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House of Tomorrow (reissue) by Magnetic Fields

Magnetic Fields

House of Tomorrow (reissue)
Merge

***Cast your mind back to notable landmarks of 1992. Outside the Twin Cities, Mall of America opened to the public. Frank Gehry’s enormous golden fish sculpture, El Peix, welcomed Barcelona Olympians. And The House of Tomorrow, a four-song 7-inch on a small indie label, ushered in a new era for The Magnetic Fields. When Susan Anway, who sang on early albums Distant Plastic Trees and The Wayward Bus, left the group, Stephin Merritt stepped up to the microphone. He sought to sound simple, subtle, and unobtrusive, à la the Japanese concept of shibusa. Likewise, the arrangements and production of The House of Tomorrow felt less polished overall than on its predecessors, even as the band’s sound was evolving. Newly remastered and available as a 12-inch for the first time.

CD $9.25

01/19/1999  

MRG 152 CD 


LP $17.75

06/24/2024 673855015217 

MRG 152 


Look to the East, Look to the West by Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura

Look to the East, Look to the West
Merge

***Look to the East, Look to the West, the new album by Camera Obscura, is a revelation. The Tracyanne Campbell-led outfit, reuniting with producer Jari Haapalainen (Let’s Get Out of This Country, My Maudlin Career), have crafted an album that simultaneously recalls why longtime fans have ferociously loved them for decades while also being their most sophisticated effort to date. It is also the most hard-fought album of Camera Obscura’s career. Following the 2015 passing of founding keyboardist and friend Carey Lander (to whom the penultimate track “Sugar Almond” is addressed), the band went into an extended hiatus. They remained in contact, but their status was uncertain until they announced their return, having been invited to perform as part of Belle & Sebastian’s 2019 Boaty Weekender cruise festival, along with a pair of sold-out warm-up shows in Glasgow. Donna Maciocia (keys and vocals) joined founding members Kenny McKeeve (guitar and vocals), Gavin Dunbar (bass), and Lee Thomson (drums and percussion) for those shows and has since become a regular songwriting partner of Campbell’s. Recorded in the same room where Queen wrote “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Look to the East, Look to the West feels big, a widescreen reframing of Camera Obscura’s sound that, paradoxically, saw the band go back to basics—there are no string or brass arrangements, with more emphasis placed on piano, synthesizers, Hammond organ, and drum machines, and, perhaps most strikingly, the group have dropped the veil of reverb that characterized their previous albums. The tinges of country and soul...

LP $25.95

05/03/2024 673855083902 

MRG 839 


***Pull the Rope, the new record by Ibibio Sound Machine, casts the Eno Williams and Max Grunhard–led outfit in a new light. The hope, joy, and sexiness of their music remain, but, further honing the edge of their acclaimed 2022 album Electricity, the connection they aim to foster has shifted venues from the sunny buoyancy of a sunlit festival to a sweat-soaked, all-night dance club. Williams and Grunhard attribute this shift to a matter of collaborators, recording Pull the Rope with Sheffield-based producer Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys, M.I.A.) over the course of two weeks. The way the pair wrote songs changed significantly—rather than Eno penning lyrics to music generated by Max and company’s jamming, Orton started with Eno and Max writing together before adding the band. With less time in the studio and a new way of considering how they built songs, the duo found making decisions about Pull the Rope’s sound quicker and more instinctual than before. In melding their songwriting process, Grunhard and Williams have, impossibly, pulled the trick of making Ibibio Sound Machine a tighter band than ever before, building out from their core in a way that highlights the electrifying group of musicians they play with. Rather than recording with the full band in the room, Pull the Rope was sculpted, elements added and shaped by Grunhard, Williams, and Orton along the way. As a result, Pull the Rope is a nimble, sleek machine that’s thrilling from the first note of the opening title track, Eno’s...

LP $23.95

05/03/2024 673855084510 

MRG 845 


Bite Down by Rosali

Rosali

Bite Down
Merge

***Bite Down, the Merge Records debut of Rosali, finds acclaimed songwriter and guitarist Rosali Middleman in the midst of transition. Written after moving to North Carolina from her longtime home of Philadelphia, Bite Down is a searching, hungry record by an artist who is resolved to bite down on life, in all its horror and joy. She is joined here by Mowed Sound—David Nance (bass, guitar), James Schroeder (guitar, synth), Kevin Donahue (drums, percussion)—and in studio by Destroyer collaborator Ted Bois (keys). Bite Down is Rosali’s second album working with Mowed Sound, and there is urgency and ambition in their collaboration—a band pushing each other not just to expand on what they’ve already done together, but to break through into altogether new territory.

LP $22.95

03/22/2024 673855082417 

MRG 824 


Shriek + Variations by Wye Oak

Wye Oak

Shriek + Variations
Merge

***A limited edition expanded reissue of the fourth album from Wye Oak—Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack. Originally released in 2014, Shriek was the culmination of their intent to express the emotional and intuitive self by acting out animalistic exclamations through cathartic release. It was their most personal and confident declaration yet. Newly inspired by playing bass, Jenn took up songwriting in a setting where the guitar did not dictate harmonic boundaries or require a call-and-response relationship with her voice, a hallmark of previous Wye Oak records. With her phrasing freed, it was often Andy who interacted with Jenn’s vocals, playing syncopated and meditative keyboard parts, and the duo’s collaborative arrangements provided a backdrop in which both the arcs of melodies and the new rhythmic elements flourished. Features a second disc with five reworked Shriek tracks in collaboration with William Brittell. Limited to 1,100 copies.

