The Mountain Goats

The Mountain Goats are the indie rock band that serves as the vehicle for singer-guitarist and ridiculously gifted and prolific songwriter John Darnielle, who has been cranking out folk flavored mid-tempo songs with perfectly crafted tunes since the mid '90s. The project started out with Darnielle doing his lo-fi recordings with ad hoc musicians and the name was merely his moniker. As his production quality went up in the early '00s, The Mountain Goats came to its own as a band.  The line-up gradually settled in its current form in the '10s. The rest was Darnielle getting better and better at songwriting while the band kept getting tighter and tighter. Their musical style did not go through any significant shifts over the years. They maintained not only their overall feel and sound, but also the level of the quality in their output throughout their career.