Merge Records, the indie label founded by Superchunk‘s Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, will celebrate its 35th anniversary this year with a festival happening July 24-27 in Carrboro, NC. While the lineup and other details are still to be revealed, four-day passes go on sale Friday, February 9.
To celebrate the announcement, Superchunk are back with a new 7″ single out January 26 and featuring two songs, “Everybody Dies” and “As in a Blender.” You can listen to “Everybody Dies,” a patented, hooky ripper about life and death featuring Rosali on backing vocals, now. “The last years have often felt like an avalanche of loss—starting with Bowie and Prince, really, and then magnified by the pandemic and amplified by social media,” says Mac. “Something that seems different recently is that we aren’t just losing legends from older generations—Pharoah Sanders or Toots Hibbert or Kidd Jordan or Tina Turner—but musicians we think of as peers and friends; people we have toured with and recorded with and shared beers with all over the world. It means of course we’re getting older, and while we know from an early age that yes, everybody dies, it doesn’t make these departures any less shocking.”
Listen to “Everybody Dies” below.
Superchunk will be on a West Coast tour with Fucked Up in February and head to Japan in March. Those dates are below.
Superchunk on tour:
Feb 01 San Diego, CA – Music Box*
Feb 02 Los Angeles, CA – The Regent Theater*
Feb 03 San Francisco, CA – The Regency Ballroom (HOMESICK Festival)
Feb 04 Sacramento, CA – Harlow’s*
Feb 06 Portland, OR – Revolution Hall*
Feb 07 Seattle, WA – The Crocodile*
Feb 08 Vancouver, BC – Rickshaw Theatre*
Mar 20 Tomakomai, Hokkaido, JP – ELLCUBE%
Mar 23 Sakai, Osaka, JP – Fandango%
Mar 24 Shindaita, Tokyo, JP – Fever%
Mar 25 Shindaita, Tokyo, JP – Fever
*w/ Fucked Up
%w/ NOT WONK