The Mountain Goats announce their new album Bleed Out with a video for its opening track, “Training Montage.” The album, was inspired by action movies from the 60s, 70s and 80s, was produced by Bully’s Alicia Bognanno. The full-length drops on August 19th on Merge Records.

Bleed Out’s lead single “Training Montage” lovingly documents the getting-ready-for-battle scene in any action movie regardless of provenance and loudly declares its intentions: “I’m doing this for revenge.” It sets the tone for everything that follows on Bleed Out, an album delivered with the urgency and desperation deserving of its narrators and circumstances.

Heavily informed and influenced by their historic settings, Bleed Out is all pent-up energy and explosion, executed by a bunch of friends who were mainly happy to be in a room together making loud noises. In January 2021, just weeks after John Darnielle had started writing, his bandmates Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster joined him at a studio in the woods near his home in Chapel Hill (Sylvan Esso‘s Betty’s Studios). Everything was finished inside a week.

“So, heads up. I got this idea to write a bunch of songs where they were all uptempo mini-action movies. 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. Alicia Bognanno produced & played with us, and the great Shani Gandhi mixed. The first single is ‘Training Montage’ which does what it says on the tin, and you can preorder the album now, and as for tour dates…you know we gotta bring these uptempo jams to a stage near you at the earliest possible convenience,” says John Darnielle.

The Mountain Goats
Bleed Out
Track List
Merge Records

1. Training Montage
2. Mark on You
3. Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome
4. Extraction Point
5. Bones Don’t Rust
6. First Blood
7. Make You Suffer
8. Guys on Every Corner
9. Hostages
10. Need More Bandages
11. Incandescent Ruins
12. Bleed Out

Pre-order Bleed Out by the Mountain Goats HERE