MUMFORD & SONS - Prizefighter

Let's start from further back. 2020. Marcus Mumford sings, uncredited, a duet with Taylor Swift, “Cowboy Like Me”, on “Evermore”, one of the two pandemic-era albums recorded by the American singer-songwriter. It's a song that Mumford & Sons now love to play live often. Master of ceremonies Aaron Dessner was present back then as producer, and six years later he's once again behind the desk overseeing (as co-producer and co-writer of all 14 tracks) the sessions that led to “Prizefighter”, the sixth album by Mumford & Sons. Meanwhile the circle of friends keeps growing, and Dessner, who has also recently produced the upcoming 2026 record by Gracie Abrams (an artist Swift admires so much she had her open several Eras Tour dates and even co-wrote a song with her, “us.”), acts as a matchmaker for another introspective duet, this time between Mumford & Sons and Abrams, adding further weight to a record that lines up plenty of other duets too: with Chris Stapleton, Hozier, Gigi Perez, and the uncredited (on the title track) Bon Iver.

So this is very much a collective effort, a huge deployment of talent in which Dessner's hand is felt decisively in the shaping of the sound, thanks to a minimalism and an essentialism that Mumford & Sons had never displayed so clearly before. It's a pop-folk record constantly balanced between indie leanings and mainstream ambitions, starting from solid alt-country refractions (including a programmatically titled “The Banjo Song”), before drifting into soul territory (“Icarus”) and into the cottage-folk imagery that Swift and Dessner themselves stamped on “Folklore” (the superb “Alleycat”).
At times “Prizefighter” tends to flatten out a little on itself, especially toward the end, when it's the subtle string work that keeps the album from fizzling out; things fare much better on the tracks built around greater dynamics, leaning on richly emphatic choruses, as with the luminous “Begin Again” and “Stay”, crafted in the most classically Mumford & Sons style.

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06/07/2026