A few months ago, John Moe wrote a hilarious article for McSweeney's called "What your favorite sad dad band says about you." It is 100% accurate in every way.
Well, I'm not a dad, but my favorite sad dad band is the Mountain Goats, and this is what that says about me, according to Moe:
The Mountain Goats: You have received sensible health care. You drive Toyota cars and your dalliance with a used domestic pickup that had character did not end well. Your tolerance for people telling you a lot about building a computer ends at the nineteen-minute mark, at which point you politely excuse yourself. Without explanation, you decline the escape room team-building event at work.
I saw the Mountain Goats last month in Phoenix and they, as usual, were engaging and energetic and brilliant and hilarious and just all around awesome. They recently announced a new record that will drop on August 19. Pitchfork describes it this way:
The Mountain Goats have announced their next album. It's called Bleed Out, and it was produced in full by Bully's Alicia Bognanno. The follow-up to last year's Dark in Here arrives August 19 via Merge. Today, the band has shared lead single "Training Montage" along with a goofy music video. Check it out below and scroll down for the album art, tracklist, and a string of upcoming tour dates.
Bleed Out was inspired by action movies from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, in which Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle found comfort toward the end of 2020. Cozied up in his North Carolina home, Darnielle watched French thrillers like 2008's Mesrine, vintage Italian Poliziotteschi, and 1974's The Freakmaker starring Donald Pleasence.
"So, heads up. I got this idea to write a bunch of songs where they were all uptempo mini-action movies," Darnielle said of his process for the new batch of songs. "Plots, characters, heists, hostages, questionable capers, getaway cars, all that stuff. Gas pedal glued to the floor. Eventually as you might guess I wanted at least one song where the tempo relaxed a little and that's the title track but otherwise buckle up. We hid out in the woods in Chapel Hill and made this album with nobody knowing about it. Proper secret-soldier style. It has been pretty hard keeping this under our hats, we are really proud of what we got here."
If you can't stand waiting around, in the meantime you can at least listen to the first track off the album they've released—Training Montage—and watch the video a million times, like I have. I love how it features John Darnielle's completely out of control pandemic hairdo and goatee combo. Simply divine.
