“Rat Queen” finds a moment perpetually about to happen and the people who dream of it being real.

Track: “Rat Queen”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

John Darnielle used to joke about wanting to troll his management by posting stuff like “new tour lol” to announce a tour and I feel a similar urge to just say that “Rat Queen” is about the rat queen and move on to the next one. We must be stronger than that, but it is, in fact, about worshiping the queen of the rats. It largely speaks for itself. If we really do want to go deeper, we should probably discuss that it technically focuses on the cult around the queen rather than the queen herself.

There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs that function as anthems for the kind of people who don’t normally have anthems. This is not unfamiliar territory, but it isn’t always this direct. “I am a faceless, nameless acolyte // here tonight at your service” tells us specifically, again, directly, who this person is and what they want. They want the subject of their worship to reward their faith. They want the world they see within their head to be realized in the above-ground world that so often does not work for them. We have to make some assumptions here, but they seem like safe assumptions to make. “Rat Queen” has become a fan favorite and it’s easy to see why. “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” shows us the perversion of this same impulse, but here we see a purer form of isolation. If you don’t see this as a triumph waiting to happen, you haven’t considered what this could do for you.