2XLP $33.95

03/22/2024 673855083001 

MRG 830 


Untame the Tiger by Timony, Mary

Timony, Mary

Untame the Tiger
Merge

***For more than 30 years, singer-songwriter and guitar hero Mary Timony has cut a distinctive path through the world of independent music, most recently as vocalist and guitarist of acclaimed garage-pop power trio Ex Hex (Merge) but also as a member of seminal post- punk band Autoclave (Dischord), celebrated leader of the deeply influential Helium (Matador), multifaceted solo artist (Matador, Lookout!, Kill Rock Stars), and a co-founder of supergroup Wild Flag (Merge). Described by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein as “Mary Shelley with a guitar” and dubbed “a trailblazer and an innovator” by Lindsey Jordan aka Snail Mail, Timony has distinguished herself as one of her generation’s most influential. Although she has remained a cult hero and critical favorite since the early ’90s, Timony’s many triumphs have long been counterbalanced by crippling doubt and self-nullification. Her fifth solo album, Untame the Tiger, approaches these emotions head on. Her first solo release in 15 years is a startling document of an artist fully coming into her own power during the fourth decade of her career. It is the product of lessons learned during life-altering struggle. The mystical, acoustic-driven Untame the Tiger emerged after the dissolution of a long-term relationship and was bookended by the deaths of Timony’s father and mother. The album was recorded during a two-year period during which she was the primary caregiver for her ailing parents. The tectonic psychic shift Mary experienced due to this loss informs many of her lyrics.

LP $22.95

02/23/2024 673855083414 

MRG 834 


What an enormous room by Torres

Torres

What an enormous room
Merge

***What an enormous room is not only the title of the new album by Torres, it is an incantation, a phrase Mackenzie Scott has had in her head now for several years, for as long as some of the songs found here. What an enormous room is an entirely new look at Torres. Scott’s undeniable skill as a guitar player is still the engine driving her songs, but in “Collect,” it’s pushed through a polyphonic octave generator, creating a sound that is sexy and alien and peak Torres, a provocative statement of purpose that’s both a call to arms and a call to the dance floor. “Wake to flowers” is a celebration of the unexpected joy of things turning out much better than one could have hoped. It’s on the slinkier side of What an enormous room, exploring new territory for Torres that Scott attributes to recording with her friend Sarah Jaffe, the Texan singer-songwriter whose inclination to break genre boundaries has led her to collaborate with Eminem and producer Symbolyc One. Jaffe provides What an enormous room’s rhythm section, playing bass and drums, and the easiness of her collaboration with Scott made it possible for songs like “Jerk into joy” to emerge—like the incantation central to it, and the album itself—after years in Scott’s head in a way that is simultaneously more direct and more sonically ambitious than any Torres record to date.

LP $22.95

01/26/2024 673855082714 

MRG 827 


Duets For Guitars # 2 by Ward, M

Ward, M

Duets For Guitars # 2
Merge

***REISSUED!!! Duet for Guitars #2 introduced us to M. Ward’s characteristic rasp and fingerpicking prowess. More minimal in scope than future records, the songs run the gamut from lullabies to rocking declarations of love. Released on Co-Dependent Records in 1999, one of the initial 1,000 copies found its way to Howe Gelb, who re-released it in 2000 on Ow Om. It went out of print and remained a hard-to-find piece of the M. Ward catalog until 2007, when it was reissued on Merge with three new tracks. More than an origin story, Duet for Guitars #2 is a beautiful, assured album that is sure to make lo-fi and Americana aficionados swoon, to say nothing of M. Ward fans new and old.

LP $22.95

01/26/2024 673855030111 

MRG 301 


Transfiguration of Vincent by Ward, M

Ward, M

Transfiguration of Vincent
Merge

***REISSUED!!! In 2003, everything broke open for M. Ward with the release of Transfiguration of Vincent. Critically lauded and long beloved, Pitchfork hailed it as an album that “broadcasts timelessness and defies genre constraints,” and Slant placed it on their list of the best albums of the 2000s. On Transfiguration of Vincent, Ward’s elegant fingerpicking, evocative croon, and heartrending lyricism came into full bloom, casting a spell so powerful that even a song as universal as David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” felt not only new but irrevocably his. One of the most cherished albums in the Merge catalog, Transfiguration of Vin- cent is both a great place to begin your love affair with M. Ward and a deep, stunningly realized work that listeners have returned to over and over again for 20 years.

LP $22.95

01/26/2024 673855022314 

MRG 223 


Attachment Styles (Reissue) by M(H)AOL

M(H)AOL

Attachment Styles (Reissue)
Merge

***Based in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, London, and Bristol, the Irish intersectional feminist five-piece M(h)aol have gained a reputation for their engaging and invigorating live shows. The group’s 2023 album Attachment Styles is about social connection, queerness, and healing where the listener goes on a journey. When vocalist Róisín Nic Ghearailt was writing the lyrics, she used as an overarching theme the theory of attachment styles which examines the impact our inter-familial relationships and society have on how we relate to one another. Consisting of Róisín (vocals, she/her), Constance Keane (drums, she/her), Jamie Hyland (bass, she/her), Zoë Greenway (bass, she/her), and Sean Nolan (guitar, he/him), M(h)aol apply a DIY ethos to all aspects of the band. Attachment Styles was originally released on TULLE, an independent women-led record label co-founded by Constance. It was recorded, mixed, mastered, and produced by Jamie, and all accompanying artwork and music videos were created by Zoë.

LP $22.45

11/17/2023 673855083315 

MRG 833 


***Orbiting Human Circus’ new album is called Quartet Plus Two. What is Orbiting Human Circus? It is the continuing evolution of Julian Koster (Neutral Milk Hotel, The Music Tapes), whose music and storytelling under this moniker have encompassed immersive theater and a Night Vale Presents podcast, as well as more traditional albums. Central to the album are the “two” referenced in the title: North and Romika, the singing saws, whom Koster doesn’t “play” so much as encourage. “I think saws sing like angels,” says Koster. “I always have. Since I was a little boy. When you encourage them to sing, they do so earnestly and beautifully. It’s an honest and real sound.” The origins of Quartet Plus Two are as magical and seemingly unlikely as everything else in Koster’s career. While walking through New York’s Central Park, he stumbled upon Gauvain Gamon and Kolja Gjoni—a standup bass player and drummer, respectively—playing Gershwin and Mingus, and a musical partnership was born. Pianist Benji Miller rounds out the titular quartet, with Koster’s longtime collaborators Robbie Cucchiaro (horns) and Thomas Hughes (orchestral arranging and chimes) of The Music Tapes also contributing to the record. The music they make together is at once familiar and unrecognizable, as Koster and Orbiting Human Circus interpret jazz compositions by Irving Berlin, Duke Jordan, George and Ira Gershwin, and others, alongside Koster’s three originals. The use of the term “composition” is intentional and speaks to Koster’s relationship with the music of Quartet Plus Two in far more evocative...

