Through This Fire, the 23rd album by the Mountain Goats, built around a dream-born character named Peter Balkan and a narrative of three shipwrecked survivors. The reviewer praises the album’s ambition and emotional weight but argues that it ultimately falls short of the band’s most accomplished narrative works.

John Darnielle crafts a story about survival, climate anxiety, and human fragility. The album’s theatrical structure—overture, character-driven numbers, and Broadway-style arrangements—marks one of the Mountain Goats’ most richly orchestrated works in years. Instruments like pedal steel, winds, and strings, driven by multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, create an expansive sonic palette. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda provides backing vocals, though the reviewer considers his contributions unnecessary.

Lyrically, Darnielle offers vivid, devastating moments—dark humor, aching exchanges between survivors, and powerful meditations on death, youth, and environmental collapse. Songs like “Rocks in My Pocket” and “Your Glow” deliver some of the album’s sharpest emotional blows.

But despite these strengths, the reviewer argues that the narrative feels too linear, too predetermined, and lacks the layered richness of earlier Mountain Goats classics like The Sunset Tree or Goths. The momentum of the plot pushes the album forward at the expense of deeper ambiguity or character complexity. Even the finale, “Broken to Begin With,” is described as resonant but ultimately slight, weakened further by a callback to an earlier track that feels unearned.

The reviewer concludes that while Through This Fire contains striking moments and thematic ambition, it struggles to balance small-scale emotional detail with grand conceptual sweep. The oceanic metaphor at the album’s center—vast, unpredictable, and deep—stands in contrast to a narrative that moves somewhat rigidly from point A to point B.