FOGGY NOTIONS PRESENTS
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
VICAR STREET
18TH OCTOBER
Tickets on sale now.
Today, the Mountain Goats—John Darnielle, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster—announce their 24th full-length album, Days, out August 7th, 2026. To mark the announcement, the band is sharing its driving lead single “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds.”
“This album began life as Grunges, a sequel to Goths, after I made a joke on social media about writing a song called ‘Contemplating Pearl Jam in the Carolina Dawn.’ A few months later my wife left town for a two week residency in Virginia. My wife leaving town to play hockey in Banff is how All Hail West Texas happened. These songs are loosely about the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which is to say they’re about the accumulation of days, each one a little further back than the next, sometimes miraculously seeming clearer as they recede and sometimes blurring into unrecognizable shapes which are sometimes pleasant and sometimes troubling. Most songs here are in major keys but don’t let that fool you. If you do let that fool you I have a bridge to sell you; there is nothing on the other side of the bridge. Still, you shouldn’t let that deter you. Who am I to tell you what kind of bridge you need, or where the bridge you need should lead? Nobody, really. Nobody at all,” says John Darnielle.
The band has announced world tour dates through the end of 2026. The tour kicks off May 15 at The Fillmore Silver Spring in Silver Spring, MD and includes stops throughout North America, Europe, United Kingdom and concludes with stops at the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, CA and Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall in New York, NY.
Days was produced by John Congleton and recorded at Sear Sound in Manhattan, still managed by the legendary Roberta Findlay. The sessions featured Rob Jost on bass and French horn, group backing vocals from Catherine Russsell, Jamie and Carolyn Leonhart, and layered backing vocals by Janis Siegal of The Manhattan Transfer on “Hidden Majesty of Later Venom Albums.” Additionally, old friend Matt Nathanson contributed vocals to “Candlebox,” and Mikaela Davis added harp to “Going to Fennario.”
Hi it’s John Darnielle and this is the new Mountain Goats bio. Every time you make a record you have to have a new bio and it’s a whole thing. Sometimes you have to have conversations about who’d be a good person to write the bio and other times one of the press people does it and you vet it and it goes through a whole process, but we are eliminating the middle man this time. My other job involves writing prose and I’m regarded as decent enough at it so let’s fast forward through the prelims here.
Days is the something-somethingth album by the Mountain Goats. If that last phrase has a number in it then you will know it has been edited by bad people and you should stop reading now. If it says “something somethingth” then we are still together. Like at least two other tMG albums, specifically Goths and Beat the Champ, Days gets born one day when I have a funny idea. The idea in this case was writing a followup to Goths about the 90s and calling it Grunges. I made this joke on the popular recipes blog “Bluesky” and accompanied it with a brief ad-lib called “Contemplating Pearl Jam in the Carolina Dawn” that I recorded in my back yard.
But the thing about jokes is there’s often something deeper underneath them, most theories of comedy attest to this, don’t get me started. I’d written out a fake track listing for Grunges but then I wrote a poem about Layne Staley in the underworld getting rescued by Orpheus and I started thinking about the past, a popular theme among writers for many years now, and then I got both sad and smitten with wonder by how the past is a place upon which you both can & can’t enact a sort of renovation: can, by changing perspectives; can’t, because you can’t actually move any parts around or change anything.
You think about this stuff as you get older, if you’re lucky enough to be getting older.
We recorded the album at Sear Sound in Manhattan, still managed by the legendary Roberta Findlay, with whom I was fortunate enough to have a talk on the phone during the session; Rob Jost played bass on it; he plays in the pit on Death Becomes Her; he also plays French horn here. The group backing vocals are by Catherine Russsell, Jamie Leonhart, and Carolyn Leonhart; the layered backing vocals on “Hidden Majesty of Later Venom Albums” are by Janis Siegal of the Manhattan Transfer, who was tracking on another floor in the same building while we were at Sear. Giant honor for me to have Janis, I am a huge Manhattan Transfer fan. I called my old friend Matt Nathanson to add vocals to “Candlebox.” He knocked it straight out of the park. Mikaela Davis added harp to “Going to Fennario.” You can read about all this in the credits.
Looking back on what I’ve written I see that “bio” isn’t exactly what you’d call this, as it tells you very little about me, or about Jon Wurster, the best drummer in rock and if you think I’m exaggerating then bless your heart, or about Matt Douglas, who plays guitars and horns & writes horn arrangements and plays keys besides. I played piano and guitar but mainly I’m the singer. Other biographical details are honestly insignificant to my way of thinking, who really cares, but I get that my opinions about this stuff are a little out of step with the zeitgeist.
This is Days by the Mountain Goats.
LISTEN NOW