LP $22.95

11/17/2023 673855083810 

MRG 838 


Jenny from Thebes by Mountain Goats

Mountain Goats

Jenny from Thebes
Merge

***Jenny from Thebes began its life as many albums by the Mountain Goats do, with John Darnielle playing the piano until a lyric emerged. That lyric, “Jenny was a warrior / Jenny was a thief / Jenny hit the corner clinic begging for relief,” became “Jenny III,” a song which laid down a challenge he’d never taken up before: writing a sequel to one of his most beloved albums. The Mountain Goats’ catalog is thick with recurring characters—Jenny, who originally appears in the All Hail West Texas track bearing her name, as well as in “Straight Six” from Jam Eater Blues and Transcendental Youth side two jam “Night Light,” is one of these, someone who enters a song unexpectedly, pricking up the ears of fans who are keen on continuing the various narrative threads running through the Mountain Goats’ discography before vanishing into the mist. In these songs, Jenny is largely defined by her absence, and she is given that definition by other characters. She is running from something. These features are beguiling, both to the characters who’ve told her story so far and to the listener. They invite certain questions: Who is Jenny, really? What is she running from? Well, she’s a warrior and a thief, and, this being an album by the Mountain Goats, it’s a safe bet whatever she’s fleeing is something bad. Something catastrophically bad. Jenny from Thebes is the story of Jenny, her southwestern ranch style house, the people for whom that house is...

LP $22.25

10/27/2023 673855084114 

MRG 841 


Misfits & Mistakes: Singles, B-Sides and Strays 2007 - 2023 by Superchunk

Superchunk

Misfits & Mistakes: Singles, B-Sides and Strays 2007 - 2023
Merge

***Misfits & Mistakes: Singles, B-sides & Strays 2007–2023 is Superchunk’s fourth singles compilation, a massive, 4-LP (or 2-CD) collection covering their triumphant return from hiatus. The amount of ground covered within its gorgeous packaging is staggering: 50 songs, 16 of which are on physical media for the first time, sourced from out-of-print releases, digital singles, compilations, and more—a vital piece of the Superchunk canon. Featuring extensive liner notes by Mac McCaughan (with additional notes from Laura Ballance), Misfits & Mistakes tells the story of each release, from why they chose to cover songs by The Misfits, The Cure, Destiny’s Child, and Bananarama, to working with collaborators like Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee), Jane Wiedlin (The Go-Go’s), Eleanor Friedberger, Damian Abraham (Fucked Up), Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley (Teenage Fanclub), and more!

2XCD $17.25

10/27/2023 673855082028 

MRG 820 CD 


4XLP $74.50

10/27/2023 673855082011 

MRG 820 


Will Butler + Sister Squares by Butler, Will + Sister Squares

Butler, Will + Sister Squares

Will Butler + Sister Squares
Merge

***Sister Squares are Sara Dobbs, Miles Francis, Jenny Shore and Julie Shore. What made them a musical unit was working with Grammy winner and Oscar nominee Will Butler. This is their self-titled debut album. The band emerged as full collaborators from their origins as Butler’s touring band, first put together to support 2015’s Policy. While considering making a solo record, Butler found himself turning to the band for feedback on lyrics and song structures, eventually asking Miles if they’d produce the album. From there, the music flowed. Will Butler + Sister Squares projects widescreen emotional landscapes with a warm, humane soul. “Long Grass” is like a Harry Styles song sung with 20 more years of life behind it, and the back half is a danceable choral record that showcases what Sister Squares bring to Butler’s sound. “It came out uniquely ours,” Miles explains, “a tiny bespoke musical bloom that can never be exactly reproduced. Those kinds of moments between us are embedded all over this album.”

LP $22.25

09/22/2023 673855084015 

MRG 840 


Nothing Lasts Forever by Teenage Fanclub

Teenage Fanclub

Nothing Lasts Forever
Merge

***“Foreign Land” is the opening track on Teenage Fanclub’s 2023 studio album, Nothing Lasts Forever. That track—and the rest of this beautifully rich and melodic album—is the sound of a season’s end, of the last warm days of the year while nights begin to draw in and thoughts become reflective and more than a little melancholy. While the vocals and the finishing touches on Nothing Lasts Forever were recorded at Raymond McGinley’s place in Glasgow, the music was recorded in an intense 10-day period in the bucolic Welsh countryside at Rockfield Studios, near Monmouth, in August 2022. You can hear the effect of that environment on the record—it’s full of soft breeze, wide skies, beauty, and space. Though the band that recorded Nothing Lasts Forever—McGinley and Norman Blake on lead vocals and guitar, along with Francis Macdonald on drums, Dave McGowan on bass, and Euros Childs on keyboards—arrived at the residential studio without a fixed plan, their confidence and ease with working together meant the record came together incredibly quickly.

