Music For Grownups
Superchunk dances toward the apocalypse, and other recommendations
SUPERCHUNK – Songs in the Key of Yikes (Merge Records)
Three and a half decades in, you’d think Mac McCaughan and company would’ve earned the right to coast — put out a greatest hits reissue, play the festival circuit, maybe drop an occasional single to remind us they’re alive. Instead, Superchunk return with Songs in the Key of Yikes, a record that bristles with the jittery anxiety of people who still feel genuinely rattled by the world around them. The title may sound like a punchline from some indie-rock message board circa 2003, but what we get here is no joke: this is Superchunk doing what they’ve always done best, confronting chaos head-on with guitars cranked just shy of collapse and choruses that refuse to sink under the weight of their own dread.
New drummer? No problem. The departure of Jon Wurster might have seemed unthinkable to longtime fans, but replacement Laura King fits in just fine, thank you. The songs are wired-tight, standing at that familiar Superchunk intersection where exhilaration meets exasperation. Hooks burst out of every chorus, but there’s a layer of unease beneath the ringing guitars — the sense that the ground is moving, that we’re stuck living in one long “yikes” moment and hoping for something steadier. McCaughan’s voice, still boyish in tone but now shaded by decades of exasperated idealism, gives that tension just the right human crack.
Part of the miracle of late-period Superchunk is how they still sound like the band you fell for at Maxwell’s or whatever little dive you first found them, while also sounding like grownups who have survived long enough to know better. Songs in the Key of Yikes doesn’t try to reinvent anything, and thank god for that. What it does do is remind us that resilience doesn’t have to be quiet, that you can still shout “yikes” at the universe and come out the other side with something resembling joy.
Since returning from a long hiatus in 2010, Superchunk’s albums have arrived every few years like State of the Union addresses. 2018’s What A Time To Be Alive offered a reaction to the first Trump administration and what led us to it, while 2022’s Wild Loneliness attempted to heal the trauma of the Covid pandemic. Now, faced with an existential threat to American democracy and a world that seems racing toward its own destruction, Superchunk’s provides a rallying cry to chill out and hang on. For a band whose peers either broke up or became cover bands of themselves decades ago, Superchunk keep proving that “youthful energy” isn’t about age but attitude. And Songs in the Key of Yikes overflows with it.
FAR CASPIAN - Autofiction (Tiny Library)
Far Caspian’s Autofiction feels less like a sophomore record and more like a fumbling in the dark for the switch—half confessional diary, half curtain call for the shoegaze revival. Joel Johnston has always trafficked in the hushed, home-recorded intimacy that makes these bedroom projects feel like secret transmissions caught between left-of-the-dial radio stations. But here, instead of keeping it all wrapped in reverb, he lets the seams show—there’s yearning, doubt, and a kind of vulnerability that seems raw and intimate.
Tracks drift from woozy dream-pop to heavier, almost post-rock swells, but Johnston never really blows out your speakers; everything feels like it's being played one room over, and that distance is what makes it work. The songwriting focuses on repeated themes - constantly reinventing yourself and your identity, the restless back and forth between solitude and connection. If that sounds familiar, sure, but part of indie rock’s whole deal is hearing one more version of the same universal itch scratched a little differently.
Does Autofiction overstay its welcome? Maybe. Some tracks blur together like half-remembered dreams, pleasant but hazy. But there are also moments where Far Caspian becomes more than another singer-songwriter hiding behind a band name —moments where you connected and hear something aching and precise, equal parts melancholy and hope.
FIELD MEDIC - Surrender Instead (Bandcamp.com)
Field Medic’s Surrender Instead feels like eavesdropping on a kid with an old guitar and too many feelings, except the kid’s Kevin Patrick Sullivan, and he’s decided to put those feelings down with all the shambling, roadside-poet honesty that makes you want to hug him one second and tell him to drink some water the next.
Field Medic has always thrived in that tenuous space between sidewalk busker and bedroom poet, and this record doubles down on that ethos. The songs sway and stumble like they were tracked in a half-lit kitchen at 2 a.m., but every cough in the throat, every warble in the voice lands with more sincerity than a polished studio sheen could ever muster. You don’t get big choruses or obvious hooks here; you get lines that feel stolen straight out of a coffee-stained notebook – and the messy truth that comes with them.
There’s a lot of darkness on Surrender Instead: drinking bouts that tumble into self-doubt, mornings spent reckoning with the nights before, depression woven into daily rituals. But somehow Sullivan makes all that heaviness strangely comforting. Maybe it’s because he’s not whining or asking for pity like some emo kid who’s just had his heart broken for the first time. He’s just telling you how it is, and in that shared recognition—yeah, life’s rough, and we all fall down sometimes—we find what passes for solace.
Surrender? Nah. This is a record about survival: sometimes giving in, sometimes pushing through, sometimes just putting a melody to the ache so it doesn’t sit so heavy on your heart. That’s what folk music at its best has always been, and Field Medic carries that tradition like a backpack stuffed with regrets, bad decisions, and hard-earned truths.
MOVIOLA - Earthbound (Dromedary Records)
Moviola have been kicking around the Columbus scene for what feels like forever — not exactly a band in the traditional sense, more like a collective of lifers who’ve each got day jobs, kids, backyards, and mortgages, but somehow keep finding the time to hole up and make these quietly moving records. Earthbound is maybe the most “grown‑up” thing they’ve ever done, and I mean that in the best way possible.
Where indie rock often trades in nervous energy or irony, Moviola move at their own speed — unhurried, deliberate, content to let a song take its shape organically. The production sounds lived‑in, like a familiar room with the paint scuffed in the corners, but you wouldn’t want it cleaned up because that’s what makes it comfortable. The melodies don’t leap out so much as they sidle up next to you, slip an arm around your shoulder, and quietly remind you that slowing down isn’t such a bad idea.
Call it alt‑country, call it lo‑fi folk‑rock, call it whatever you want, but what Moviola do best is capture that hazy twilight place between indie rock’s ambition and the simple pleasures of an acoustic guitar in a kitchen after dinner.
Not every track here is going to knock you out on first listen — some feel as modest as a scribbled note stuck on the fridge. But if you live with this album for a while, its small gestures start echoing in bigger ways. That’s the thing about Moviola: they don’t demand your attention, they earn it, slowly, stubbornly, like old friends who keep showing up year after year because they still have something worth sharing.
In a pop world obsessed with the next big thing, Earthbound reminds you of the power of sticking around, of putting down roots, of making music that feels as familiar and vital as pouring a cup of coffee and watching the sun come up. This is music you share with friends, because it sounds like friends are making it.