“Most of the songs on this record, you could play on an acoustic guitar around a campfire,” says Marcus Mumford of his first album with Mumford & Sons in seven years.
After the lo-fi confessional of his 2022 solo album, Self-Titled (on which he unpacked the fallout from sexual abuse he suffered as a child), fans might wonder if that means that his band’s fifth album, Rushmere, might be a more muted affair. Perhaps it’s an attempt to shuffle shyly back onto the stage after the band’s banjo player, Winston Marshall, quit following controversy around his support for Unmasked (Andy Ngo’s book decrying the leftist protest movement Antifa). But there’s no sidestepping into the spotlight here. Many of these new songs follow the old Mumford & Sons format, swelling from soft-strummed intimacy to open-armed, stadium-sized stomps.
