The Mountain Goats

Release Date: 10/17/2025
Format: LP
Label: 4AD
Release type: Apricot Vinyl LP Pressing 

The Mountain Goats is the long-running project of the prolific John Darnielle. After building a cult following throughout the ’90s with a stream of boombox-recorded releases Darnielle signed to 4AD in 2002. It marked a major shift: for the first time, he embraced the studio as a creative tool. Between 2002 and 2009, 4AD released six Mountain Goats albums, the band is still active today and are on their 22nd release.

It's a mark of Darnielle’s extraordinary fertility that, of the 800-plus songs he has recorded, only a handful directly concern his own life experience; The Sunset Tree’s 13 tracks, written after Darnielle’s stepfather passed away in December 2003, are the bulk of this small subsection. It’s a collection of songs about the house that Darnielle grew up in and the people who lived there — an ensemble cast which includes Darnielle himself, an ex-girlfriend, his mother, stepfather, and sister; old friends and old enemies. "I've put off writing about this stuff for years," he said at the time of its release, "because I’m a little squeamish about milking my own trauma for art, and getting good songs rather than cry-fests from these experiences is a really excruciating process. And also because my stepfather was still alive." 

Experienced as a whole rather than as a series of terrifying, frozen moments, The Sunset Tree is a redemptive rather than a remorseless record. As the liner notes say :

"you are going to make it out of there alive."

1. You Or Your Memory
2. Broom People
3. This Year
4. Dilaudid
5. Dance Music
6. Dinu Lipatti's Bones
7. Up The Wolves
8. Lion's Teeth
9. Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod
10. Magpie
11. Song For Dennis Brown
12. Love Love Love
13. Pale Green Things