LP $23.95

09/22/2023 673855084213 

MRG 842 


***The moment the needle drops on Bite, the new A Giant Dog record, one’s conception of what an A Giant Dog record sounds like bends like space and time around a starship running at lightspeed. The biggest point of departure is that Bite is a concept album, concerning characters who find themselves moving in and out of a virtual reality called Avalonia. A Giant Dog’s first album of original songs since 2017’s Toy, Bite finds the band—Sabrina Ellis, Andrew Cashen, Danny Blanchard, Graham Low, and Andy Bauer—at their peak as musicians, challenging themselves with more complex arrangements and subject matter that forced them out of their heads and into those of the characters who occupy this supposed paradise. “We had to find ourselves within, or project ourselves into, the principal characters. We developed them, got to know their minds, emotions, and motivations, and then expressed those in nine songs,” Ellis explains. Themes of addiction, gender fluidity, living ethically in a capitalist society, physical autonomy, avarice, grief, and consent bubble beneath the promised happiness of Avalonia. This is evident in songs like “Different Than,” where Ellis sings, “My body can’t explain the things my mind don’t comprehend” as if societal gender pressure is squeezing its protagonist out of their skin. The songs on Bite are full of bombast, at turns calling to mind the spacefaring operatic rock of Electric Light Orchestra and the high drama of an Ennio Morricone film score. The album’s narrative sweep is epic in scope, its characters...

LP $22.25

08/25/2023 673855082912 

MRG 829 


***It’s spring of 2023 in the North Carolina Piedmont, and songwriter and singer M.C. Taylor—leader of the band Hiss Golden Messenger—is feeling alive. Joyful. Eternal, he might say. For the Grammy-nominated musician, whose albums have traced an internal path through adulthood, fatherhood, spirituality, and depression for well over a decade, this is something new. “The tunes on Jump for Joy were composed in free moments throughout 2022, a year during which Hiss was on the road more or less constantly,” explains Taylor. “And perhaps because the post-pandemic energy out in the world felt so chaotic and uncertain, I found myself thinking a lot about the role that music has played in my life and how exactly I ended up in the rarefied position of leading a band and crew all over the globe through dingy graffiti-scrawled green rooms, venerated music halls, dust-blown roadside motels. Sometimes playing in front of 5,000; sometimes 200. Sleeping sitting up. Laughing until my stomach hurts. Not being able to fall asleep at 3 a.m. in some anonymous bed because my mind is spinning with anxiety or depression or adrenaline, or because my ears are still ringing. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul to pay Peter back. Over and over again. It’s an outlaw life but one, I’m coming to realize, that makes me happy.” The songs that make up Jump for Joy—the sharpest and most autobiographical that Taylor has written under the Hiss name—read as a sort of epistolary, postcards between the present-day...

LP $22.95

08/25/2023 673855082516 

MRG 825 


Happy Hour In Dub by Cook, Hollie

Cook, Hollie

Happy Hour In Dub
Merge

***Happy Hour in Dub, a heavenly set of dub versions to pair with Hollie Cook’s critically acclaimed 2022 album Happy Hour. Her first full dub record since 2012, Happy Hour in Dub was coaxed into being by close listening of the original album’s modern lover’s rock. Cook and producer Ben Mckone explain:“The reason and inspiration for wanting to make the dub record is because Happy Hour, in its original form, has so many intricate musical details running throughout the songs—from the backing vocal and string arrangements to some far more subtle details. And during the mixing process, hearing some of these parts on their own over the drum and bass foundation, we felt there was so much left to explore and expose in the songs and take them to outer space.” At the controls rejoining Hollie in exploring the space is Happy Hour producer Mckone, who takes her soulful creations and stretches them to their sonic limits, with new vocal features by Josh Skints and Kiko Bun.

LP $20.35

08/11/2023 673855078816 

MRG 788 


I Am Not There Anymore by Clientele

Clientele

I Am Not There Anymore
Merge

***The Clientele’s I Am Not There Anymore regularly evokes what singer-guitarist Alasdair MacLean calls “the feeling of not being real.” Recording for the album began in 2019 and continued piecemeal until 2022—in part because of the pandemic, but also because the band wanted to experiment. “We’d always been interested in music other than guitar music, like for donkey’s years,” MacLean says. This time out, he and bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen incorporated elements of post-bop jazz, contemporary classical, and electronic music. According to MacLean, “None of those things had been able to find their way into our sound other than in the most passing way, in the faintest imprint.” This stretching out—what MacLean calls “a leap forwards and to the side”—can be heard clearly in lead single “Blue Over Blue,” with its percussive samples and its moments where the arrangement opens up suddenly into something cinemat- ic in scope, with horns and strings. MacLean says I Am Not There Anymore is all about “the memory of childhood but at the same time the impossibility of truly remembering childhood... or even knowing who or what you are.”

2XLP $25.75

07/28/2023 673855080710 

MRG 807 


CD $13.50

07/28/2023 673855080727 

MRG 807 CD 


For Some Other Reason by Mac Krol

Mac Krol

For Some Other Reason
Merge

***MAC KROL is MAC MCCAUHAN of SUPERCHUNK and PORTASTATIC and MILE KROL. The collaboration began its life in 2015, when Krol and his bandmates Elliott Kozel, Phil Mahlstadt, and Michael Sienkowski decamped to San Francisco’s Tiny Telephone after recording Turkey, intending to turn “a handful of riffs and ideas” into a full record. “The plan was to take the rough mixes home and write lyrics to record them later,” Krol explains. “However, once I got home and listened to the songs, I quickly realized that most of them were in the wrong key for my voice. So I filed them away to deal with later, and eventually lost interest.” In 2020, stuck inside due to the pandemic, Krol rediscovered the tracks on an old hard drive and had time to try his hand at solving them. “To my surprise,” he says, “they sounded better than I remembered, but still didn’t work with my voice. I emailed Mac the tracks and said if he was bored in quarantine, maybe he could write some words to sing on top of my instrumentals and possibly give them a second life. He said he hated writing lyrics and politely declined. A few days later, three songs showed up with completed lyrics and iconic Mac McCaughan singing and shredding all over them. I was blown away!”

