“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.
The band’s party trick is reflected here in rootsy production by Dave Cobb (known for his work with country and Americana stars including Chris Stapleton, John Prine and Brandi Carlile), along with the album’s packaging. Rushmere is an ancient pond on London’s Wimbledon Common where the band members used to hang out in their pre-fame days: ye olde cosy England. Vinyl copies, however, yawp wide to reveal a large black and white photograph of a much bigger, unnamed body of water in the US.
They’re at it from the off, with opener “Malibu” gradually building from the hushed expressions of “doubt” and “weakness” over muffled guitar strings to expansive, drum-bolstered and banjo-gilded declarations of love: “You are all I want, you’re all I need!” The son of evangelical church leaders, Mumford has always used a holy model to offer up his whispered worries; here he sings of feeling “a spirit move in me again”. They canter on from there into the exhilarating “Caroline” which nods to Fleetwood Mac with its title, its high stakes romantic drama and urging to “go your own way”. Glass is broken. Accusations are thrown (“You can say you’re a saviour/ But I know you’re a fraud”) but somehow Mumford manages to maintain a tone of steady sincerity.
Elsewhere on the album – recorded partly in Devon but also in Nashville and at Cobb’s home in Savannah, Georgia – the band lean into Americana that suits their holy-rolling emotional tone. Standout song “Truth” is driven by a ragged tumble of a blues riff; Mumford’s raw vocals summon fire while his bandmates lay down soothing AM-retro backing vocals like blankets on dusty desert ground. Slower moments come with the delicate wash of “Anchor” (with the singer lamenting a life “on the run”) and “Monochrome”, a prettily finger-picked, piano-sprinkled track with a Beatles “Blackbird” lilt. Cobb is a massive, memorabilia-collecting superfan of the Fab Four, and seemingly couldn’t wait to coax a little of that heritage out of the first British band he’s worked with.
No wheels have been reinvented on Rushmere. But it’s a solidly crafted and comforting addition to the band's earthy, fraternal oeuvre. As Mumford sings on “Blood on the Page”, sometimes we all need a little “stillness in the chaos”. Or, in their case, an excuse for a few more arena-sized campfire singalongs.
