew that it was vital to keep the album's pace up.

“I think that with both this record and the last one our main directive was to kind of keep up the energy – maybe the energy that people like from our earlier records – and I think we achieved that with the new albums in the way that we made them,” McCaughan continues. “I was writing songs and sending demos around, but the band didn't learn the songs until a couple of days before we went to record them, and we'd do them in batches of three of four songs at a time. So before going in to record we'd maybe practice for two days and then go and record three or four songs, and I think that kind of gave the whole thing a little bit of an edge in the sense that we knew the songs well enough to play them, but there wasn't really any danger of overworking them since it was all still really fresh.

“I think that after not making a record for eight or nine years, the worst thing that could happen is that you put it out and people say, 'You waited nine years to do that?' and then just kind of shrug about it, so I think that what we really wanted to do was focus on our strengths and focus on in some ways what's fun about playing live with the band.”

The lyrics on I Hate Music are largely ruminations on holding music close as you're getting on in years, which also explains the somewhat misleading title.

“I think this record's a little bit about getting old, but from the standpoint of, 'What role does music play in your life as you get older?' and, 'How do you still enjoy it or live with it in a way that's not just nostalgia but that still accesses the thing about it that got you interested in it in music the first place?'” McCaughan muses. “It's not a looking back exercise – not that nostalgia's not interesting – but it's more about 'How can you take what was good about music in the first place and keep applying it to your life?' And the title of the record is in some ways about those moments when you can't do that and it doesn't work.

“So I think that's kind of what this record is about – 'how do you deal with all that?' – and if you have a moment in your life where maybe you're 20 and you can put a record on and it will make you feel better or something but that doesn't work anymore, then I feel that even though that's a passionate feeling it's still something to wrestle with.”