Skip to content
News

Superchunk’s ‘Indoor Living’ Reissued for Merge Records’ 25th Anniversary

superchunk, indoor living, reissue, merge records

Iconic indie label Merge Records has announced an upcoming reissue of Superchunk’s out-of-print sixth album, 1997’s Indoor Living. The remastered LP will be available in vinyl and CD formats on February 25, complete with new liner notes by bassist/Merge co-founder Laura Ballance and producer/engineer John Plymale.

Physical editions of the reissue will include a download of a 14-track live album — the eighth and latest installment in Superchunk’s long-running Clambakes franchise. Clambakes Vol. 8: We’d Like to Thank the Homecoming Committee captures a 1997 concert recorded at North Carolina’s Duke University, and follows (of course) Clambakes Vol. 7: Shut the F*ck Up!…No, We Love You – Live at the Corner Hotel 1996, which the band shared on SoundCloud back in November.

But back to Indoor Living. Here’s some of what Ana Marie Cox, who wrote the original SPIN review of the album nearly 17 years ago, has to say about the record now (via Merge):

Indoor Living is about domestication: The taming and training of human beings to inhabit each others’ lives, during which a certain amount of blood is spilled. But anyone can write a break-up record, anyone can color in a broken heart all black. It takes a more sophisticated eye to find the light and perfect moments that happen even when we wish they didn’t, and Indoor Living is a scrapbook of those moments. A request for mercy comes across like an in-joke (“We both know that I’ve got bad knees”) in “Watery Hands.” “European Medicine” is a lively travelog that’s by turns amusingly fatalistic (“All our wine just froze, so much for your sunny coast”) and achingly needy (“Hold my hand steady while I write / Look over my shoulder all night”). Even “The Popular Music,” the record’s angriest slice of heartache, has a protagonist that can’t quite pull off a fully punk rock tantrum: “I’m smashing not washing the china you left me to use,” but “making mosaics of scenes from the parts of my life that you left me to lose.”

The upcoming Indoor Living package (available for pre-order right now) is the second installment in Merge’s ongoing monthly reissue series celebrating the label’s 25th anniversary. The first entry — a re-release of Lambchop’s 2000 full-length, Nixon — will be released on January 28.

Scroll down for the track lists to Indoor Living and Clambakes Vol. 8, as well as Superchunk’s current tour dates, including a pair of gigs at this year’s Coachella festival. For an in-depth look at Superchunk and Merge, read SPIN’s 2013 feature, Merge Country: How Superchunk’s Label Turned Durham Into a Thriving Indie-Rock Company Town. And check out SPIN’s 50 Best Albums of 2013 to see where Superchunk’s fantastic I Hate Music placed.

Indoor Living reissue track list:

1. “Unbelievable Things”
2. “Burn Last Sunday”
3. “Marquee”
4. “Watery Hands”
5. “Nu Bruises”
6. “Every Single Instinct”
7. “Song for Marion Brown”
8. “The Popular Music”
9. “Under Our Feet”
10. “European Medicine”
11. “Martinis on the Roof”

Clambakes Vol. 8: We’d Like to Thank the Homecoming Committee — Live at Duke 1997 track list:

1. “Younger Bums” (Big Dipper cover)
2. “Burn Last Sunday”
3. “Cast Iron”
4. “Watery Hands”
5. “Song for Marion Brown”
6. “Sunshine State”
7. “I Guess I Remembered It Wrong”
8. “Nu Bruises”
9. “Marquee”
10. “Shallow End”
11. “Driveway to Driveway”
12. “Hyper Enough”
13. “Bye Bye Kitty Cat” (Mice cover)
14. “Precision Auto”

Superchunk tour dates:

January 18 – Chicago, IL @ The Metro (Tomorrow Never Knows Festival)
January 19 – Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon (FRZN Festival)
February 5 – Dallas, TX @ Trees ^
February 6 – Austin, TX @ The Mohawk ^
February 7 – Houston, TX @ Fitzgerald’s ^
February 8 – New Orleans, LA @ One-Eyed Jacks ^
April 13 – Indio, CA @ Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival
April 20 – Indio, CA @ Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival

^ = with Waxahatchee