Music News

The Mountain Goats Announce New Album ‘Beat The Champ’

Indie-folk trio The Mountain Goats are returning from two years of relative silence with a new album. Beat The Champ, a collection of professional wrestling-inspired songs, is due out on April 7th.

Songwriter John Darnielle spent the last year pursuing his literary aspirations with the release of his first novel, Wolf In A White Van, but now Darnielle has turned his focus towards another longtime love: wrestling, which he says was “an avenue of escape for me when I was a kid.” “Wrestling was low-budget working class entertainment back then, strictly UHF material. It was cheap theater. You had to bring your imagination to the proceedings and you got paid back double,” Darnielle says of the album. “I wrote these songs to re-immerse myself in the blood and fire of the visions that spoke to me as a child, and to see what more there might be in them now that I’m grown.”

You can listen to one of the album’s songs, “The Legend Of Chavo Guerrero,” (an ode to one of Darnielle’s favorite wrestlers) below. You can also catch the band on tour this spring when they tour across the U.S.

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