Mumford & Sons "Prizefighter"

After a seven-year break, Mumford & Sons suddenly got busy. They released Rushmere in 2025, and now, less than a year later, they have released Prizefighter. After they finished Rushmere, they continued to write songs, much to their own surprise. Then, as the rock and roll fates would have it, they bumped into Aaron Dessner (The National) at Electric Lady Studios. Dessner had contributed some production to the band’s 2015 album Wilder Mind. After they reconnected, lead singer Marcus Mumford followed Dessner on his global itinerary as they continued to write songs. This culminated in a ten-day recording stint at Dessner’s Long Pond Studios.

Given so much serendipity, one might expect a flash-bang of an album, one that flows with optimism and ease. Prizefighter has its moments, but it’s not nearly as light on its feet as Rushmere. Produced by Dave Cobb, Rushmere finds the newly minted trio (banjoist and guitarist Winston Marshall left the band in a controversial hullabaloo in 2021) stomping and strumming across the album’s trim 34 minutes.

Prizefighter, by contrast, tends to introspection as it meanders across a runtime of almost 50 minutes. Of course, the iconic sounds with which the band erupted onto the world stage in 2009 are firmly in place. This is acoustic music that mostly eschews the drum kit for a deconstructed approach to percussion and uses synthesizers to paint a gloss over the rustic cracks and add drama to the soaring choruses. But much of the band’s spunk, its hard-driving rhythms and breakneck tempos, has faded. It’s still there, just not as distinctive.

Mumford & Sons’ use of religious allusion and imagery is still very much on the band’s calling card, and Mumford seems to be, much like the prizefighter of the title track or the character in the opener, “Here,” looking around and taking stock of things. “Well, here’s my final serenade/ Here’s a gun and here’s a blade/ Here’s a picture that I saved/ For too long,” Mumford sings. It’s the kind of thing one says at the end that is also a beginning.

The last several years have been hard on the band. In addition to losing one of the hallmarks of their sound, Marshall’s banjo, Mumford dealt with alcohol abuse and released a solo album where he revealed that he was sexually abused as a child. Prizefighter is at its best when it reckons with the hard stuff of life. The stirring love song “Run Together” braces the listener with its harmonies as the singer seeks to build up a fragile relationship. “Conversation with my Son (Gangsters and Angels)” levels a truth (“The kids and their questions/ It’ll keep you up all night”) that any parent can relate to, while “Shadow of a Man” deals directly with the grip of addiction in what is probably one of the band’s best songs.

But Prizefighter at times seems to lose itself in a quest for refinement. Dessner recruited long-time National collaborators Ben Lanz on trombone, Rob Moose on viola and violin, and Kyle Resnick on trumpet. The result on the positive end is to add nuance of timbre to the role of keyboards, something that Dessner has orchestrated so well over the years for The National. Dessner also makes careful lead guitar statements in his own unique style that add an interesting contrast to the band’s sound. But some of his devices, like his loop-like guitar parts or protracted dissonances through chord changes, drain the band’s energy like a nagging spouse.

Then there are the guest spots. Mumford & Sons are a big deal. We remember. Trotting out the 2010s icons, Chris Stapleton and Hozier, is hardly necessary, especially given that their vocal contributions amount to little more than a slightly different coloring of Mumford’s dark, husky voice. Using female vocalists, Gigi Perez and Gracie Abrams might have fared better, but the songs lose the tone of the album. Particularly, “Badlands” sounds like it could have been an outtake from The National’s I Am Easy to Find.

When Mumford & Sons hit it big over fifteen years ago, they did more than just launch themselves to fame and fortune. They created a whole aesthetic of acoustic music that has been copied and done to death. Contemporary Christian music practically co-opted their sound overnight. Even so, it’s still the case that no one pulls off their sound as they do. The last two releases show that Mumford & Sons still have the creative spark in spades, but it serves them better when they don’t tinker with it.

Christopher Raley