Fans of Merge Records could probably guess that Mac Krol is the pairing of Superchunk‘s leader and Merge co-founder Mac McCaughan and Mike Krol. The duo will release their debut 7″ on July 28 via Merge.
Mac Krol began life as recordings Mike Krol did at San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone back in 2015. “The plan was to take the rough mixes home and write lyrics to record them later,” Krol says. “However, once I got home and listened to the songs, I quickly realized that most of them were in the wrong key for my voice. So I filed them away to deal with later, and eventually lost interest.” Fast forward to 2020 when many of us had more time to dig through boxes, and Krol found the hard drive with the tracks. “To my surprise,” he says, “they sounded better than I remembered, but still didn’t work with my voice. I emailed Mac the tracks and said if he was bored in quarantine, maybe he could write some words to sing on top of my instrumentals and possibly give them a second life. He said he hated writing lyrics and politely declined. A few days later, three songs showed up with completed lyrics and iconic Mac McCaughan singing and shredding all over them. I was blown away!”
The A-side is “For Some Other Reason,” which sounds like the collision of two highly skilled songwriters. Listen to that below.
Mac will be on tour with Superchunk in September.
