The Mountain Goats

There are Mountain Goats albums that emerge from historical deep dives, vividly rendered autobiography, liturgical exploration, and modern anthropological study. Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan came from a dream. In May 2023, John Darnielle woke in the middle of the night and grabbed his phone to record a title that surfaced from somewhere in his subconscious. Because this is the Mountain Goats—a band known for avoiding the easy route and always pushing themselves a step beyond—Darnielle not only decided to complete this mysterious project, but to present it as a full-on musical, the most conceptually detailed and musically elaborate work in the band’s ever-expanding catalog.

“I loved musicals when I was a kid,” Darnielle explains, “but I hadn’t really indulged in them that much until the last seven years or so. And then we did Jenny From Thebes, which I called a ‘fake musical’ a lot… But this one actually is going for it.”

Produced by the Mountain Goats’ multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas—who also co-wrote several songs—the record is embracing, inviting, and overflowing with melody and orchestration that stretches far beyond the band’s previous boundaries. “My approach is more arrangement-based,” Douglas says of his role. “I’m trying to sculpt the shape of the songs with the layering of instruments that are suiting the song best… I am sometimes a bit of a maximalist with that stuff. Sometimes more is more!”

Drawing on the cryptic phrasing of its title, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan tells the story of a small crew shipwrecked on a desert island, where the three surviving members—an unnamed narrator, Captain Peter Balkan, and Adam—struggle with diminishing resources and apocalyptic visions. “The first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to,” Darnielle sings early in the album. “The next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night.” The songs unfold as tales of survival and desolation, brutality and tenderness, hard-earned wisdom and profound compassion—rich with novelistic detail and shouted, wordless choruses that transcend language. In other words: quintessential Mountain Goats, further deepening a singular body of work now more than three decades deep.

To match the conceptual heft, the band’s core trio—Darnielle, Douglas, and drummer Jon Wurster—are joined by bassist Cameron Ralston and notable guests including Replacements legend Tommy Stinson, harpist Mikaela Davis, and musical-theater icon Lin-Manuel Miranda, a longtime friend whose background vocals add extra dramatic weight.

For all the new territory they explore, the Mountain Goats still lean into their strengths. There are belt-along anthems like “Armies of the Lord,” whose stately slow build seems engineered to ignite their famed live shows. There is intimate storytelling like the hushed “Peru,” whose pastoral calm offers a rare moment of respite amid chaos. Longtime fans will find nods to the past as well—most notably a sequel to the boombox-era deep cut “Lady From Shanghai,” reframing the stakes of the original and showcasing just how virtuosic the band has become.

As the narrative evolves from its opening overture—the first instrumental track to ever appear on a Mountain Goats record—the band leads listeners through humble beginnings, escalating turmoil, disappearances, and the eventual acceptance of fate. At times, Darnielle’s writing feels as formalist and poetic as anything in his National Book Award-nominated literary career. “Lightly row but this much I know / The first thing you learn will be the first thing to go,” he sings on the brisk, catchy “Cold at Night.” In “The Lady From Shanghai 2,” a sophisticated groove underscores the narrator’s ambition, suggesting it may have been doomed from the start. Even within the album’s tight chronological frame, Darnielle leaves ample room for interpretation—lingering questions that remain after the final note fades.

“That’s something that I like,” he says. “Details that, generally speaking, only I will know about. So you try to let the music evoke that very personal thing without it being a confessional song.”

Recorded at Dreamland Recording Studios in Hudson, New York, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan matches the emotional vulnerability of the Mountain Goats’ career peaks while filling a larger sonic space than ever before. Beneath the compelling performances lie surprising layers—synth, pedal steel, fretless bass—that signal a bold new chapter for the band. Darnielle envisioned the songs as staged soliloquies, delivered among a set of ship remnants and sea-worn props. In the album’s closer “Broken to Begin With,” one character surveys his bleak surroundings not with bitterness, but with gratitude for the fleeting shelter the environment provided.

It is a bleak tale, in the tradition of Mountain Goats concept albums stretching back to 2002’s Tallahassee. But it also reveals a shared worldview between the narrator and the relentlessly inventive trio bringing his story to life: “Nothing’s ever promised to anyone,” Darnielle sings in “Fishing Boat.” “Everything you get is a gift.”