SOUND CHECK DEPT.SUPERGROUP

Stephen Malkmus likes tennis. He recently moved to Chicago, with his wife, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and tries to play at least once a week.

-  —Nick Paumgarten

Not long ago, he passed through New York while on tour—not with Pavement, his longtime band, or with the Jicks, his other longtime band, but with the Hard Quartet, his latest project, which is almost always described, with indeterminate irony, as an underground supergroup.

The supergroup convened beneath the bubble at the McCarren Park tennis courts, in Brooklyn, where Malkmus, fifty-nine, was finishing up an hour-long hitting session with Hutchins and a few old friends. His three bandmates, arriving for lunch, not tennis, milled around by a net post amid discarded layers and spare gear. They looked out of place on the court: Matt Sweeney, in a biker jacket and a bucket hat; Jim White, wild-haired, in a tattered suit coat; Emmett Kelly, with slicked-back hair and shades.

Malkmus, stroking one-handed backhands with a studiously exaggerated follow-through (he’s a fan of the Swiss player Stan Wawrinka), seemed to be working as hard to tolerate the courtside commotion as to make clean contact. He had on a black T-shirt and coral-colored Adidas track pants, rolled up above the knees. A rusty visitor, subbing in for a few rallies from the opposing baseline, can testify that his ball has bite.