The Mountain Goats Announce New Album In League With Dragons, Share Lead Single “Younger”
John Darnielle and company's "dragon noir" album arrives in April
Images via Jeremy Lange, Merge Records
As promised upon the recent announcement of an extensive headlining tour, The Mountain Goats have officially unveiled their 17th studio album, In League With Dragons, and released its lead single, “Younger.”
Due out April 26 on Merge Records, In League With Dragons “surges with wild tales of revenge and redemption, heroes at a crossroads and great figures in decline” over its dozen new, John Darnielle-penned tracks, which “luxuriate in a wide swath of sounds, from shades of the ‘80s Athens scene to swathes of outlaw country and a few motorik meditations,” per a press release. “Younger” is telling evidence of the album’s eclectic genre-hopping, foregrounding the guitars that 2017’s Goths eschewed entirely and ending with a sax solo, of all things.
Darnielle will perform and elaborate on the band’s album announcement via Facebook Live this afternoon, broadcasting from the headquarters of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering masterminds Wizards of the Coast. You can catch that livestream starting at 4 p.m. EST via the band’s Facebook page.
At 1 p.m. Pacific / 4 Eastern / midnight in the cave of spontaneous regenerations, I’ll be streaming live from @Wizards, talking about the record, playing a few songs. This is not a drill https://t.co/zfGvqrAd4P
— The Mountain Goats (@mountain_goats) January 28, 2019
The Mountain Goats frontman opined on the band’s latest in a characteristically sprawling statement, describing its rock opera-meets-high fantasy style as “dragon noir”:
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 videogame. 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. Finally, I wrote the title track, which felt like a drawing-together of the themes in play: rebellion against irresistible tides, the lush vistas of decay, necessary alliances. I am earnestly hoping that a new genre called “dragon noir” will spring from the forehead of nearly two years’ work on these songs, but, if not, I am content for this to be the sole example of the style.
