Laura King Rises From Underground Roots to Become Superchunk's Drummer

When Mac McCaughan called Laura King in January 2023, she was recovering from hand surgery. Jon Wurster had just left Superchunk after 31 years with the Chapel Hill group, and McCaughan wanted to know if King could fill in at an upcoming show. By August 22, 2025, she was no longer filling in. She was an official member of the band, credited on Superchunk's 13th studio album "Songs in the Key of Yikes," released on Merge Records.

The call did not come out of nowhere. King had arrived in North Carolina from Baltimore in 1999 and spent more than two decades building exactly the kind of record that makes a bandleader dial a specific person in a moment of need. She played in The Moaners, an alt-country outfit that ran until 2011. She co-founded the garage-punk band Flesh Wounds, which put out a single on Merge Records, McCaughan's own label, and opened for him on a solo tour of both coasts. She played drums in McCaughan's backing band the Non-Believers. In 2019, she was one of the handpicked contributors to Speed Stick's "Volume One," recorded at Beep Wave Studio in Carrboro alongside McCaughan and Thomas Simpson. When Wurster stepped back to focus on work with the Mountain Goats and Bob Mould, McCaughan already had years of evidence about what King could do.

Her path into Superchunk distills into three moves worth replicating.

The first is scene reliability across the long term. King's two-plus decades in the Triangle underground, through The Moaners, Flesh Wounds, Bat Fangs, R. Ring, and Speed Stick, built trust that no single audition could manufacture. The practical takeaway sits in the self-titled Bat Fangs debut, recorded in Kentucky in January 2017 with Ex Hex's Betsy Wright. Pull up "Turn It Up" and listen to how King drives an arena-rock song with the same groove-over-flash instinct she brings everywhere: she is in a completely different genre context from Superchunk's melodic punk, but the commitment to the song's pulse never wavers. That consistency across wildly different projects is what makes a musician a reliable call.

The second move is earning the direct relationship before you need it. King did not cold-audition for Superchunk; she had been in McCaughan's orbit for years before January 2023. She opened for him, recorded with him, played in his backing band. When Wurster left, McCaughan was not searching for a name; he was calling someone whose work he already trusted from the inside. The listen-and-copy cue is Superchunk's "Is It Making You Feel Something," the opener of "Songs in the Key of Yikes." The tempo, the dynamics, the way King locks in behind McCaughan's melodic-punk surge all reflect a rhythm section that already knows each other.

The third move is stylistic legibility across genres. Speed Stick's "Volume One" is a noise record built around two drummers playing simultaneously; Bat Fangs runs on arena-rock instincts; Superchunk needs someone who can channel high-velocity indie punk without burying McCaughan's vocal. King demonstrated she could shift registers without losing the thread. Put Speed Stick's "Volume One" and Superchunk's "Is It Making You Feel Something" back to back, and the distance between them is the skill.

Superchunk's current lineup, McCaughan on vocals and guitar, Jim Wilbur on guitar, Laura Ballance on bass, and King on drums, has now recorded and toured together. For a Chapel Hill band built on DIY principles since 1989, adding a drummer who spent more than two decades in the same regional ecosystem is not a patch job. It is the ecosystem working exactly as designed.