Celebrate Merge’s 35th anniversary with a new Superchunk single and a summer festival! Superchunk’s brand-new, limited-edition 7-inch “Everybody Dies” b/w “As in a Blender” will be released on January 26, 2024, and is available for pre-order now. Listen to A-side “Everybody Dies” wherever you stream music!

An excerpt from Mac McCaughan’s notes on “Everybody Dies” b/w “As in a Blender” digs into the emotional underpinning of the A-side (full statement follows tour dates below):

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. 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.

The 7-inch is housed in a sleeve featuring an oil-pastel painting by McCaughan and includes a lyric insert  for “Everybody Dies.” The B-side, “As in a Blender,” is a cover of Alastair Galbraith’s 1992 hazy NZ classic. Superchunk’s recording line-up for these recordings was McCaughan, Laura Ballance, Jim Wilbur, and Laura King on drums. Rosali Middleman features on group vocals on “Everybody Dies,” and King sings on the outro of “As in a Blender.”

Superchunk hits the road this February, storming the West Coast with Fucked Up before traveling to Japan in March for a four-day tour, with NOT WONK opening three of those shows. Tickets are on sale now; see below for dates!

Finally, get out your Day-Timers and SAVE THE DATE for Merge’s 35th anniversary festival, taking place July 24–27! Four-day passes go on sale February 9, with more information to come!

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

Mac McCaughan on “Everybody Dies” b/w “As in a Blender”:

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. 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.

When I recorded the demo of the A-side, I played a poor imitation of a Drive Like Jehu–type drum pattern; Rick Froberg was a musical inspiration. Lucky for everyone, I didn't try to sing like him on this track. When we were thinking of covers to record for the B-side—dedicated to Hamish Kilgour in the runout groove—I came in one day and said, “What about an Alastair Galbraith song?” and Jim said, “‘As in a Blender’?” Galbraith’s meditation on mortality and the passage of time is somewhat more sanguine than ours and was exactly the one I had been listening to.