For decades, the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle has been writing these incredibly dense and evocative lyrics. And even though he’s now a respected, award-nominated author, he’s still cranking out new music. Last month, the Mountain Goats announced that they’d release the new album In League With Dragons this spring. Darnielle wrote that the album started out as a rock opera about a seaside town ruled by a wizard but that it developed from there: “I am earnestly hoping that a new genre called ‘dragon noir’ will spring from the forehead of nearly two years’ work on these songs, but, if not, I am content for this to be the sole example of the style.” Today, we get to hear our second dragon noir song.

After the Mountain Goats shared the early track “Younger,” they have now come out with “Cadaver Sniffing Dog,” a song that describes a gruesome crime scene. As ever, Darnielle holds back in big-picture details, instead describing a setting where some horrible crime has just taken place: “Stray clumps of hair and blood and brain / Fragments of bone in the drain / Rookies trying to keep the airway clear / But the damage is too severe.”

The song also includes hints about something more fantastical: “Leopards on their hands and knees / Nobody’s ready for days like these.” And are there actual dogs who sniff cadavers? Musically, the song is choppier than “Younger,” built on a driving and slightly obtuse riff. There’s a squirmy, Sonny Sharrock-esque guitar solo in there, too. Below, listen to “Cadaver Sniffing Dog” and read what Darnielle says about it.

Darnielle writes:

My records indicate that I wrote “Cadaver Sniffing Dog” on Christmas Day, 2017, which probably tells you more about me than the song itself could ever hope to. I’d had the title in a notebook for several years, and had made a run or two at it, but Christmas lights & early sunsets seem to have put me in the right frame of mind to rise to the challenge of writing something morbid enough to live up to the name. Because I’m me, and favor sharp contrast, I went with something uptempo instead of, you know, a dirge.

The acoustic guitars (Matt Douglas & I playing together in the same isolation room), bass, and drums are live in the studio; the lead vocal may also have been tracked on that same take, I forget; the downtown-New-York-by-way-of-Berlin guitar solo is Thom Gill. The strings are arranged by producer Owen Pallett and performed by the Macedonian Radio Symphonic Orchestra, conducted by Oleg Kondratenko. The backing vocals are arranged by Robert Bailey and sung by himself, Everett Drake, Jason Eskridge, and Michael Mishaw, with whom we also worked on the Goths album; it’s a profound honor to to me to have Robert and the guys take a song and just elevate it, transport it, make it cosmic. Matt Ross-Spang engineered it and Shani Gandhi mixed it; they are actual wizards.

The lyric is a noir vision of a crime scene investigation, and is a metaphor for a relationship in which there is nothing whatsoever left to salvage, because, as I mentioned earlier, it was Christmas, and, being the sort of person who really tries to get into the Christmas spirit, I — well, anyway, please enjoy “Cadaver Sniffing Dog.”

In League With Dragons is out 4/26 on Merge.