25 years ago, The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World changed our lives

This song changed James Mercer’s life. Fed up with the Albuquerque music scene, which he found “macho, really heavy, and aggressive,” as he put it in a 2012 interview, Mercer picked up an acoustic guitar and wrote “New Slang,” a relentlessly catchy indie-folk tune in the bright key of C major. At that point in his life, his future band, the Shins, didn’t have an album yet. Since 1992, he’d been singing and playing guitar in Flake Music, a group that split its songwriting duties in an egalitarian fashion while taking stylistic cues from nineties indie rock arbiters like Superchunk and Pavement. But Mercer was eager to pursue something more in line with his affinity for sixties psych-pop and their progeny in the Elephant 6 collective. He began writing songs on his own and recruited Flake Music drummer Jesse Sandoval to form what he planned on calling the Shins.

Shortly before the turn of the century, Flake Music broke up, and its remaining members—keyboardist Marty Crandall and bassist Neal Langford—decided to join Mercer’s new project. They put out a 7” EP, Nature Bears a Vacuum, and toured with Modest Mouse, who’d recently put out some songs on Sub Pop Records through the label’s Singles Club. Frontman Isaac Brock had heard some of the Shins’ cassette demos, including “New Slang,” and used his connections at Sub Pop to vouch for the band’s signing. When co-founder Jonathan Poneman saw the band open for Modest Mouse at a show in San Francisco, he was impressed enough to put out a 7” for a coveted entry in their Singles Club. 

Naturally, “New Slang,” released through the series in February 2001, would be the song to introduce the Shins to Sub Pop devotees, and it’d catch like wildfire in the months leading up to the release of their debut album, Oh, Inverted World, now twenty-five years old. Noting the heaps of praise its lead single garnered, Sub Pop signed the Shins in full before the album’s summertime release date, a smart choice, given that, in 2023, it became the third album in the label’s catalog to be certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, following Nirvana’s Bleach and the Postal Service’s Give Up.

It’s easy to see why “New Slang” became as beloved as it has, why it catapulted Mercer’s new band to the echelons of Big Indie. Yes, there was the McDonald’s ad that aired during the 2002 Winter Olympics, and, yes, there was that one movie. But far more important than either of those is Mercer’s songwriting prowess. “New Slang” is scarcely more than some simple melodies, a handful of chords any novice guitarist would know, a distant tambourine, a couple of short, understated guitar solos, and those bookending ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-oohs that beg you to sing along. It’s a simple song (not to be confused with this one) that would grant the Shins an audience far beyond the city limits of Albuquerque that Mercer found so stifling.

Thankfully, Oh, Inverted World is more than its pre-release single. It’s an album that delivered on the swelling hype and cemented Mercer and his entourage as the new twee kings. This is the type of record whose stature only grows over time, one that begets these retrospective reviews and celebratory tours. Take its opening track, “Caring Is Creepy,” which has become a Shins standard despite never being released as a single. Like “New Slang,” it was also prominently featured in Zach Braff’s Garden State twenty-two years ago, but whereas “New Slang” indulged Mercer’s singer-songwriter tendencies, “Caring Is Creepy” presented his music with full-band arrangements. Mercer immediately hits his upper register, delivering the opening manifesto “I think I’ll go home and mull this over / Before I cram it down my throat” with a falsetto that’d sound pseudo-British if he hadn’t actually moved near Suffolk as a teenager. When that first chorus hits, the rest of the band joins the fray, dressing Mercer’s song about a relationship gone awry in a blissful patina of reverb.

He channels the sunny milieu of the Beach Boys and the percussive guitars of early Beatles on “Know Your Onion!,” which he named after a phrase his mother would frequently say (and for those unfamiliar: to know your onion is to have the mettle to get a job done). Sandoval propels the song forward with an insistent, straight-ahead beat, and Mercer shows off his gift for melodies that burrow deep into your psyche, pulling from his sixties influences and harnessing his enviably wide vocal range. Listening to Mercer sing these melodies is like watching a master painter at work; despite carefully following each miniscule brushstroke, the end result is nonetheless astonishing. Mercer jumps from note to note at a rapid clip, and by the time he’s done singing, you realize how few songwriters possess this astute of an ear. “And I got on with making myseeeeeelf,” he sings, descending the line until he lands with his bandmates at an instrumental break.

Much of the Shins’ debut was recorded in Mercer’s home studio, lending the record its scrappy, lo-fi milieu. Everything is drenched in a generous coat of reverb, so much so that its contours bleed at the edges like a dream sequence in a film. With a decidedly DIY setup, he managed to create something that sounds like a missive sent forward in time from half a decade past, ultimately conjuring the sounds of his heroes. At once kaleidoscopic and homespun, Oh, Inverted World displays the Shins in their most nascent form, not in terms of the sophistication of their playing or songwriting, but in how they’re captured here. Starting with 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow, the band would adopt a more polished mix, in which each instrument is concrete and discernible. Part of the appeal of the Shins’ first record, however, lies in its combination of fine-tuned songwriting and unfussy production. There’s a magnetic, hypnotizing effect to these songs for how they balance Mercer’s perfectionism and, dare I say, bedroom-pop origins in such captivating harmony.

Some of that DIY ethos is at its most compelling on the album’s softer material. There’s “Weird Divide,” whose smeared vocal harmonies glaze over the light percussion of shakers and claves. “Your Algebra” opens with crackles that fade in Mercer’s single-string guitar picking and haunting melody, and Melanie Crandall’s cello thickens the gauzy layering. Album closer “The Past and Pending,” one of Mercer’s personal favorites on the album, consists of little besides guitar and vocals, some kick drum and tambourine, but the minimal fare allows Neils Galloway’s French horn to emerge, growing from a speck on the horizon to an element in the foreground. As the track nears its 5:50 endpoint, Mercer’s lilting voice recedes, as if he’s slowly stepping backward so he can vanish behind the curtain. “Lose yourself in lines dissecting,” he repeats. Two decades and some change later, we still are. The Shins made an album that changed our lives.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.

Keep scrolling for more great stories.