In a basement beneath a former home of James Mercer in Portland, Oregon, The Shins spent the early summer of 2003 making their second album. The neighborhood around that house was rough, the kind of place where you think twice about leaving gear overnight. On October 21, 2003, the result, Chutes Too Narrow, arrived on Sub Pop, the Seattle label that had signed the American band for their debut.
Sixty-dollar locks and Phil Ek
Why a basement? Mercer was blunt about the math: recording there cost less than a studio, and a couple of new locks for the door ran sixty dollars. The group produced the record themselves with Phil Ek, a producer known for work with Built to Spill and Modest Mouse. They tracked in June and July, then took the tapes to Avast! in Seattle for mixing and The Lodge in New York for mastering.
The cheap setup nearly cost them everything. Near the end of the sessions, someone stole the computer the band was recording on. Mercer later said the master files ended up in the basement of a drug addict. That the album survived at all is a small miracle of recovery and nerve. The title itself came from a line in the song 'Young Pilgrims,' written by Mercer, who wrote every track on the record. The album also carried small instrumental surprises. On 'Saint Simon,' a violin played by Annemarie Rullančič adds a delicate lift, while Kevin Suggs contributes pedal steel guitar to 'Gone for Good.' These touches kept the record from feeling too spare.
That the album survived at all is a small miracle of recovery and nerve.
A guitar-forward turn from the debut
What emerged was a cleaner, more guitar-forward sound than their debut Oh, Inverted World. The Shins pulled away from keyboard textures and let the six strings lead. The lineup stayed tight: Mercer on vocals, guitar and harmonica, Dave Hernandez on bass and guitars, Jesse Sandoval on drums, and Marty Crandall on keyboards. Phil Ek's experience with Pacific Northwest indie rock helped sharpen the edges.
The album's look became part of its story. Jesse LeDoux designed the cover, and the packaging earned Chutes Too Narrow a Grammy nomination for best recording package. Critics responded fast. Pitchfork gave it a Best New Music nod with an 8.9 out of 10, and Metacritic's aggregate score landed at 88 out of 100. The record cracked the Billboard 200 at 86, a modest entry that would grow into a long, quiet success. The songs kept finding new homes after the album's release. 'Gone for Good' and 'Those to Come' appeared in the 2004 film In Good Company, and 'Those to Come' later turned up in Winter Passing. By August 2008, Nielsen SoundScan reported sales of more than 393,000 copies, and the album eventually earned a gold certification from the RIAA.
The risk of that basement session paid off. Chutes Too Narrow marked The Shins' shift from scrappy Sub Pop newcomers to a band with a signature sound—bright, anxious, and guitar-lit. The stolen computer, the sixty-dollar locks, the neighborhood on edge: all of it fed a record that sounded leaner because it had to be. By the end of the decade, critics were still ranking it among the best of the 2000s. The album's reputation only deepened in the years that followed. In 2009, Paste ranked it 24th among the decade's best albums, while NME placed it 75th on a similar list, and Uncut included it at 113 on a list of the 150 greatest albums of the decade. The record also reached 82 on the UK Albums Chart in 2004.