The Mountain Goats have announced Days, a new album led by the track “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds.” The record arrives as a swift follow-up to Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, which the band released last November.

Frontman John Darnielle said the album began as Grunges, which he imagined as a sequel to the band’s 2017 LP Goths. He later turned a social media joke about writing a song called “Contemplating Pearl Jam in the Carolina Dawn” into the seed for the project, then shaped the material after his wife left town for a two week residency in Virginia.

Darnielle said the songs are loosely about the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and he framed them as music about the way days accumulate, recede, sharpen, and blur as time passes. “Most songs here are in major keys but don’t let that fool you,” he said. “If you do let that fool you I have a bridge to sell you; there is nothing on the other side of the bridge.” He added: “Still, you shouldn’t let that deter you.”

The album was produced by John Congleton and recorded at Sear Sound in Manhattan. Alongside Darnielle, the lineup includes Rob Jost, Mikaela Davis, and assorted backing vocalists, but not Peter Hughes, who left the band in 2024 after 30 years. That absence gives Days a different shape before a note is heard, even as the group keeps moving with the urgency of a band that does not want to sound trapped by its own history.

The track list also includes “Best Hard Rock Albums 2013” and “Hidden Majesty of Later Venom Albums,” titles that fit Darnielle’s taste for mixing precision with mischief. For listeners, the question now is not whether Days continues the band’s recent run — it does — but how far this new lineup and this new batch of songs will carry The Mountain Goats before the next turn arrives.