We’re a mere couple of weeks away from the release of the new Mountain Goats album In League With Dragons. Bandleader John Darnielle has said that he hopes the album, a sort of concept LP about a small town ruled by a wizard, will kick off a whole new genre called “dragon noir.” We’ve already heard a couple of songs from the album, “Younger” and “Cadaver Sniffing Dog.” And now he’s shared another new one called “Sicilian Crest,” and he’s also shared a whole lot of things about the writing and recording of “Sicilian Crest.”

Last year, Darnielle and Night Vale host Joseph Fink teamed up for I Only Listen The The Mountain Goats, a podcast wherein Darnielle and Fink discuss Darnielle’s work, with a whole lot of digression built into the thing. For the podcast’s first season, they went over every song from All Hail West Texas, the Mountain Goats’ classic 2002 album. (This also led to a tribute compilation.) And they recently launched the second season, which gets deep into the creation of In League With Dragons. Today, there’s a new episode, which traces every stage of “Sicilian Crest,” right from when Darnielle first wrote it and recorded a demo with his young son helping out.

Musically, “Sicilian Crest,” the last song on the album, is grand and lush, built from a florid piano and from a whole lot of tense, explosive Jon Wurster drum work. By the time the song really gets going, we also get triumphant early-’90s adult contemporary synths and big, near-orchestral surges of sound. The lyrics play out as some kind of absurd, overblown prophecy: “Drench a kitchen rag in the heretic’s blood / Wash the windows and prepare for the flood.” Check it out below.

On the song, Darnielle says:

“Sicilian Crest,” lyrically, is more reminiscent of early Mountain Goats than anything since a couple of the songs on Heretic Pride — but began life as an in comprehensible title in a notebook, has its genesis in playing around at the piano with my son while a Moridira Hurricane and a Fender Twin on standby stood close at hand, and ended up being a cryptically political dance number with shades of New Order or the Alarm. My bandmates are going to kill me for referencing The Alarm in this announcement, and one of them will kill me twice if I don’t mention that the Alarm’s drummer’s name was “Twist.” So, should the worst come to pass, please enjoy my funeral, and in the meantime please enjoy this episode of I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats.

In League With Dragons is out 4/26 on Merge. You can listen to that podcast episode here.