What a Time to Be Alive

It is desperate, important, and powerful music and it might just be the best album they've ever made.

It’s not as instantly accessible an album as the band’s relatively recent classics Majesty Shredding (2010) and I Hate Music (2013), but in many ways it’s a more important one. It’s the sound of an essentially middle-aged band firing out a clutch of missile missives directed at the dark heart of modern America (in the absence of many younger bands fulfilling that role) and carrying it off majestically.

What a Time to be Alive roars.

What a Time to Be Alive’s rage feels visceral because of age and experience and exhaustion, not despite it.

An album flush with both vicissitudes and vitality, What a Time to be Alive resonates with its resolve.

It’s a hurricane of pop-punk fury with as much ferocity as anything the band recorded 25+ years ago.

It's immediate. It's powerful. It's political. This time the giant has bared its teeth.

The best Superchunk album in recent memory.

The way What a Time to Be Alive zooms by, there are songs you might blink and miss if McCaughan weren’t writing some of the most sharply worded lyrics of his career.

Another great Superchunk record. What a Time to Be Alive bristles with anxious energy; even by Superchunk’s over-caffeinated standards, it keeps an unrelenting pace.

Thirty years deep into their career, Superchunk throw yet another left turn into a career full of them, offering up a protest record about the people for the people. What a time to be alive, indeed.

This infectious record is a timely reminder that punk’s greatest trick has always been to make the isolated feel less alone.

Not least of the record's triumphs is its vindication of a band at its peak even after all these years. [Mar 2018, p.94]

It's their angriest, jitteriest and most aggressive album since their early-90s heyday, and on "Reagan Youth" and "All For You" Superchunk sound like a hardcore band half their age. [Mar 2018, p.32]

An activated rage focuses and elevates the album from standard melodic post-punk to a timely, resonant mission statement.

The music is taut, compressed and, in places, vulnerable and beautifully resonant. [May 2018, p.90]

Superchunk do come back full circle with a timeless, uniform body of work, though it also takes them back a few years after their late-career breakthroughs Majesty Shredding and I Hate Music.

What a Time to Be Alive, the yawp and the yeah and the yowl, is the perfect thesis and pinched nail. It’s the resolution to remain unhampered by despair while excising and atomizing all the moments we have to despair in.

There are plenty of power-punk melodies to ensure What A Time To Be Alive isn’t condemned to an early shelf life, even if to put it amongst their best work would be a stretch too far.