There is a line in one of the songs on Superchunk’s latest album, ‘Indoor Living’, that goes “We were struck by lightning, it was like we’d never get old”.

This pretty much sums up Superchunk’s music; energetic, enthusiastic, eternally teenage punk-pop, fuelled by adrenalin and the dodgy colouring they used to put in orange squash. From early singles, ‘Slack Motherfucker’ and ‘Cool’, through album tracks like ‘Skip Steps One And Three’ from 1991’s ‘No Pocky For Kitty’, Superchunk proved themselves the masters of the no-more-than-three-minute indie rock format, culminating in 1995 with ‘Hyper Enough’, the ultimate ‘Chunk single. But the album this was attached to, ‘Here’s Where The Strings Come In’, showed a widening of the band’s sound, incorporating songs that touched on six-minutes long and showing a more mature approach to songwriting that is backed up by the eleven tracks on ‘Indoor Living’. It seems that Superchunk are finally growing up.

“Yeah...” says Jim Wilbur [guitars], “growing up the same way everyone else grows up, one day at a time. We’ve been doing it for 8 years now. When you’re 20 years old, you play a certain way, the songs you write are going to sound a certain way, and if you only have a thousand dollars to record a song then it’s going to sound a certain way, and then eight years later you’re... I won’t say better or more developed, but you’re eight years later and you have more money to record. I think you can see the thread between it all - I can see it. It seems obvious that people would change or develop or sound different after eight years”. Fair enough. But considering that Spin once said fifth album ‘Foolish’ could be subtitled ‘More Songs About Paying Back Student Loans And Breaking Up With Your College Girlfriend’, have the lyrics grown up too?

“People always ask this,” says Jim, “Mac [McCaughan, vocals and guitars] writes the lyrics, and we all write the music. The lyrics are often just the vessel of the vocal, which is a fifth instrument in the band. There are times when we’re recording and we’re doing the first verse and Mac is singing it, and we finally get it down, and then we get to the second verse and he says, “OK, I got to write the second verse now”. It’s pretty obvious at that point that he doesn’t have a lot to say, there’s no message here that he’s trying to get across, because if there was he might have written it before he needed to record it. And I know in the past when people have asked, he’s said that if you hear something in the vocal that means something to you, then that’s fine, but every so often people will come and say ‘this song is about this’, and they won’t be wrong, but that wasn’t what Mac was thinking about at the time. There’s a song on the new record called ‘Martinis On The Roof’, and the reviews have all been saying is a song about love gone bad, or friends growing up and leaving town. But that’s one of the few songs that is actually about something very specific and concrete and all the images in it are concrete, and it’s about a guy we were all friends with who got killed in a car crash. It wasn’t about a couple that broke up, but if people hear that and respond emotionally to it, then it’s valid. That’s the important thing, not the intent of the lyrics, but what the listener takes away from it”.

Ever since the early days, Superchunk have released their singles through their own label, Merge, whilst also being involved with some of the most reputable indie labels around. “Originally Merge just put out seven inches, they didn’t have the money to put out anything larger, but then we did a production/distribution deal with Touch And Go, or we set up a relationship with them, is a better way to put it,” explains Jim. “When we were on Matador, they weren’t as big a label as they are now. They were never affiliated with a big label, which is fine. A lot of times people said we left Matador because they were getting a deal with Atlantic and we didn’t want to be involved with a major label, which wasn’t the case at all. It was the time - our contract was up and we figured we’d make more money by staying on Merge, or releasing records through Merge, the cuts would be more lucrative for the band. Not very chivalrous, but that’s why we did it. It had nothing to do with Atlantic Records”.

Nowadays, they release through City Slang, onetime home of a certain Ms Courtney Love, but Superchunk don’t seem as tempted by the lure of major-label whoredom. “We were once, with Atlantic,” Jim admits. “We talked about it for about twenty five minutes, but realised we’d be giving up too much for too little”. As for Merge, “I think the plan is to stay afloat and maybe expand later. It’s the music industry at the moment - people aren’t buying very many records. Or at least they aren’t buying Merge records. But then I don’t think they’re buying Green Day records right now either”.

Whether people are buying it or not, ‘Indoor Living’ shows Superchunk as still being the cuddly, fiercely independent adrenaline junkies they always were. They’re just growing old in style.

Superchunk were talking to Tim, in December 1997.