The Mountain Goats have shared the second single from their forthcoming album Bleed Out. It’s titled ‘Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome’, and you can listen to it below.
“When I write an album that revolves around a theme, it usually takes two or three songs before I notice what’s going on,” John Darnielle said in a statement. “There’s always one song that becomes the ‘might as well dive all the way in’ song and on Bleed Out that song was ‘Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome,’ written while watching a French action movie way past my normal bedtime.”
He continued: “Once I had the chorus of this one I started asking myself the kinds of questions that usually end up shaping the album: What if I just wrote all the songs on guitar? What if I leaned into the uptempo ones? In recent years I shy away from the fist-punch no-brakes anthemic style but here I figured, you know, no point just wading around in blood if I’m already in knee-deep.”
Bleed Out comes out August 19 via Merge Records. It was led by the single ‘Training Montage’, which made our Best New Songs list.