"It was also weird to be on the first volume," adds Wurster. "[It] gives a little perspective on how long the band has been around. It doesn't seem like that long."

In fact, it's been over nine years -- an eternity considering the finicky and ravenous appetite of the American indie rock scene. The band has defended its position at the forefront of the DIY pack nicely by churning out ambitious punk masterpieces packed to the gills with raucous hooks, pogo-perfect rhythms and gorgeous melodies emanating from lead singer Mac McCaughan's mouth.

It's not hard to understand why "Slack Motherfucker" was chosen to lead off the compendium of alternative music gems. Aside from being a truly visceral piece of songwriting, it was adopted by the self-styled slacker generation as a rallying cry for...whatever it was that they were rallying for.

"People misunderstand that song consistently," says Wilbur. "It's not about being pissed-off at your boss. It's a New Order Riff," he laughs. "The song is about a co-worker who isn't pulling his weight. People thought it was a 'Take This Job and Shove It' for the '90s. It's not that at all."

As are most things with Superchunk, it is simply, what it is -- a song that they thought sounded good. They take little responsibility for the messages that their songs are sending out. As a result, the band has never reprinted lyrics in the liner notes -- an idea that McCaughan and company finds incongruous with their music.

"A lot of people think songs are the lyrics -- poetry set to music," says Wilbur. "I don't. But, it's perfectly valid if they do. I think of it as music with vocals functioning as another instrument…a lot of people focus on them. That's a good thing because it hooks people. I wouldn't want to listen to an instrumental rock record. It's important to have words, but they come after the fact. And it happens that Mac writes great words I think, so it works fine."

Wilbur seems to have a knack for understatement. Despite McCaughan's lyrical nonchalance, he writes as well as anyone out there. Indoor Living is an extremely entertaining album, full of low-fi furor. It's their most ambitious project to date. Known for stripped-down bombast and straight ahead rock delivery, Superchunk is rarely credited by for much stylistic variation (in response to which, they named their publishing company "All The Songs Sound The Same Music"). Indoor Living slows down the frenzy and showcases experimentation -- keys, synth and vibes all turn up on the album. It's a far cry from 1993's Foolish, or 1995's Incidental Music, which were composed and cranked out in speedy studio sessions. This time around they had most of the work done before they even got to the studio, which freed them up to explore new musical directions.

"We recorded a lot of the rehearsals in my basement on a four track recorder," explains Wurster. "So, we knew what we could and couldn't do. When it came time to record everything, we had our stuff together enough that I don't think we did more than three takes of a song. That gave us more time to experiment with keyboards and vocals and all those sort of things. We had enough time."

"And we still played a lot of basketball," Wilbur laughs. "There was a court in the back of the studio. We'd record a song and then go play for ten or fifteen minutes."

The product was an album that is becoming rarer as popular music careens wildly from genre to genre to find its next cash cow. Indoor Living is a staunchly independent work that demands to be met on its own merit. There is no corporate hype machine (McCaughan and bassist Laura Ballance have been running their own label, Merge Records, for five years) to grease the cogs, no major label distribution, no grand marketplace strategy. They seem to be blissfully unconscious of the search for The Next Big Thing, creating albums in a vacuum sealed somewhere around 1992. As loops and samples continue to sneak into the most unlikely places, it's possible that their window of opportunity might be closing. Whether or not this is true, it seems wholly unimportant to the band.

" It could be, but we don't talk about this stuff," Wilbur explains in earnest. "For me it was never about being timely or trendy. This is what we do. If we started the band today it would be exactly the same. It wasn't done consciously."

"Whereas a lot of bands who start now are very conscious of what's out there," interjects Wurster. "In some cases it's too thought out. For us it was like, 'this is what it is.'"