The Mountain Goats are releasing their seventeenth studio album on April 26 titled In League with Dragons. As usual, it’s a concept album, this time revolving around a fantasy world of wizards and dragons.
Our Song of the Day is the record’s lead single, “Younger,” a typically wordy and nearly six-minute guitar-based strummer which features a very jazzy sax solo near the end. John Darnielle had this to say about the new record:
"This album began life as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard, for which some five to seven songs were written. When I’m focusing on a project, I always distract myself from the through-line with multiple byways, which are kind of like mini-games within the broader architecture of a long video game.
"As I worked on the Riversend stuff, weird noir visions started creeping in, probably under the influence of Leonardo Sciascia (a Sicilian author, he wrote mysteries) and Ross MacDonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse, which a friend from Port Washington gave me while I was in the thick of the writing. I thought these moods helped complicate the wizards and dragons a little, and, as I thought about my wizard, his health failing, the invasion by sea almost certain to wipe out half his people, I thought about what such a person might look like in the real world: watching a country show at a midwestern casino, or tryout pitching for an American League team years after having lit up the marquees."
In League with Dragons follows 2017’s Goths. Watch The Mountain Goat’s KEXP in-studio performance from 2017 below.
