A Beginner’s Guide to Mount Eerie and The Microphones

In a lengthy bio released in conjunction with his new album Night Palace, Mount Eerie‘s Phil Elverum says early on, “I’d like to not refer to myself ever.” And for a long time, the music he made with this prolific project and its immediate predecessor, The Microphones, gave little real-life indication of being autobiographical in any tangible sense. His song titles often featured first-person statements (“I Want Wind to Blow,” “I Am Bored,” “I Want to Be Cold”), but they often hovered between something primal and universal and a mystical, mysterious quality reflected in his Pacific Northwestern backdrop of Anacortes, Washington, often with a sense of supernatural darkness—one reflective of other corners of popular culture. In that very same bio, he notes, “The darkness of the woods of Twin Peaks was not a TV fairytale. It was right out the door, ringing with feedback.” With a modest budget and an uncanny ability to craft atmosphere and a sense of place and negative space alike, Elverum built his own sort of mythology.

And yet there’s a portion of Elverum’s catalog that’s deeply, agonizingly personal. After the death of his longtime partner in 2016, he temporarily let go of the distortion and static, the spectral ambience and anonymity. His approach changed dramatically, addressing grief in unambiguous terms and with a heartbreaking directness. And since then, Elverum himself has become more present in his own songs, his observations and documentations of the world around him less abstracted while his songwriting has continued to evolve in breathtaking ways. There have always been connected threads throughout his music, like how nearly every album has a song or interlude titled “(Something)”, or how songs or albums have sequels and continuations of past works. And now, with new album Night Palace, he connects past to present, revealing a new chapter both in his personal life and as an artist, reflective of his own spiritual growth and expansion of his imaginative songwriting that connects back to his earlier work in meaningful and profound ways.

With this stunning new chapter in his catalog, we compiled a beginner’s guide to Phil Elverum’s sprawling body of work, featuring essential releases from The Microphones, the best Mount Eerie albums, deeper cuts and more.

It Was Hot, We Stayed In the Water (2000)

It Was Hot, We Stayed In the Water isn’t where everything began, strictly speaking. Phil Elverum first released The Microphones’ debut Don’t Wake Me Up in 1999, but a year later, those same ideas were blown up into something even more far-reaching and ambitious on its follow-up. There’s a gentleness and intimacy to much of the album reflective of the lo-fi acoustic sounds that have marked Elverum’s catalog as a whole, but that’s by no means the extent of what It Was Hot comprises, blown up into fuzzed-out twee pop on “Ice,” sprawling out over 11 minutes on the epic saga of “The Glow,” exploding in a marching array of percussion on “Drums,” and pairing carnivalesque calliope sounds with buzzing drone on “The Gleam.” At times some of these ideas are just that, rather than fully fleshed out songs, but the sheer excitement of it all is what makes it all work regardless, an exploratory albeit DIY quality that lends even the most ambitious pieces a playful and warm sensibility. And while Elverum is the album’s architect and central figure, he’s in the company of a lot of notable Olympia indie figures here: Calvin Johnson, Mirah, The Blow’s Khaela Maricich and Karl Blau, to name a few. And while it’s by no means as large in scope as its successor, It Was Hot, We Stayed In the Water acts as a kind of predecessor to that haunting masterpiece, and not just because its title directly references “The Glow.” It’s only a little over 40 minutes long, but it feels immense.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

The Glow Pt. 2 (2001)

The third Microphones album is inarguably the most celebrated album in Elverum’s body of work and for good reason. Building on the ambition and innovation of It Was Hot, The Glow Pt. 2 goes darker and deeper into the Pacific Northwestern woods—there’s a reason they were the backdrop for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (which Elverum himself has often referenced). More atmospheric and masterfully crafted, The Glow Pt. 2 lets go of some of the playful ramshackle arrangements of its predecessor in favor of denser and more slowly building pieces like the gorgeous opener “I Want Wind to Blow” or the droning shoegaze standout “The Moon.” There’s an eerie and intangibly supernatural element to The Glow Pt. 2 that sets a mood that gets under your skin and into your subconscious. It’s an indie-folk masterpiece. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

