Heretic Pride
by The Mountain Goats
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The Mountain Goats bestography
Heretic Pride is ranked 17th best out of 39 albums by The Mountain Goats on BestEverAlbums.com.
The best album by The Mountain Goats is The Sunset Tree which is ranked number 1460 in the list of all-time albums with a total rank score of 1,174.
(N.B. Bestographies include all albums by an artist (and their variations), but do not include albums ranked outside the top 100,000).
Listen to Heretic Pride on YouTube
Heretic Pride track list
The tracks on this album have an average rating of 79 out of 100 (all tracks have been rated).
Heretic Pride rankings
Calculated from aggregate positions across 60,000 charts (2 million album rankings). Click to see how the rankings are calculated (Last updated: 5 hours ago)
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Heretic Pride ratings
Average Rating = (n ÷ (n + m)) × av + (m ÷ (n + m)) × AVwhere:
av = trimmed mean average rating an item has currently received.
n = number of ratings an item has currently received.
m = minimum number of ratings required for an item to appear in a 'top-rated' chart (currently 10).
AV = the site mean average rating.
Showing latest 5 ratings for this album. | Show all 42 ratings for this album.
| Rating | Date updated | Member | Album ratings | Avg. album rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ! | 06/11/2026 07:10 | Exist-en-ciel | 15,375 | 70/100 |
| ! | 10/10/2025 05:53 | PapaShiz86 | 11,607 | 79/100 |
| ! | 11/29/2023 14:59 | Matthew | 636 | 70/100 |
| ! | 08/28/2023 23:25 | daCritic | 4,587 | 73/100 |
| ! | 03/19/2023 14:40 |  phantom1305 | 2,812 | 71/100 |
Rating metrics:
Outliers can be removed when calculating a mean average to dampen the effects of ratings outside the normal distribution. This figure is provided as the trimmed mean. A high standard deviation can be legitimate, but can sometimes indicate 'gaming' is occurring. Consider a simplified example* of an item receiving ratings of 100, 50, & 0. The mean average rating would be 50. However, ratings of 55, 50 & 45 could also result in the same average. The second average might be more trusted because there is more consensus around a particular rating (a lower deviation).
(*In practice, some albums can have several thousand ratings)
This album is rated in the top 3% of all albums on BestEverAlbums.com. This album has a Bayesian average rating of 76.9/100, a mean average of 78.0/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 78.0/100. The standard deviation for this album is 13.2.
Heretic Pride favourites
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Heretic Pride comments
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In my opinion, this is the most cohesive and best produced Mountain Goats album. In a world where I can eliminate New Zion, it may be one of my 10 favorite albums of all time. The storytelling is superb, and it just oozes JD's conversational poetry in motion.
paladisiac 12/09/2011 18:36 | #32503
"sax rohmer #1" is my favorite mountain goats song since "this year". The do-or-die song off of Heretic Pride fights peril for love where the narrator sings "I am coming home to you / With my own blood in my mouth / And I am coming to you / If it’s the last thing that I do ". I love the power behind Darnielle's voice as if he's a defiant superhero frodo on the side of the volcano at the end of the third LOTR movie. This might be his best album. With a lot of songs as strong as "sax rohmer #1", it's really difficult to choose between this, "get lonely" and "the sunset tree". "heretic pride" is defiant, feeling "so proud to be alive" despite "the reckoning" that arrives like this: "Well they come and pull me from my house / And they drag my body through the streets / And the sun’s so hot I think I’ll catch fire and burn up / in the summer air so moist and sweet". "autoclave" is more fearful of the personal apocalypse singing "You ought to head for the exits, the sooner the better" and "i am this great, unstable mass of blood and foam / And no one in her right mind would make her home my home". "lovecraft in brooklyn" is pretty funky for a darnielle tune and that chugging guitar that only pauses at the bridges, then Darnielle goes frantic on lyrics "Someday somethings coming / From way out beyond the stars / To kill us while we stand here / It will store our brains in mason jar". The end is surely nigh. i love the vocal spazz-out at the end of "in the craters on the moon". "so desperate" is onomatopoeiatic in its delivery. "san bernadino" is a lush journey at sunrise through the city with plucked acoustic guitar & backing strings. i love the female fox on "marduk t-shirt men's room incident" -- a sad, delicate tale about acoustic guitar & strings. john darnielle storms out (for darnielle) with "michael myers resplendent", singing "when the house goes up in flames / No one emerges triumphantly from it / When the scum begins to circle the drain / (Well) everybody loves a winner".
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