The Mountain Goats is the long-running project of the prolific John Darnielle. After building a cult following throughout the ’90s with a stream of boombox-recorded releases Darnielle signed to 4AD in 2002. It marked a major shift: for the first time, he embraced the studio as a creative tool. Between 2002 and 2009, 4AD released six Mountain Goats albums, the band is still active today and are on their 22nd release.

It's a mark of Darnielle’s extraordinary fertility that, of the 800-plus songs he has recorded, only a handful directly concern his own life experience; The Sunset Tree’s 13 tracks, written after Darnielle’s stepfather passed away in December 2003, are the bulk of this small subsection. It’s a collection of songs about the house that Darnielle grew up in and the people who lived there — an ensemble cast which includes Darnielle himself, an ex-girlfriend, his mother, stepfather, and sister; old friends and old enemies. "I've put off writing about this stuff for years," he said at the time of its release, "because I’m a little squeamish about milking my own trauma for art, and getting good songs rather than cry-fests from these experiences is a really excruciating process. And also because my stepfather was still alive." 

Experienced as a whole rather than as a series of terrifying, frozen moments, The Sunset Tree is a redemptive rather than a remorseless record. As the liner notes say :

"you are going to make it out of there alive."

Tracklist
You Or Your Memory (2025 Remaster)
Broom People (2025 Remaster)
This Year (2025 Remaster)
Dilaudid (2025 Remaster)
Dance Music (2025 Remaster)
Dinu Lipatti's Bones (2025 Remaster)
Up the Wolves (2025 Remaster)
Lion's Teeth (2025 Remaster)
Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod (2025 Remaster)
Magpie (2025 Remaster)
Song for Dennis Brown (2025 Remaster)
Love Love Love (2025 Remaster)
Pale Green Things (2025 Remaster)

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