7" $11.00

07/28/2023 673855079271 

MRG 792 


All Her Plans by Cable Ties

Cable Ties

All Her Plans
Merge

***All Her Plans, the third album from Melbourne, Australia’s Cable Ties, finds the trio of Jenny McKechnie, Shauna Boyle, and Nick Brown at their punchiest and most assured. The ferocious, kraut-influenced blend of post-punk and garage rock of Merge debut Far Enough remains, but McKechnie’s lyrics invite the listener closer than ever before. The urgency and fury that have marked Cable Ties’ output thus far is more nuanced on All Her Plans. The unfettered rage of their calls to action endures—tackling subjects like broken mental healthcare systems and the burden of familial care that is largely placed on women—while holding space for gratitude, love, and acceptance. All Her Plans is a breakthrough moment for Cable Ties. It is the sound of a group that is exhilarated to be making music together again, both a celebration of their resilience and a massive step forward into a future they can finally claim as their own.

LP $21.25

06/23/2023 673855082318 

MRG 823 


Every Day Like the Last: Collected Singles 2019-2023 by Wye Oak

Wye Oak

Every Day Like the Last: Collected Singles 2019-2023
Merge

***Every Day Like the Last: Collected Singles 2019–2023, is a physical home for three new tracks and previously released music from Wye Oak, charting the past four years of the band’s lives. Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack’s musical partnership bloomed in the uncertainty of that period, whenever they felt that Wye Oak had something to say. They shifted to quickly writing, recording, and releasing digital EPs and singles. To Stack, there is a thread running through what is seemingly chaos: “Finding cheer in the doom of the world.” Every Day Like the Last does just that, reminding the listener of the new heights Wye Oak have reached since 2018’s The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, while gazing into the unknown of what’s ahead. The title of this collection acknowledges that duality, posing it like a question: “every day like the day before it” or “every day like the last day on Earth?” “Both meanings apply,” Wasner says. There are no easy answers.

LP $22.95

06/23/2023 673855071718 

MRG 717 


The Big Mess by Tanlines

Tanlines

The Big Mess
Merge

***Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen of Tanlines are indie-rock lifers turned reasonable, happy middle-aged fathers of two, figuring out their place in a chaotic culture and industry that can no longer command their full attention.They are emblematic of a particular time and place that doesn’t really exist anymore, yet here they are existing, and thriving, in 2023. The Big Mess came together when Emm and his family moved from Brooklyn to rural Connecticut, while Cohen launched a marketing career and a successful podcast and stayed in the city. Emm continued writing songs—hundreds of them—through all the weirdness of the past few years, but he wasn’t exactly sure who he was writing them for. “I spent years figuring out in my mind, ‘What is my musical life going to look like?’” he says. “I just kept writing.” Cohen gave Emm his blessing to continue Tanlines, even if his own contributions would be limited due to his own non-musical obligations. “I’m like, ‘Whatever you can do to keep this thing going, do it,’” Cohen says. And with that, Tanlines was reborn. By January 2022 Emm felt he had a body of work that made sense as a Tanlines album. Cohen spent ten days with Emm at his Connecticut studio, along with unofficial third Tanline Patrick Ford (!!!). This was tied together with a sleek final mix from Peter Katis (The National, Interpol) at his famed Tarquin Studios, resulting in a clear vision of what Emm’s musical life was going to look like:...

LP $22.25

05/19/2023 673855082813 

MRG 828 


A River Running to Your Heart by Fruit Bats

Fruit Bats

A River Running to Your Heart
Merge

***Eric D. Johnson rarely lingers at one location too long. As a kid growing up in the Midwest, Johnson’s family moved around a lot, but it wasn’t until he became a touring musician years later that motion became a central part of his identity. That transient lifestyle stoked an enduring reverence for the world he watched pass by through a van window. A sense of place is a unifying theme he’s revisited with Fruit Bats throughout its many lives. From the project’s origins in the late ’90s as a vehicle for Johnson’s lo-fi tinkering to the more sonically ambitious work of recent years, Fruit Bats has often showcased love songs where people and locations meld into one. It’s a loose song structure that navigates what he calls “the geography of the heart.” A River Running to Your Heart represents the fullest realization of that creative vision to date. It’s a sonically diverse effort that largely explores the importance of what it means to be home, both physically and spiritually. And while that might seem like a peculiar focus for an artist who’s constantly in motion, for Fruit Bats, home can take many forms—from the obvious to the obscure.

LP $22.25

04/14/2023 673855076713 

MRG 767 


Continue as a Guest by New Pornographers, The

New Pornographers, The

Continue as a Guest
Merge

***Over the past 20 years, THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS have proven themselves one of the most excellent bands in indie rock. The group’s ninth album and first for Merge establishes them alongside modern luminaries like Yo La Tengo and Superchunk when it comes to their ability to evolve while still retaining what made them so special in the first place. A dazzling and intriguing collection of songs, Continue as a Guest finds bandleader A.C. NEWMAN and his compatriots NEKO CASE, KATHRYN CALDER, JOHN COLLINS, TODD FANCEY and JOE SEIDERS exploring fresh territory and shattering the barriers of their collective comfort zone. Newman began work on Continue as a Guest after the band had finished touring behind 2019’s In the Morse Code of Brake Lights. Themes of isolation and collapse bleed into this album, as Newman tackles the ambivalence of day-to-day life during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Newman says that Continue as a Guest’s title track also addresses the concerns that come with being in a band for so long. “The idea of continuing as a guest felt apropos to the times,” he explains. “Feeling out of place in culture, in society, being in a band that has been around for so long—not feeling like a part of any zeitgeist, but happy to be separate and living your simple life, your long fade-out. Living in a secluded place in an isolated time, it felt like a positive form of acceptance: find your own little nowhere, find some space to fall apart, continue...

