30. Mountain Goats – No Children

For a song that features the lyrics “I hope I lie and tell everyone you were a good wife, and I hope you die, I hope we both die”, No Children is surprisingly positive. The song captures that exact moment after a painful breakup where the recriminations are over, the sadness is done, and where bile and anger is exactly the tonic. It’s the moment at which the only option is to move forward, and away, and No Children makes it sound like an exultant realisation: this wife, this harridan – yes, he loved her, once, but now he is so sure of her terribleness that the memory may as well belong to a different guy, and the glee in John Darnielle’s voice at this moment of clarity is gorgeous. Such hatred, weirdly, is a spur of so much positivity for the future – he’s been set free, not by his painful former lover, but by his own feelings. No Children is the sound of catharsis in its purest form.

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