Clear Moon/Ocean Roar (2012)

These are technically two albums, which makes this a six-album edition of the Beginner’s Guide as opposed to the typical five, but they’re also companion albums—made more explicit by the fact that they’re packaged together as a double-album on vinyl. Released in 2012, Clear Moon and Ocean Roar represent two halves of a “more challenging and weird and dark and heavier” set of music he composed inspired in large party by his home city of Anacortes, Washington. They’re atmospheric pieces throughout, but they’re haunted and unsettling as well, beautiful in their spectral ambience. Clear Moon is the more accessible of the two, hypnotic in its standout moments such as the eerie tones of “Lone Bell” and the melodic drone pop of “House Shape,” while Ocean Roar leans heavier on black metal influences and incorporates a blast-beat-laden cover of a Popol Vuh song, in addition to a handful of mesmerizing instrumentals. They’re two halves of a masterful whole, not necessarily the most acclaimed Mount Eerie records but some of the most stunning regardless.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp (Clear Moon) | Bandcamp (Ocean Roar)

A Crow Looked At Me (2017)

Fair warning, this one’s pretty hard to listen to. Not because of the music, though—it’s a low-key, pretty, mostly quiet album that, were you to not zoom in on the lyrics too carefully, is undeniably pleasant. Oh, but the lyrics—written after the death of Elverum’s wife, Geneviève Castrée, A Crow Looked At Me is a plain-spoken, straightforward expression of debilitating grief and abject pain that takes a lot out of you. That’s the point; Elverum even says at the beginning of the very first song, “Death is real,” and he asks us not to look away, not to avoid a thing that will eventually take away someone we love. But amid the ache of A Crow Looked At Me, there’s humanity, mystery and beauty, making it an album worth returning to, if not immediately.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Night Palace (2024)

Phil Elverum’s eleventh and latest album as Mount Eerie, Night Palace, is the most comprehensive album in his career in tying together the disparate and eclectic elements from throughout his career. Many standout moments, including “The Gleam Pt. 3,” directly reference The Glow Pt. 2, his first record to feel spiritually and sonically connected to his music made as The Microphones in quite a few years. But there’s a versatility and sprawl to it that makes it thrilling to listen to throughout, whether through the dark, groove-laden sounds of “Huge Fire” or the heavy drones of “Co-Owner of Trees” or the more playful and lighthearted “I Spoke With a Fish.” And after the wrenching expression of grief on A Crow Looked At Me and, to a lesser extent, Now Only, there’s a sense of spiritual grounding, joy and warmth here—even amid condemnations of colonialism—that makes it soul-nourishing to listen to. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)

Next Steps: While it’s a perhaps more accessible listen than its predecessor, Now Only makes better sense after you’ve heard A Crow Looked At Me. Yet where that album is a devastating document of grief, this is about the slow process of picking up the pieces and figuring out what comes next. However it builds on that album’s palette with moments of heaviness such as “Distortion.” While it was perhaps a bit of an odd entry when it first arrived, in hindsight, Elverum’s foray into black metal on Wind’s Poem is both fitting and unlocks certain aesthetic pathways in his body of work (like on Ocean Roar). And the album that gave his project its second name, Mount Eerie, is a wonderful bridge between chapters, anchored by the sprawling “The Sun.”

Advanced Listening: While this space is typically reserved for the real-heads-only material, I’d recommend that anyone on board with The Microphones give a listen to The Microphones in 2020. But take note of the fact that it’s a single 40-minute composition, so if you’re not ready for that commitment, pencil it into your schedule. Then for a trip back to some of the rawest early material in the catalog, including more stripped-down and lower-fi versions of songs on The Glow Pt. 2, dive into the 2002 compilation Song Islands.

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