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.
In January 2021, just weeks after Darnielle had started writing, his bandmates Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster joined him at Sylvan Esso’s Betty’s Studios in the woods near his home in Chapel Hill. The band wrapped recording within a week.
Bognanno was recommended to Darnielle by his manager. “We met up and hit it off,” Darnielle said in a press release. “She’s a great guitarist. It was kind of just a lark, to see what would happen, and it was totally great.”
“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.”
Bleed Out:
01 Training Montage
02 Mark on You
03 Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome
04 Extraction Point
05 Bones Don’t Rust
06 First Blood
07 Make You Suffer
08 Guys on Every Corner
09 Hostages
10 Need More Bandages
11 Incandescent Ruins
12 Bleed Out
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