The Mountain Goats Announce Days, Share “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out To The Feds”

The Mountain Goats are back with Days, their 24th studio album, and they’re leading it with a song built around one of the more strange, tabloid-adjacent bits of Charlie Sheen lore. The new single, “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out To The Feds,” arrives alongside news of a large international tour that will take the band through North America and Europe and into some heavyweight rooms, including Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

It has not exactly been a long wait, either. Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan came out just six months ago, carrying its own ambitious frame and guest spots from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tommy Stinson. In the meantime, the band has stayed busy with the one-off “Going To Fennario” and a pair of covers with Mary Chapin Carpenter. But this new rollout puts the focus back on John Darnielle’s long-running project, which has somehow kept finding fresh angles after all these years.

“Charlie Sheen Reaches Out To The Feds” is a driving, talkative Mountain Goats song, pushed forward by bright, bouncy horns and Darnielle’s familiar bark-and-tremble delivery. It’s one of the voices he returns to best, that taut, unstable register that can make even a ridiculous premise feel urgent. And the premise here is truly ridiculous in the specific way the internet and pop culture can be: in 1991, while Charlie Sheen was starring in the first Hot Shots!, he watched the Japanese horror film Guinea Pig 2: Flower Of Flesh And Blood and reportedly became convinced he had seen a real murder on screen. He contacted the FBI, prompting an investigation into the film and its distributors, before the whole thing was dropped after authorities saw a making-of video explaining the production. Later, of course, Sheen’s career took other turns.

On the song, Darnielle inhabits that moment with the kind of feverish seriousness he’s long been able to pull off, singing, “Gentlemen, the camera doesn’t lie! How many more innocent women must die?” It’s a ludicrous line, but also exactly the sort of phrase that makes a Mountain Goats song stick in your head for days.

In a press release, Darnielle says Days was originally called Grunges and conceived as a sequel to the excellent 2017 album Goths. Some of that idea still lingers in the tracklist, which includes “Song For Layne Staley,” “Candlebox,” and the previously released “Going To Fennario.” Darnielle also frames the record as a kind of time-warped reflection on the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, and on the accumulation of days themselves.