Ahead of ‘There Near’, the Dinosaur Jr. songwriter talks touring by bike, old gear, and the strange second life of a 25-year-old deep cut nobody asked for.

isn’t chasing anything. Not the sound of Dinosaur Jr.’s 1985 debut, not the freak run ‘Over Your Shoulder’ pulled off on Japan’s charts in 2019, and not the twenty-somethings finding the band through a Spotify playlist rather than a record shop.

‘There Near’ arrives via Jagjaguwar: the band’s first album since 2021’s ‘Sweep It Into Space’, recorded largely just the three of them – with a hand from organist – at Bisquiteen Studio in Amherst. For it, Mascis picked up a 1970s Mesa Boogie MK1 amp, the same model engineer Chris Dixon had on hand for the band’s self-titled debut forty years ago. The record lands the same week the band kicks off a US tour in Las Vegas, with support from Stef Chura.

Twenty minutes on Zoom finds him exactly as advertised: same big glasses, same long grey hair, same deadpan that gives almost nothing away. That only changes once the conversation turns to gear.

How’s the tour been?

We just ended a tour. It was pretty good.

You’ve gotten into cycling recently. What got you into it?

I guess they just made this bike path in my town, and I thought it would be a good way to get some exercise. I like biking better than walking, for instance.

Does any of that feed into the music at all?

It’s good on touring. You get to see some of the towns you’re in. And it just helps my mental health, getting outside.

You came up through skating, too. Still get out on a board these days?

Not much these days. I’d love to, but I don’t want to get injured.

‘There Near’ has you going back to some of the gear and methods from the first record. What actually changed this time round?

I kind of went back to having a few more guitar tracks. I’d gotten stuck trying to get one really clean sound with just two rhythm guitar tracks, so I thought, it doesn’t need to sound perfect all the time. Maybe I liked it. I started layering more guitars again, closer to how I used to record. Just for a change, I guess.

(Elsewhere, Mascis has described applying advice he once heard Rick Rubin give other bands: go back and listen to your first record.)

Anything else new on the record?

I played slide bass. Lou wanted to try slide bass, which I don’t think we’d ever done before. I’m not big on slide myself, but I got a new one I liked.

What’s new on the pedalboard?

A parametric EQ pedal, a Maestro I think from the ’70s, and a Gretsch Playboy overdrive. Every new pedal kind of inspires a different sound to me. I’m always adding different pedals, and they all inspire a different guitar part.

It’s a rare moment where the deadpan cracks. Pedals, it turns out, are about as close as Mascis gets to sounding excited. The other reinvention on his CV this decade was a stranger, more accidental one. ‘Over Your Shoulder’, a deep cut from 1994’s ‘Without a Sound’, spent early 2019 sitting at number 18 on Billboard’s Japan Hot 100, ahead of new releases from artists like Ariana Grande. The song had long soundtracked a Japanese TV show, ; when pirated clips resurfaced on YouTube decades later, the algorithm did the rest, and enough people watched that the plays counted as official streams.

Did it feel strange, a 25-year-old song charting out of nowhere?

Yeah, I thought it was interesting, but it didn’t change much for us. It was a cool story, and we started playing it again because of that. I hadn’t played it in a long time.

Did you expect it to take off the first time round, let alone twenty-five years later?

No, because it wasn’t popular before either.

A lot of your catalogue is finding new, much younger listeners, some through Spotify rather than a record shop. Does that feel different to talking to someone who’s been a fan since the start?

It’s great to have younger fans, it’s fun to see kids getting into it. When I was a kid I liked older bands too. If you like the music, you just like it. And if younger people don’t come to the shows, it’s more boring, so it’s good to have them there.

What do you think they hear in it that connects?

I don’t really know what they see in it, but we’re pretty different from a lot of bands now. We don’t use click tracks or in-ear monitors, we play pretty loud on stage. A lot of bands don’t do that anymore, so some of it probably seems new to people. Some people still like that approach.

Any advice for the next generation of bands?

No, people can do whatever they want.

And that’s it. No ceremony, a quick thanks, and the call ends. Twenty minutes in, it feels like about the most J Mascis way it could have gone.

‘There Near’ is out now via Jagjaguwar.