LP $22.25

03/31/2023 673855080918 

MRG 809 


***Recorded live at Yellowhammer Brewing in Huntsville, Alabama, in May 2021, Secret Stratosphere finds William Tyler and fellow psychedelic dreamers The Impossible Truth refashioning prime cuts from the Nashville guitarist’s rich catalog, casting new light onto once-familiar songs. Featuring the crackling combo of Jack Lawrence (Raconteurs, Dead Weather), Brian Kotzur (Silver Jews, Country Westerns), and Luke Schneider (solo, Margo Price), the quartet stretch the dynamics of Tyler’s compositions to their fullest interdimensional potential, exposing a deep undercurrent of kosmische and post-rock influences (with the right amount of grit from the nitrous corner of the Dead Lot). In teasing these influences out on favorites and new songs alike—he cheekily calls closer “Area Code 601” a “Hawkwind meets Charlie Daniels Band number” before sending the crowd home on a previously unreleased stunner that lives somewhere between mind-expanding prog and beer commercial– backing Southern rock—Secret Stratosphere confirms William Tyler’s place as one of our most brilliant guitarists, bandleaders, and composers.

2XLP $30.50

03/31/2023 673855079608 

MRG 796 


The Collected Works of Neutral Milk Hotel by Neutral Milk Hotel

Neutral Milk Hotel

The Collected Works of Neutral Milk Hotel
Merge

The two full-length records that Jeff Mangum made as Neutral Milk Hotel sound both in and out of time. Like translations of a shared subconscious, 1996’s On Avery Island and 1998’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea give voice to the perennial spirit of youthful epiphany, of beginning to see the world clearly, to process and express it—no matter when you encounter them. With lo-fi indie rock, accordion, singing saw, tape collages, the so-called “zanzithophone” and beyond, Neutral Milk Hotel created an eternal entry into their Elephant 6 scene and an enduring feeling of possibility. Mangum was born in the small city of Ruston, Louisiana, coming of age within the ’80s and ’90s indie and punk undergrounds, a movement of teenagers recording in their bedrooms, sharing zines and trading tapes, listening to hardcore and experimental music on college radio. For all the mythology Mangum’s elusive persona has accrued, it’s the beguiling songs themselves that have resonated so deeply for generations. In 2011, Mangum collected nearly all of the band’s recorded output in a limited-edition box set (self-released under Neutral Milk Hotel Records, a small operation helmed by Mangum and his mother) which is now being updated for wide reissue by the band’s longtime label Merge Records. CONTENTS: Black matte box is a 2-piece telescoping casewrapped package. Outer shrinkwrap includes a front sticker with “Neutral Milk Hotel,” and a back sticker listing box contents. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea LP is 11 tracks pressed 33RPM to black vinyl in a...

BOX SET $148.50

02/24/2023 673855077611 

MRG 776 


***With One Day, Fucked Up have delivered one of the most energizing and intricate albums of their career, a massive-sounding record that arrives in deceptively small confines. The Canadian hardcore legends have been known for their epic scale in the past, so it might be a surprise that Fucked Up’s sixth studio album is their shortest to date, written and recorded in the confines of one literal day (hence the title). Don’t mistake size for substance, though: The band’s sound has only gotten bigger, more hard-charging, with even denser thickets of melody. “I wanted to see what I could record in literally one day.” That singular idea came to mind for guitarist Mike Haliechuk in the closing months of 2019. Haliechuk got himself into a studio and proceeded to write and record the record’s ten tracks over three eight-hour sessions, reconnecting with the core the band’s songwriting essence in the process. Initially, Fucked Up vocalist Damian Abraham was also set to complete his vocals in similar fashion—that is, before the lockdowns of 2020 took place. As it turns out, the isolation yielded creative dividends, as Abraham returned to contributing lyrics as well for the first time since 2014’s Glass Boys. One Day is an undeniable work of confidence from a band that continues to operate at the top of their game, making music that’s guaranteed to last a lifetime and beyond. Limited colored version pressed on blue in milky clear color-in-color vinyl.

LP $21.35

01/27/2023 673855080116 

MRG 801 


LP COLOR $21.35

01/27/2023 673855080109 

MRG 801 X 


***If naming is a form of claiming, of being claimed, how is one tethered to both the physical landscape that surrounds us, as well as our own internal emotional landscape—at times calm, at times turbulent, and ever changing? H.C. McEntire’s new album Every Acre grapples with those themes—themes that encompass grief, loss, and links to land and loved ones. And naming—claiming land, claiming self, being claimed by ancestry and heritage—permeates the hauntingly beautiful landscape that is this poignant collection of songs. Gracious (and graceful) with its lilting melodies and lush harmonies, Every Acre explores the acres of our physical and emotional homes. These songs are reaching for the kind of home that we all seek: one where we can rest and lay down (or tuck away) our burdens of loss. And maybe, moving through every acre of a world that often tries to tear our sense of identity and heritage down, McEntire sheds light on what it is to be human in this life—both stingy and gracious, both hurtful and kind.

LP $20.35

01/27/2023 673855080215 

MRG 802  


Reason In Decline by Archers Of Loaf

Archers Of Loaf

Reason In Decline
Merge

***As sculpted shards of guitar—tumbling, tolling, squalling—shower the jittery bounce of a piano on opener “Human,” it’s obvious that Reason in Decline, Archers of Loaf’s first album in 24 years, will be more than a nostalgic, low-impact reboot. When they emerged from North Carolina’s ’90s indie-punk incubator, the Archers’ hurtling, sly, gloriously dissonant roar was a mythologized touchstone of slacker-era refusal. But this, the distilled shudder of “Human” is an entirely different noise. In fact, it’s a startling revelation. Eric Bachmann and Eric Johnson, once headstrong smartasses inciting a series of artful pileups on the band’s four studio albums and EP, are now a fluidly complementary, sonically advanced unit. Notably, Johnson’s signature trebly lines peal clearly above the din instead of struggling to be heard. Second, singer-songwriter Bachmann, after throat surgery, relearned how to sing (this time from his diaphragm); as a result, he no longer howls like the angriest head cold on the Eastern Seaboard. And now, his lyrics balance righteous wrath with a complex tangle of adult perspective. In short, this is not your father’s Archers of Loaf, even if you’re a father now who was a fan then. (If that’s the case, congrats on surviving the Plague and getting to hear this fearlessly poignant record, you alt-geezer!) Otherwise, thank your youthful fucking lucky stars, kids! Enjoy Reason in Decline with fresh ears and do as the Archers have been doing: Stay humble, stay informed, express yourself creatively, and try not to lose your goddamned mind while the...

