Mass Romantic is the debut studio album by Canadian indie rock supergroup The New Pornographers. Produced by David Carswell and band bassist John Collins, it was released on Mint Records on November 28, 2000. The album was three years in the making, with musicians A.C. Newman and Dan Bejar writing songs as early as 1998. With encouragement from peers, they recorded an album with other Canadian musicians from groups including The Evaporators, Zumpano, and Destroyer. Released in 2000, the album failed to chart in Canada or the United States, but positive reviews from music media led to the group having a sold-out tour. The album was met with very positive reviews, receiving a score of 87 from Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics. Production Mass Romantic was recorded over the course of almost three years. The first four songs were finished in early 1998. The New Pornographers claimed that the songs "were just sitting around. Friends would hear the songs and go, 'This is really great,' and so it was kind of frustrating in a way. We'd go, 'Yeah, well, we're going to try to record a record.'" The group's producer and bassist John Collins decided to refer to themselves as a super group. The band consisted of Zumpano's Carl Newman, John Collins of The Evaporators, Dan Bejar of Destroyer, Limblifter's Kurt Dahle, filmmaker Blaine Thurier, and alternative country singer Neko Case. Production on the album was difficult. A.C. Newman stated, "I remember 'Letter From an Occupant' was a pretty belabored song. It ended up being almost minimal, but I remember there's so much shit we put on it. There's a psychedelic 12-string guitar solo, a backwards guitar, there's a kind of really cool synth that's in there but buried. At some point, you have to choose. That was the hardest part about mixing the thing: just making that judgment call. I only feel at peace with the record now because people seem to like it." Many of the songs on the album were written by A.C. Newman and Destroyer frontman Dan Bejar. Newman recalled that he thought "'How could we lose?' You could just take some interesting elements and put them together. Even taking myself out of the picture, when I looked at the band I just thought, 'This band's got to be great.' I thought, 'Okay, everyone can hate my