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Apr 19, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Jade Wilson

The Mountain Goats have announced a new album, Dark in Here, and shared its first single, “Mobile,” via a lyric video for it. Dark in Here is due out June 25 via Merge and is their third album in just over a year, following April 2020’s Songs for Pierre Chuvin (which was recorded on a boombox and featured only frontman John Darnielle) and October 2020’s Getting Into Knives. Check out the “Mobile” video below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

Dark in Here was recorded in the week in between recording Songs for Pierre Chuvin and Getting Into Knives, at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It’s a studio that Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Gregg Allman, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and other legends have recorded at. “Mobile” features some Muscle Shoals legends as well, with Spooner Oldham (Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt) on electric piano and Will McFarlane (Bonnie Raitt, Tammy Wynette) on lead guitar.

The Mountain Goats’ bassist Peter Hughes had this to say about “Mobile” in a press release: “The Mountain Goats have been playing together as a band long enough to have developed a degree of musical telepathy, but listening to these two guys responding in real time to us and each other revealed another level of connectedness altogether, one bordering on the supernatural. We ran through most of these songs three times; I’m pretty sure the performance of ‘Mobile’ you’re hearing is a second take. One of my quarantine projects after getting home was going back to Moby Dick and actually finishing it for once, and I was amused to encounter early on the retelling of the story of Jonah. If Melville gives it to us as a fiery 19th century New Bedford sermon, what ‘Mobile’ offers might be understood as Father Mapple’s modern-day Gulf Coast flip side, the breeziness of McFarlane’s electric guitar and Matt Douglas’ accordion belying its protagonist’s guilty conscience.”

Getting Into Knives followed 2019’s In League With Dragons, 2017’s Goths, and 2015’s wrestling-themed Beat the Champ. The band features frontman John Darnielle, drummer Jon Wurster, bassist Peter Hughes, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas.

Read our interview with John Darnielle on Getting Into Knives.

Mobile Tracklist:

01 Parisian Enclave
02 The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower
03 Mobile
04 Dark in Here
05 Lizard Suit
06 When a Powerful Animal Comes
07 To The Headless Horseman
08 The New Hydra Collection
09 The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums
10 Before I Got There
11 Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review
12 Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light

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