LP $21.35

10/21/2022 673855079516 

MRG 795 


***The debut collaboration between New Orleans electro-revival dynamo DAWN RICHARD and multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer SPENCER ZAHN. Pigments is a project about the power of self-expression through living art, through motion. It’s also a love letter to New Orleans, Louisiana. Not strictly classical, jazz or ambient electronica but rather a body of “movements,” Pigments is an expressive soundscape that is an immersive passage through the city as seen through the eyes of a young Black girl with dreams to paint her future with the pigments given to her. Richard explains: “Spencer wanted to create one long piece of music that would ebb and flow around my lyrics and emotions, which tell a story of growing to love my own skin. I wanted my voice to be moss surrounding the roots of Spencer’s compo- sitions, never forcing the moment to fill every space but rather reveling in the openness of thought and breath.”

LP $21.25

10/21/2022 673855078403 

MRG 784 


The Will to Live by Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus

The Will to Live
Merge

***The Will to Live was produced by TITUS ANDRONICUS singer-songwriter PATRICK STICKLES and Canadian icon HOWARD BILERMAN (Arcade Fire, Leonard Cohen, The Whole Nine Yards) at the latter’s Hotel 2 Tango recording studio in Montreal. Drawing on maximalist rock epics from Who’s Next to Hysteria, Bilerman and Stickles have crafted the richest, densest, and hardest- hitting sound for Titus Andronicus yet. All at once, the record matches the sprawl and scope of the band’s most celebrated work, while also honing their ambitious attack to greater effect than ever before. “It may strike some as ironic we had to go to Canada to record our equivalent to Born in the USA,” quips Stickles, “but the pursuit of Ultimate Rock knows no borders.” The Will to Live features sterling contributions from members of the HOLD STEADY, ARCADE FIRE, and THE E STREET BAND, as well as duets with the TA guitarist LIAM BETSON, former Titus Andronicus drummer ERIC HARM, and JOSÉE CARON of the Canadian rock band PARTNER. The album comes packaged with gorgeous triple-gatefold artwork by illustrious illustrator NICOLE RIFKIN, a Hieronymus Bosch–inspired triptych which mirrors the three-part structure of the narrator’s perilous voyage across the corresponding three sides of vinyl. USA, Mexico, Central America only.

2XLP $24.95

10/07/2022 673855080819 

MRG 808 


The Bible by Lambchop

Lambchop

The Bible
Merge

***The only prophets worth a shit are the reluctant ones, and so it was that right before he started work on what would become his 16th album, The Bible, LAMBCHOP's KURT WAGNER found himself at the proverbial crossroads. Nearing the end of Lambchop’s third decade, Wagner felt musically isolated. Many of his old bandmates were either long gone or uninterested in touring anymore. He questioned whether making music even made sense. Wagner was actually considering getting a job at the grocery store down the road. “I feel weird because I’m going to be 64, dude,” he says in between drags on a cigarette, on the phone from his home in Nashville. “What the fuck am I doing?” The Bible is the sound of Kurt Wagner looking backwards and forwards, asking this and all the other big questions. The music on The Bible is more unpredictable than it’s ever been on a Lambchop record. Jazz careening into country, into disco, into funk, and back to country. He can call it whatever he wants in this bio. The sounds all jumbled together with snatches of observations, words torn from the headlines in Minneapolis—bumper stickers on the freeway, or graffiti from outside that decommissioned paint factory. This is Lambchop’s 16th album, with a completely new lineup, their first after the plague. Features an etching on the D-side.

2XLP $25.75

09/30/2022 673855080406 

MRG 804 


***Maybe you are just like John Darnielle: In the depths of the pandemic end of 2020, the Mountain Goats frontman passed the time trapped at home watching pulpy action movies, finding comfort in familiar tropes and sofabound escapism. But you are not really like John Darnielle, unless the action movies you found comfort in included French thrillers like 2008’s Mesrine, vintage Italian poliziotteschi, or the 1974 Donald Pleasence mad-scientist vehicle The Freakmaker. Or unless watching them brought you back to your formative days as an artist, when watching films fueled and soundtracked your songwriting jags and bare-bones home recordings and in turn inspired your 20th album to be a song cycle about the allure—and futility—of vengeance. But there’s no shame in not being like John Darnielle; few people are. Bleed Out is a cinematic experience unto itself. One song about preparing to exact bloody revenge begat another song about the act of exacting bloody revenge and then more songs about and the causes and the aftermath of being driven to exact bloody revenge, each delivered with the urgency and desperation deserving of their narrators and circumstances.

2XLP $28.50

08/19/2022 673855079912 

MRG 799 


Unravelled: 1981 - 2002 by Tall Dwarfs

Tall Dwarfs

Unravelled: 1981 - 2002
Merge

***Unravelled: 1981–2002 shines a loving light on lo-fi pioneers Tall Dwarfs, the prized New Zealand duo of Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate. The collection compiles songs from two decades of recordings. The vinyl edition includes a 20-page collector’s booklet of photos, comics, posters, and other ephemera. Tall Dwarfs formed in 1981, opting to record themselves on a 4-track reel-to-reel. New Zealand’s AudioCulture wrote of the duo’s project: “Early live performances were a ramshackle work in progress. Knox described them in an interview with American magazine Forced Exposure as ‘two minutes of song followed by five minutes of fucking around.’ Tall Dwarfs was meant to be a one-off, but after the founding of their New Zealand label Flying Nun, they continued to record music for the next 21 years, releasing seven EPs and six albums. Their process was spontaneous, with songs being recorded as they were written. Typically, Bathgate would work up something on guitar while Knox provided vocals, lyrics, and tape loops. Then they added any sounds that seemed necessary to finish a song, using whatever was lying around: pans, chairs, baby rattles. Though Tall Dwarfs could be weird, they were never too experimental; Knox and Bathgate both loved melody too much. The songs on Unravelled: 1981–2002 were curated by Alec Bathgate, who also designed the box set packaging; Chris Knox suffered a debilitating stroke in 2009 just as they had started work on a new album. The collection captures the different sides of the Tall Dwarfs in 55 songs....

