Aesop Rock and Blockhead released the trouble mountain album on November 13, 2026, a 17 track, 61 minute project on Rhymesayers Entertainment. It is Aesop Rock’s 13th studio album and only his second full length made entirely with Blockhead, after 2021’s Garbology.
The pair have worked together for nearly three decades, and the new record builds its whole world around one image: a fictional mountain resort, inspired by the Poconos getaway commercials that saturated their New York childhoods, as the official Rhymesayers listing describes it.
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Trouble Mountain album tracklist
1. Swedish Death Cleaning
2. Coyote Summer (feat. Hanni El Khatib)
3. Church Key
4. Easter
5. Hound Selector
6. TM Tours (feat. Baby Dayliner)
7. Trouble Trouble
8. Mom One
9. One Thing (feat. Open Mike Eagle)
10. Ants
11. Oatmeal
12. No Interviews
13. The Bag
14. Eat and Grow (feat. Cavalier & 4-IZE)
15. Ewok
16. High and Outside
17. Buffering
Three songs arrived before the album, each with a video: Coyote Summer, Trouble Trouble, and Ants, which was shared on November 12, the day before release. The Trouble Trouble video, animated by longtime visual collaborator Justin Coro Kaufman, is embedded here.
A resort that is really about baggage
The concept is a joke with a serious centre. TM Tours is a tourism jingle for the fictional lodge, sung by Baby Dayliner, while Trouble Trouble, at track 7, frames the mountain itself as the heap of trouble a life accumulates. Early reviews have picked up on exactly that split between the resort packaging and the weight underneath it.
Welcome to Trouble Mountain, a ski resort of psychedelic proportions.
That is Glide Magazine, whose review calls the record a spellbinding concept album where fantasy seeps into reality. Rombo Magazine’s review points listeners first to Trouble Trouble and Hound Selector, and singles out Mom One, a straight faced tribute to a mother’s handwriting imagined as graffiti.
Three singles, three videos
The rollout treated the visuals as part of the album. Coyote Summer, the Hanni El Khatib collaboration at track 2, arrived with a video directed by Evan Gütt that catches glimpses of Aesop Rock while dodging a full face reveal. Ants, shared November 12, is animated by Kaufman, the same hand behind Trouble Trouble. The opener, Swedish Death Cleaning, sets the album’s method in miniature: an everyday ritual turned into a dense, funny, slightly unsettling inventory of a life.
Formats and the long partnership
The album is out on streaming, vinyl, CD and cassette. The deluxe vinyl edition on Aesop Rock’s official store expands it to a 4xLP box set carrying the full album plus all 17 instrumentals, which turns Blockhead’s production into a second listen of its own.
That second listen is the point of this partnership. Blockhead’s sample heavy, mid tempo production gives Aesop Rock’s dense writing a steady floor to stand on, and Trouble Mountain is the most fully built world the two have made together. Five years after Garbology, the reunion was worth the wait.
