Dinosaur Jr. Unveil ‘blowin’ Up’, Their Second Single From Upcoming Album ‘There Near’

The Amherst rock quartet gear up for their first album in five years, ‘There Near’.

Photo credit: Jeff Fowler

Dinosaur Jr. release ‘Blowin Up’ via Jagjaguwar ahead of upcoming album, ‘There Near.’

As proven by their twelve preceding studio albums, Dinosaur Jr. is no stranger to a tactical double-bluff or shadowboxing social commentary, and ‘Blowin’ Up’ proves no different. Described in a press release as a “pointed and timely attack on our current regime,” with lyrics that “cut like knives” cloaked in melodies with a “friendly mien”, the frantic bottle-popping rock tune warns that ‘There’s nothing quite as bad as a bored edge Lord’, and ‘You’re about as dumb as they come’ - though those who need to hear the lyrics most, alas, likely don’t fall in the Dinosaur Jr. audience.

Ahead of the release, some longtime listeners are hoping that ‘There Near’ will be less of a reinvention of their sound, and more of an expansion of what they’ve already mastered in previous releases; the sentiment is directly in line with Dinosaur Jr. being commonly crowned as a 90s band whose blockbuster sound, which they have loyally maintained in modern releases, has aged exceptionally well. Some followers have also expressed the hope that Mascis’ songwriting will be similar to 2021’s ‘Sweep it into Space’, which tightened their elbow-deep jam sessions into more immediate ear-lodging hooks.

Though the confrontational gnaw of ‘Blowin’ Up’would suggest that their approach to lyricism is tightening toward something less oblique, it is one of the two tracks on the record penned by drummer Lou Barlow. Mascis, lead singer and songwriter of Dinosaur Jr., shared a somewhat different creative philosophy in a statement: “I'm not always sure what a song is 'about' when I'm writing it. I guess the meaning will present itself at some point. I'll use whatever words work. And a lot of it will be influenced by whatever esoteric mumbo jumbo I'm reading at the time. I try not to think too hard about any of it. I think it's a drag that Spotify shows all the lyrics to a song. What's the fun of that?”

In promotion of the album release, Dinosaur Jr. will be embarking on a tour around North America with Band of Horses and Stef Chura from July 30th to November 7th.

‘There Near’ is available to stream August 28th via Jagjaguwar.