4XLP $93.50

08/19/2022 673855079813 

MRG 798 


***This summer, Merge will reissue A Giant Dog’s first two full- lengths—2012’s Fight and 2013’s Bone—worldwide on limited edition colored vinyl, reintroducing the world to the quintet Spoon’s Britt Daniel calls “the greatest American rock and roll / punk band since I don’t know when.” Recording for the first time with a proper producer (Mike McCarthy) in a proper environment (a studio lol), A Giant Dog Bone, on pink vinyl for the reissue, still manages to kool-aid man its way through the speakers with the immediacy of the band’s live shows, a hit parade for the party people. Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen add another baker’s dozen tunes to the band’s repertoire just a year following their debut, with songs like “All I Wanted,” “Dammit Pomegranate,” and “Another World” cementing them as a conspicuous songwriting duo.

LP $20.35

07/29/2022 673855079400 

MRG 794 LP 


***This summer, Merge will reissue A Giant Dog’s first two full- lengths—2012’s Fight and 2013’s Bone—worldwide on limited edition colored vinyl, reintroducing the world to the quintet Spoon’s Britt Daniel calls “the greatest American rock and roll / punk band since I don’t know when.” Celebrating its tenth birthday in 2022 is A Giant Dog Fight, the Texas group’s hard-to-find debut album, remixed, remastered, and pressed on green vinyl just for the occasion. All the trademark tenets of AGD lore are on display at the jump: monstrously adorable album art and punny title, whip-smart songwriting dolled up in denim and leather, boiled down to the sweetest moments and blown out to the masses with bravado to spare. Upon Fight’s original release, the local Austin Chronicle raved: “The raucous, low-rent squall quakes with affirmative abandon, while a just-right dose of pop girds the buzz and yowl.

LP $20.35

07/29/2022 673855079301 

MRG 793 LP 


(Colored) Year of the Ox by Fucked Up

Fucked Up

(Colored) Year of the Ox
Merge

***Recorded over 6 months by Jon Drew at Giant Studios in Toronto, Year of the Ox is the band’s fourth record in the continuing 12-year cycle and adds to its evolving retinue of guest musicians. The patient and building Year of the Ox features Nika Rosa Danilova of Zola Jesus for a guest vocal passage and Toronto’s string quartet, New Strings Old Puppets. B-side “Solomon’s Song,” a gothic vampire love tribute to Twilight, features a 5-minute saxophone solo from Aerin Fogel of the Bitters and heavy synthing from Trust.

12" $17.75

07/29/2022 73855039107 

MRG 391 PV 


Love The Stranger by Friendship

Friendship

Love The Stranger
Merge

***Friendship’s Merge debut, Love the Stranger, moves like a country record skipping in just the right spot, leaving its fellow travelers longing for a place they’ve only visited in their dreams. Guitarist Peter Gill, drummer Michael Cormier-O’Leary, bassist Jon Samuels, and hawkeyed balladeer Dan Wriggins map out the group’s particular, breathtaking landscape and invite the listener to share in its glory. Love the Stranger’s invitation is all the more wondrous because its characters have clearly been hurt before. “I need solitude and I also need you,” Wriggins reckons in “Ugly Little Victory.” Wide awake, vulnerable, and gimmickless, Friendship won’t hesitate to confide in us, or even ask for help when the moment calls, like on the lyrical centerpiece of “Alive Twice”: Between instrumental pit stops at “Kum & Go” and “Quickchek,” local references in Love the Stranger create a catalog of human perception, presented as roadside attractions. From grape jelly residue (“Ramekin”) to the site of a demolished cathedral (“St. Bonaventure”) to King of the Hill quotations (“Smooth Pursuit”), the record’s images craft a symbolic language of high and low Americana, both evocative and consistently accessible. Spending time with Love the Stranger creates a community—one in which the window between the listener and the music- maker shatters in full, until all that remains are the fragments you decide to pick up together. Like its sprawling lyrical references, Love the Stranger’s production is both familiar and capacious enough for pedal steel, synth strings, airy folk guitar field recordings, and MIDI pad...

LP $18.95

07/29/2022 673855079714 

MRG 797 


***REISSUED!!! Merge Records is thrilled to reissue Neurotica by Redd Kross, the 1987 power pop and alternative rock opus celebrating 35 years in 2022. Remastered by JJ Golden (Pearl Jam, Thee Oh Sees) and paired with 12 unreleased demos rediscovered in the archive of original A&R guy Geoffrey Weiss. The double vinyl edition—the album on translucent turquoise, the demos on translucent orange—arrives in a slick gatefold jacket. Neurotica could be viewed as a This Is Your Life-esque document of what brothers Jeff & Steve McDonald had been working toward creatively since starting Redd Kross in their Hawthorne, CA living room circa 1978. The songs quake with punk rock fury. And how could they possibly have shaken off the untamed energy of their early Red Cross years which laid a foundation for Southern California hardcore punk & DIY culture alongside bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Descendants? But fury is only part of their formula. To find the other parts, travel back to the ‘70s, when the McDonald boys lived for nothing but Saturday morning cartoons, sugary cereal, bubblegum pop singles, Beach Boys LPs, Partridge Family TV specials and the arena rock guitars of KISS & Cheap Trick. Whereas most self-respecting punk rockers would have sneered at ‘60s/‘70s radio and pop culture schmaltz (even if they secretly liked it), that was all a tremendous part of the Redd Kross DNA. And the McDonalds wore those influences on their dayglo sleeves. They decontextualized the macho, sometimes saccharine, sound of classic...

2XLP $31.95

06/24/2022 673855068503 

MRG 685