The narrator in “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower” goes where quite literally no one can go.

Track: “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower”
Album: Dark in Here (2021)

Recently I have seen a lot of people doing “style parodies” of the Mountain Goats, which is not a new idea but is on my mind as I think about “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower.” I think it’s a song that would help you identify what makes John Darnielle’s writing sound like it does. This is a song about a real place (the Kola Superdeep Borehole is the deepest man-made hole in the world, in western Russia) but a thing that did not happen there. When Darnielle has talked about the concept he’s focused on the idea that the hole itself is fascinating because it’s an extreme, but it’s more his jam to imagine the hoax that sprung up around it where people spread rumors that the Russians recorded the howls of Hell when they dug too deep.

Someone literally goes to Hell in this song, but we still spend time imagining their preparation of lacing their boots and checking on their compatriots. I’ve made the case a billion times here that the Goats are all about specificity, but they are equally about the mundane. The single most extreme element of any of the hundreds of Mountain Goats songs is contained in “listen for the voices calling out from down below,” but it’s just as much about the fact that this person has one fading thought about how the people back home will remember them for their steadfast approach to life. The subject is grand, massive, beyond the scope of human conception, but this moment is when you sneak away from your buddies and decide you’re mentally prepared to descend, quite literally, into Hell. In that, you unlock why “learn to wait your turn” is necessary and not a throw-away line.