Earlier today, the Mountain Goats premiered a new track on popular spooky podcast Welcome To Night Vale. The song’s called “Heel Turn 2,” and comes from John Darnielle’s upcoming wrestling-inspired album, Beat The Champ. The 6-minute track serves as the quasi-centerpiece to the new record, and features a c...

If you’ve spent enough time listening to the Mountain Goats, you know that frontman John Darnielle has a remarkable gift for short, economical, evocative fictions that come in the form of songs. He’s gone longer, too; his book in the 33 1/3 series, about Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality, is structured as a novella ...

In what I imagine was a weird and electric scene for both John Darnielle and the audience, the Mountain Goats recently played the historically significant Newport Folk Festival. And during their set, Darnielle took the opportunity to debut “Animal Mask” a new song that concerns two things relevant to my interests: Seeing your...

A brief taxonomy of prolific musicians, in terms of popularity. We have the obsessed cranks, those who toil in underground music caves without the usual industry strictures to condense their output: R. Stevie Moore, Jandek, Senmuth. You’ve got your restless creatives, the major figures who earned the cultural and actual capital to indu...

Here’s the Mountain Goats’ new video for “Cry For Judas,” an emotional, striking tour through youthful curiosity, sin and pain. Also, the star of it is arguably a mouse running through a maze. Needless to say, there’s a lot to process here. Watch it below. Transcendental Youth is out now on Merge...