Those of us who love professional wrestling love it because wrestlers are the closest things we’ll ever see to real-life superheroes. (Some of us love rap music for the same reason.) For a young John Darnielle, wrestling represented escape from a tough home life. And with this album, he crawls into the head of the wrestlers he watched and a few who came after, digging into the question of what that escape means, and what prices those wrestlers paid to help others escape. It’s an album made with great dignity, about a profession presumed to have none. –Tom

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