Mister Goblin Announces New Album 'Frog Poems'

Mister Goblin, the long-running project of former Two Inch Astronaut frontman Sam Goblin, will release his new album Frog Poems, out April 26th, 2024. His fourth album as Mister Goblin, Frog Poems is the first for the project's new label home, Spartan Records.    Accompanying the album is its first single, “Goodnight Sun.”

Of the new single, Goblin offers: “This was the first song I wrote for the record and the one that came together the quickest. It's, maybe obviously, a reimagining of the children's book Goodnight Moon if it took place in a declining world. Once, I played it at a house show and a kid came up to me afterward and said he had to leave halfway through and go call his girlfriend to get back together with her (or "get it back in the bag" as he put it) because he found it moving. I hope they're happy but I have my Doubts.”

Frog Poems  was mixed and produced by longtime collaborator Seth Engel (Jimmy Montague, Joey Nebulous, Options) and recorded in two separate studios. Half the record was done with a full band, Engel providing drums, while the other half are solo recordings. The dissonance between the two, alternating modes gives Frog Poems some of its particular dynamism.   

Pulling from a kaleidoscopic array of influences spanning from the early 2000's tongue-in-cheek storytelling traditions of bands of Pedro the Lion to the breezier and more fuzzed-out conventions of 90's alternative bands like The Lemonheads, and even further into the post-hardcore leanings of bands like No Knife and Shiner, Frog Poems is unexpected, thoughtful, and idiosyncratic in all of the best ways.  

The album also continues the sonic refinement that's become more and more palpable with each Mister Goblin release. A project born of a desire to write music free of rigid genre framing after the disbandment of Two Inch Astronaut, Goblin leans harder than ever into that ethos.

He adds: “The criticism I've always heard about Mister Goblin records is that they're ‘too dynamic' or trying to accomplish too much without a unified sonic purpose or something.  Instead of changing that, because I'm stubborn, I think I just tried to do it better.”    

Photo Courtesy of the Artist