This year marks the 20th anniversary of Superchunk’s Here’s Where the Strings Come In, an album that contains no actual strings, but nonetheless found the Chapel Hill indie rockers ready to embrace what they signify: maturation, sophistication, evolution. When Mac McCaughan declared, "I think I’m hyper enough as it is" on the album’s opening salvo, the statement functioned as both a readymade bumper-sticker slogan for Superchunk’s patented pogo-pop, and an admission of fatigue, signalling the refinement process that would play out over the band’s subsequent, pre-hiatus discography. Not coincidentally, around the same time, McCaughan promoted his solo project Portastatic from scrappy, sporadic pursuit to an equally prolific going concern, allowing him to not just quiet down, but branch out and explore sounds—easy-listening pop, Tropicalia, jazz, incidental soundtrack music, Prefab Sprout covers—that even a mellowing Superchunk wouldn’t accommodate.
Just as Superchunk sat out the 2000s—partly because their Merge Records imprint had transformed from beloved indie label to job-generating local-economy savior—Portastatic would likewise fall silent after 2006’s Be Still Please, its transformation from home-recording free-for-all to dignified, studio-smoothed art-pop outfit seemingly complete. But now that Superchunk have re-emerged this decade with two well-received, return-to-form albums, McCaughan finds himself in the same position as he was 20 years ago—eager to assert his lyrical voice without the risk of being overpowered by his primary band’s guitar roar. But this time, he’s not hiding behind a self-deprecating alias—with Non-Believers, he taps into a deeply personal, wistfully reflective mode of storytelling that demands putting his own name on the marquee for the first time in his 25-year career.
This album could have easily been titled Here’s Where the Synths Come In: though McCaughan is no stranger to keyboards, their use here is more dramatically purposeful than the textural shading they provided throughout the Portastatic catalogue, and inextricably intertwined with Non-Believers’ thematic framework. This is an album about growing up in and out of punk, its small-scaled but vigorous sound emblematic of the music’s transition into mechanistic New Wave at the dawn of the '80s (when synths essentially became the punk equivalent of hiring a string section). But while the bright, buzzy, fuzzy tones are redolent of a bygone era when these machines really sounded like the future, McCaughan’s vivid lyrical vignettes ground us in the sobering everyday scenes—as the celestial ballad "Mystery Flu" blossoms, he’s pondering "the stripe of paint on pavement, the seam in cement, an easement to our coming loss" like someone’s who’s spent far too many late nights on the interstate en route to another $50 gig.
Throughout McCaughan’s career, the lines separating his artistic, professional, and personal lives have been routinely blurred, so it’s fitting that the songs on Non-Believers double as pledges of romantic commitment and DIY self-sufficiency: The exultant chorus of "Only Do"—"there is no try/ there is only do"—is both an invitation to elope and an epitaph-worthy summation of McCaughan’s work ethic. Lyrically, McCaughan’s following in the footsteps of elders who aged gracefully out of punk before him, whether channelling the rich observational detail of the Go-Betweens on the high-school house-party reminiscences of "Your Hologram" or the hard-scrabble wisdom of latter-day Paul Westerberg on "Our Way Free" (a galloping, gently ascendent anthem that Arcade Fire should really select as their local-hero cover-song tribute the next time they roll through Durham).
Like those forebears, McCaughan has a gift for capturing simple, affecting moments without tipping the scales to sentimentality. Even the sleek dream-pop R&B groove and smooth harmony hooks of "Real Darkness" are undercut by a despairing account of locked-in-the-bathroom teenage depression; "family friends and strangers lift your chin and go, ‘smile kid’," McCaughan sings, but the ache radiating from his falsetto suggests such well-meaning platitudes only hasten the downward spiral.
But as much as Non-Believers mines memories of McCaughan’s formative years—be it the blown-out ghetto-blaster-fetishism of "Box Batteries" or the sight of "an '82 Honda getting its tapes stolen" on "Your Hologram"—it’s ultimately a portrait of his current condition, and how all those young-punk passions and problems made him the confident, principled, and industrious man he is today. On the latter song, he says, "I’ll be down in the basement/ I’ll be winding up wires," like an indie-rock lifer who’s got a permanent burn mark above his elbow from decades of spooling guitar cables around his arm at load-out. It’s a line he could’ve written when he was 15—and it sounds just as meaningful and virtuous on the cusp of 50.
