The Mountain Goats are an indie folk rock band from Claremont, California who have been based in Durham, North Carolina since the early 2000s. Founded and headed by singer-songwriter John Darnielle, the Mountain Goats are simultaneously a core genre staple and in a class of their own.

While Darnielle is the only consistent member of the Mountain Goats, he’s worked with many collaborators over the course of the life of the band, including indie rock luminaries Franklin Bruno and John Vanderslice. However, the band’s core members have remained unchanged since their 2015 album, Beat the Champ, with Darnielle being joined by bassist Peter Hughes, percussionist Jon Wurster, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas.

The music of the Mountain Goats has changed a lot through the course of their career. In the early years, they were known for their distinctive home-recorded sound, with Darnielle making many of the band’s releases on an old Panasonic boom-box. This era was also notable for the band’s prolificacy; Darnielle joked in 2000 that this was a time “where you had to decide whether it was groceries or the new Mountain Goats record, because they were coming out at the rate of about one every thirty-six hours.”

Over the years they’ve explored a lot of different sounds and styles—most obviously in 2002, when they released two albums, All Hail West Texas and Tallahassee, with wildly contrasting recording and production styles. While few Mountain Goats songs are directly autobiographical—with the notable exception of the 2005 album The Sunset Tree—their lyrics often derive heavily from Darnielle’s experiences growing up in a troubled home in the Los Angeles suburb of Claremont; his time as a heroin and meth addict, explored heavily on 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed and 2017’s Goths; his youthful Catholic faith, subsequent rejection thereof, and continuing fascination with Abrahamic religion, manifested most significantly on 2009’s The Life of the World to Come and 2013’s Transcendental Youth; and the lives of the young patients with whom he worked as a psychiatric nurse at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California.

Beat the Champ, Goths, In League with Dragons, and Jenny from Thebes are all concept albums with decisive, yet more eccentric themes—from Darnielle watching professional wrestling as a child; to the vibrant goth subculture he and Hughes' lived through in 1980s Southern California; to an album which is broadly about “the concept of aging.”

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