The Mountain Goats - Goths

"I'm hardcore/But I'm not that hardcore," a young man muses in the early chapters of the Mountain Goats' 2017 album, Goths, and in those seven words, group leader John Darnielle neatly summarizes the album's overriding theme: what it's like not to fit in, even among those folks who don't fit in. Goths is a concept album that ponders episodes in the life of a handful of characters living in the West Coast goth scene of the '80s and '90s. The protagonists range from the young and curious figuring out their place in a community of "leather and lace and good friends," to those confronting the onset of middle age and the knowledge that you may be goth on the inside, but you're a grownup with a job and a house as far as the outside world is concerned. Goths is an album less about the trappings of the goth culture or even the music (though both certainly play a part in the story) than about folks making sense of their role in a subculture (and the larger world, too), and the album lives and d