The Shins Celebrate 30th With Previously Unreleased Songs

The Shins are marking their 30th anniversary by opening the vault.

Group leader James Mercer has announced a limited-edition 7-inch featuring two previously unreleased songs recorded in 1996: “The Living End” and “All Messed Up.” Pressed in a run of just 1,000 copies, the release pairs Mercer with original drummer Jesse Sandoval and also includes artwork Mercer created during the same period, offering a glimpse at the band’s earliest creative days. No specific release date has been announced.

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The archival excavation follows a particularly quiet stretch for the Shins. The band hasn’t released a studio album since 2017’s Heartworms, though Mercer reunited the group in 2022 for a tour celebrating the 21st anniversary of Oh, Inverted World. On that run, the Shins performed their landmark debut album in full each night while also drawing from the rest of their catalog, giving fans a rare chance to revisit a touchtone of early 2000s indie rock.

Since then, the Shins have made just one live appearance, reuniting for the 20th anniversary Garden State concert in 2025. The soundtrack played a pivotal role in introducing the band to a wider audience, with “New Slang” becoming one of the film’s signature songs.

“The most punk-rock fucking thing I could do in my life was something like ‘New Slang,’” Mercer told SPIN in 2012. “That was just, like, flipping off the whole city [of Albuquerque, N.M., where the band formed]. It’s definitely a moment in my life, that sort of angst and confusion about what my future was going to be. The Shins weren’t anything when I wrote that song. There wasn’t any hope for anything like a music career. It’s that end-of-your-20s thing. Before you knew it, my whole life was upside down: I got signed, I quit my job, I moved out of town, the big relationship I’d had for five years ended. All of a sudden my whole life was up in smoke.”

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