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The Mountain Goats Announce New Album In League with Dragons, Release “Younger”

Mountain Goats Release "Younger"

The Mountain Goats have announced a new album titled In League with Dragons and released “Younger,” the project’s first single. According to a statement, the album will explore “wild tales of revenge and redemption, heroes at a crossroads, and great figures in decline.”

“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,” Darneille wrote in a statement. “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.”

Owners of 12-sided die will be delighted to learn that the band’s chief dungeon master John Darnielle will be performing during a Facebook Live session at Wizards of the Coast (the makers of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons) at 4 p.m. EST Monday.

Check out “Younger” below:

The track listing for In League with Dragons is as follows:

1. Done Bleeding

2. Younger

3. Passaic 1975

4. Clemency for the Wizard King

5. Possum by Night

6. In League with Dragons

7. Doc Gooden

8. Going Invisible 2

9. Waylon Jennings Live!

10. Cadaver Sniffing Dog

11. An Antidote for Strychnine

12. Sicilian Crest

In League with Dragons drops on April 26 on Merge Records. The band also recently announced an extensive North American tour kicking off on April 26 in Washington D.C.