Okay, so, O’Berry just tagged me on Twitter in the most delightful news – there’s a new album coming out from The Mountain Goats (one of my favorite musicians/groups ever) and they’re releasing it FROM WIZARDS OF THE COAST and Merge records!
I honestly didn’t think my eyeballs were working! How could this be a real thing? WELL BECAUSE THE WORLD IS A GREAT PLACE SOMETIMES, THAT’S HOW! The album is titled “In League With Dragons: The Cure for Summoning Sickness” and is going to be a 12 track Dungeons and Dragons epic, hopefully pioneering a new genre John Darnielle (the man behind The Mountain Goats) calls “dragon noir”.
Here’s the quote from Darnielle that’s floating around the internet about the album:
This album began life as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard, for which some five to seven songs were written. When I’m focusing on a project, I always distract myself from the through-line with multiple byways, which are kind of like mini-games within the broader architecture of a long video game. As I worked on the Riversend stuff, weird noir visions started creeping in, probably under the influence of Leonardo Sciascia (a Sicilian author, he wrote mysteries) and Ross MacDonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse, which a friend from Port Washington gave me while I was in the thick of the writing. I thought these moods helped complicate the wizards and dragons a little, and, as I thought about my wizard, his health failing, the invasion by sea almost certain to wipe out half his people, I thought about what such a person might look like in the real world: watching a country show at a midwestern casino, or tryout pitching for an American League team years after having lit up the marquees. Finally, I wrote the title track, which felt like a drawing-together of the themes in play: rebellion against irresistible tides, the lush vistas of decay, necessary alliances. I am earnestly hoping that a new genre called “dragon noir” will spring from the forehead of nearly two years’ work on these songs, but, if not, I am content for this to be the sole example of the style.
Quote taken from NPR
We’re blasting the new single, Younger, in the marketing office on repeat as I write this, and I’m definitely having a hard time containing my excitement.
You can listen to the new single below, put in preorders for the album here and apparently later today THERE WILL BE A LIVE PERFORMANCE AND ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT THE ALBUM AT WIZARDS HQ!!! You can bet we’ll be tuning in.
Speaking of Dungeons and Dragons – did you know we have tons of space in our shop dedicated to tabletop