Dinosaur Jr. announce new album There Near, and J Mascis's string setup hasn't changed in over a decade

Dinosaur Jr. announced their new album, There Near, out August 28 via Jagjaguwar, alongside the lead single and video "Several Got Away" (Premier Guitar). It's the band's sixth studio album in the 20 years since their reunion, and their first new record in the five years since Sweep It Into Space. Director Guy Kozak describes the "Several Got Away" video as a tongue-in-cheek "backyard movie," partly inspired by a Henry Darger painting of children chased by giant floating hands of fire. "The guys were really game for it all," Kozak said, "and I was honored that they let me chase them around a big field with my camera like a psycho."

There Near was recorded in short, intense bursts over about a year at Bisquiteen Studio in Amherst, Massachusetts, almost entirely by the band's core trio: Murph on drums, Lou Barlow on bass and vocals, and J Mascis on guitar and vocals, with additional piano and organ work from local musician Ken Mauri (Premier Guitar).

The guitar tone on There Near comes from a recent gear purchase: a 1970s Mesa Boogie MK1, the same amp model Chris Dixon used to record Dinosaur Jr. at his own house on the band's first album. "I bought the same amp that Chris Dixon had when we made our first album," Mascis said. "Chris recorded us at his house with his amp. It has a real interesting sound I haven't gotten for a while. And it's something I was trying to get back to on this album" (Premier Guitar).

Mascis traces the amp's lineage with the same specificity he applies to his strings: "The Stones started using Mesa Boogies in the '70s after they heard Santana playing through them. Then The Clash copied The Stones, etc. As the years went on into the MK2 and so on, the Boogie got more metal sounding. But the MK1 has a souped-up Fender sound." He compares the move to advice he's heard attributed to Rick Rubin, sitting a band down to listen to their own first album and asking what made it work.

Amps, studios, and tour rigs change. Mascis's Ernie Ball Regular Slinky Cobalt set, .010–.046, has not. "I remember seeing Ernie Ball strings in the store as a kid," Mascis said on Ernie Ball's String Theory series. "The graphics and the way they wrote all the letters and stuff, it appealed to my more psychedelic side" (Ernie Ball). He's stuck with the same .010 Regular Slinky gauge since he started playing, telling Ernie Ball: "I've always kind of kept the same gauge, but my action's gotten higher and higher over the years. I've always had tens, and people always look at my guitar and think it's for slide or they can't play it at all."

The one real change came around 2012, when he moved from plain nickel-plated Slinky to the Cobalt wrap. A fan posting to the Ernie Ball forums caught him explaining it in an interview: "I have [gauge] ten's, and they're Ernie Ball Cobalt. I just started using them this year, and they're pretty cool. I've only broken one string on the whole tour, which is pretty amazing for me, I usually would break a string in like 20 minutes or something, so they seem to last a lot longer" (Ernie Ball Forums). Ernie Ball's own recap of the String Theory episode confirms the detail from its side too: "J Mascis plays Ernie Ball Cobalt Slinky strings" (Ernie Ball Blog).

He also puts on a fresh set before every show, by choice rather than necessity: "I put on new strings every show. So there's no grip to them because there's no dirt on them or anything. So I've always had to make them higher and higher so I could bend them, I guess" (Ernie Ball). Full documentation of the gauge, the tuning, and the rest of his setup lives on CYS's J Mascis profile.

It's a useful data point against a common assumption: heavier gain and volume don't require heavier strings. Mascis's live sound comes from three full Marshall stacks running simultaneously, not from string tension. He's talked about the switch from drums to guitar as the root of that philosophy: "This guitar, it's so wimpy. How can I get the same feeling from playing drums? I just found, by playing a guitar louder, you can get some air moving and it hits your body and impacts you somehow. So I've always worn earplugs since the beginning too, because I wanted it to affect my body and not necessarily just hear it" (Ernie Ball).

As CYS's own sourced profile on Mascis lays out, the Cobalt wrap's output and high-end bump matters more on a Jazzmaster's comparatively low-output single coils than it would on a higher-output humbucker guitar. Based on Mascis's own words above, the .010 gauge and the unusually high action he runs it at read as being about bending strings more freely for long, sustained leads, not about surviving heavy playing, he's never said otherwise. Mascis isn't the only Cobalt player on the market; per CYS's own sourced roundup of documented Cobalt users, at least 17 pros run the alloy with primary-source citations, including Slash, Steve Vai, and John Petrucci, each for a different reason.

Dinosaur Jr. paired the album announcement with an extensive fall North American run, including co-headline dates with Band of Horses and support from Stef Chura on select shows, stretching from July into November across cities including Richmond, Atlanta, Knoxville, Louisville, Denver, and a multi-night stand in Seattle (Premier Guitar). Full dates and ticket links are posted on the band's own tour page.