The message of “Make You Suffer” is simple, but when your message is that powerful it doesn’t need to be complex.

Track: “Make You Suffer”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs that are remarkable because of, not despite, their lyrical simplicity. “No, I Can’t” is a list of mundane objects as a means of reassuring someone. One of the more quotable Goats lines is a simple near repetition: “the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you // and that you’re standing in the doorway. These are not memorable because they do something no one else could do. They are memorable because, like modern art, they cause us to look at something simple in a new way.

“Make You Suffer” is a song where someone is going to make someone else suffer. The chorus, with some minor deviations, is largely about the title. The simplicity really forces you to contend with what that means. “I’m going to make you suffer,” the narrator tells us, and by the end of the song we have to assume they mean it. The thing works here not just because of how powerful that statement is but because the song itself is beautiful. These same lyrics over mightily strung chords back in the day probably wouldn’t work.