The Mountain Goats release new album "Days"

The Mountain Goats released their new album, Days, on August 7. Frontman John Darnielle told Under the Radar the record grew out of a joke he made on Bluesky, ad-libbing a fake Eddie Vedder verse he called "Contemplating Pearl Jam in the Carolina Dawn," which led him to notice how long it had been since he had actually heard Pearl Jam's "Even Flow." That small realization opened into an album's worth of songs about 1990s rock figures, written, Darnielle said, from a newfound comfort with nostalgia he did not always have.

Opener "Song for Layne Staley" is a grunge-tinged tribute to the Alice in Chains frontman who died of an overdose in 2002, built around a drum fill drummer Jon Wurster played at Darnielle's request to echo Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," itself borrowed from the Gap Band. Elsewhere on the record, "Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds" and the title track "Days" round out the '90s-facing material, while "Candlebox," named for the Seattle band, doubles as a tribute to singer Matt Nathanson, who sang backing vocals on the track and whose friendship with Darnielle dates back to open mic nights in the early 1990s.

Darnielle traced his own scene back to Claremont, California, and Dennis Callaci's Shrimper Records, which he said had "a very deep mistrust of the mainstream" that shaped the band early on. He recalled one local band turning down a slot at Lollapalooza rather than risk "the mainstreaming of this stuff," a wariness he said the group later saw play out in Seattle, where "a couple of bands get really big" before "the scene dies."

"Annie Haslam Imperial Phase," Darnielle's favorite song on the album, is built around the 1970s prog band Renaissance and produced by John Congleton, whose work Darnielle called "some of the greatest sounding music ever made." He compared writing about Renaissance, and other once-famous acts, to the Percy Shelley poem "Ozymandias," noting that "there's a sweetness to the fact that it fades."

Darnielle traced his own start in music back to a single open mic night in 1991, when he was a 24-year-old psychiatric nurse who showed up with a guitar; the host asked his name and he said "The Mountain Goats," a title that stuck through nearly three and a half decades since. He said fame is something to be "suspicious of," a wariness that now shapes practical choices too: the band limits its own tours to three weeks at a time, wary of what long stretches on the road did to acts he watched come up in the 1990s.

He described the record's tone as bittersweet rather than simply nostalgic, tied to a broader theme running through the songs, that fame and scenes both fade the way everything does, whether the subject is Layne Staley or a 1970s band most young listeners have never heard of. Now 59, Darnielle said he only recently let go of a longtime "allergy to nostalgia," a shift he traced back to writing 2017's Goths.

Days is out now, joining the rest of the week's new indie releases on the release calendar, and follows the band's prior album Jenny From Thebes, which also featured Nathanson.