The Mountain Goats have released their seventeenth studio album today, titled In League With Dragons. The album has been in the works since the release of the Mountain Goats’ 2017 album Goths, and, according to John Darnielle, “began life as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard.”
The album’s first single, “Younger,” was released back in January, with more words from Darnielle about the concept behind the new music:
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.
Stream In League With Dragons below.
