Superchunk: Wild Loneliness (Peak Vinyl indie shop colour edition) LP

Like every record Superchunk has made over the last thirty-some years, Wild Loneliness is unskippably excellent and infectious. It's a blend of stripped-down and lush, electric and acoustic, highs and lows. On Wild Loneliness you'll hear echoes of Come Pick Me Up, Here's to Shutting Up, and Majesty Shredding. After the justifiable anger of What a Time to Be Alive, this new record is less about what we've lost in these harrowing times and more about what we have to be thankful for. It feels like the band is refocusing on possibility here, and possibility is built into the songs themselves, in the sweet surprises tucked inside them. The "secret ingredient" – is always surprise. Perhaps the same is true of songs. Like when the sax comes in on the title track, played by Wye Oak's Andy Stack, adding a completely new texture to the song. Or when Owen Pallett's strings come in on "This Night." One of the best surprises on Wild Loneliness is when the harmonies of Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub kick in on "Endless Summer." It's as perfect a pop song as you'll ever hear sweet, bright, flat-out gorgeous and yet it grapples with the depressing reality of climate change. Because of COVID, Mac, Laura, Jim, and Jon each recorded separately, but a silver lining is that this method made other long-distance contributions possible, from R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, Sharon Van Etten, Franklin Bruno, and Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura, among others. Some of the songs for the record were written before the pandemic hit, but others, like "Wild Loneliness," were written from and about isolation.