The Mountain Goats have released a new title track for their upcoming album Dark In Here. One of the words that John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats used when discussing the direction for the new album (out June 25), was “wild.”
As the quartet’s bassist Peter Hughes tells it: “Not wild in the sense of abandon—these aren’t those kinds of songs. But wild in the sense of something undomesticated, untamable… You can fight the calamity all you want, but either way, it’s going to demand your surrender.”
That particular brand of wild can be felt throughout the title track to Dark in Here, recorded at the fabled FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals with a handful of local legends. Listen to the song below as Spooner Oldham’s Hammond organ and Will McFarlane’s whammy-bar Telecaster inflate the narrator’s spider-hole revenge fantasy to widescreen spaghetti-western proportions:
Like the most recent Mountain Goats releases Getting Into Knives and Songs for Pierre Chuvin, Dark in Here was recorded in March 2020. Within the credits of Dark in Here, Darnielle notes, “If you’re looking for a governing theme here, it’s calamity, as all the songs are either anticipating one or reflecting one that’s already happened.”
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