Five years and one day after Garbology, Aesop Rock and Blockhead have put out their second full album together. Trouble Mountain landed on Bandcamp and Rhymesayers on November 13, and it is a concept record with a very specific setting: a fictional mountain resort modeled on the Poconos getaway commercials that ran constantly on New York television when both of them were kids.
The pitch is escape, and the joke is that it never works. The resort promises a fresh start and turns into a place where ordinary worries get stranger. That fits the pair. Blockhead was there at the start, on records like Labor Days from 2001, and the duo's own notes say work, survival and alienation have been the throughline of everything they have made together since.
Why this one is a bigger deal than it looks
Blockhead produced the two Aesop Rock songs most people know, Daylight and None Shall Pass. Yet Garbology in 2021 was the first time he produced an entire Aesop album. Since then Aesop has mostly made his own beats, including 2025's Black Hole Superette, which he produced entirely himself and which pulled in Armand Hammer, whose own Snakes and Ladders came out two days earlier. Trouble Mountain is his 13th studio album and his sixth full-length since 2020, and the date lines up neatly. Spirit World Field Guide came out on November 13, 2020, six years to the day before this one.
Trouble Mountain tracklist
Seventeen songs, an hour on the nose. The vinyl splits it over four sides.
- Swedish Death Cleaning
- Coyote Summer (feat. Hanni El Khatib)
- Church Key
- Easter
- Hound Selector
- TM Tours (feat. Baby Dayliner)
- Trouble Trouble
- Mom One
- One Thing (feat. Open Mike Eagle)
- Ants
- Oatmeal
- No Interviews
- The Bag
- Eat and Grow (feat. Cavalier and 4ize)
- Ewok
- High and Outside
- Buffering
TM Tours is a 27-second interlude named for the resort, and Hanni El Khatib and Open Mike Eagle both carry over from the Black Hole Superette guest list. The full album streams on Bandcamp below.
Vinyl, CD, cassette and the lift pass
Every edition wears cover art signed by Justin "Coro" Kaufman, and it rewards a close look: a polar bear with a beer and an owl on its paw, a samurai on the lodge chimney, a helicopter ladder rescue, a skier on fire and a man in a lion suit, all in one snowy panic. Nate Vrieze adds illustration to the merch. Here is what Rhymesayers is selling and what is already gone as of Saturday morning:
- Standard 2xLP: 140g black vinyl in a satin gatefold with polylined sleeves, download included. Still in stock.
- Deluxe 4xLP box: limited to 2,000, the album plus every instrumental, in an embossed, foil-stamped, numbered slipcase. Showing unavailable.
- Cassette: chocolate swirl tape in a clear shell. Showing unavailable.
- CD: six-panel digipak. In stock.
- Lift Pass: a laminated all-day pass on a retractable ski reel, with the full album on an NFC chip. In stock.
The signed and numbered giclee print, an edition of 300, has also sold through. On Bandcamp the download comes in 24-bit/48kHz. If you are setting up a turntable for it, our vinyl collector's guide starts with the Pro-Ject Debut Carbon.
Our call: listen on Bandcamp today, then buy the standard 2xLP. The deluxe box with the instrumentals was the collector's piece and it is gone, so do not overpay for it secondhand this week. The black double LP is the one that will stay in print. And if you already stream everything, the lift pass is the most fun way to own a download we have seen this year.
