
Merge announces Record Store Day 2022 exclusives from Superchunk, Wye Oak, and Reigning Sound
While last year’s Record Store Day stretched across three days of “drops” and featured one Merge release (William Tyler’s New Vanitas on vinyl), the 2022 edition returns to a single spring day and features three releases from the label! On Saturday, April 23, head to your favorite independent record shop and pick up one of these limited releases:
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Reigning Sound’s Memphis in June is a document of Greg Cartwright and the original Memphis lineup of his garage/soul group in the pocket and on their home turf. Live from the Harbor Town Amphitheater, right on the river, they forcefully knock out a dozen songs across the band’s catalog with their friends, many of whom appeared on 2021’s A Little More Time with Reigning Sound. The live album is pressed on neon orange vinyl, exclusively for RSD 2022.
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Superchunk's Incidental Music: 1991-1995 is the band’s second compilation of singles, B-sides, and EPs, originally released in 1995 shortly after their landmark album Foolish. It collects fan favorites from soundtracks such as “Shallow End” and B-sides like “On the Mouth,” as well as covers of The Magnetic Fields, The Verlaines, The Chills, and even Motörhead. AllMusic’s Fred Thomas says it all: “Incidental Music is an essential piece of the Superchunk discography and a snapshot of the band as it transitioned from the scrubby radiance of its early days into the more nuanced songwriting machine it became throughout the mid-’90s.” Exclusively for RSD 2022, the double LP makes its first reappearance on vinyl since its original release, with LP1 on opaque green and LP2 on opaque orange housed in a gatefold jacket.
- Originally self-released in 2007 under the moniker Monarch, Wye Oak’s debut If Children was given a proper introduction to the world the following spring on Merge Records. Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack take their minimalist setup to maximalist ends, pairing gentle campfire folk with bombastic hazy shoegaze, sometimes within the same song. Their assured mission statement makes its vinyl debut, on red and white splatter, no less, exclusively for RSD 2022.















