The Mountain Goats have announced a new album, the first since 2012's Transcendental Youth. It's called Beat the Champ, and it's out April 7 in North America, April 13 in Europe, and April 3 in Australia/New Zealand, via Merge. John Darnielle also shared a song called "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero", which you can listen to above. The song is about pro wrestler Chavo Guerrero Sr., who Darnielle calls his "childhood hero."

As you might be able to surmise from the cover (which was designed by artist Leela Corman) and the song, the album is largely about pro wrestling. Darnielle wrote a little about the album on his Tumblr, where he explained the subject matter:

All that glory. All that shine. Nameless bodies in unremembered rooms. Some people might be thinking to themselves, JD, wrestling, I don’t know, I’ve never really been into wrestling, but did I steer you wrong with the Bible album, even though you may not have been super-into the Bible? Fear not. In a world of false promises and hollow gimmicks, please rest assured that the old maxim still holds true, whether scrawled on the back of a claim check or carved into a bench in an abandoned locker room: you can’t trust much, but you can trust the Mountain Goats.

Or, as he says, the songs are "really more about death and difficult-to-navigate interior spaces than wrestling."

He also wrote about the album on Merge's website: