Why Mumford & Sons’ “Prizefighter” Is Their Messiest, Most Interesting Reinvention Yet
Mumford & Sons Step Back Into the Ring with Prizefighter
Mumford & Sons’ new album Prizefighter lands them back in the cultural crosshairs: a band that sells out arenas, but still fights for critical respect. In Hannah Jocelyn’s review for Pitchfork, the record comes across as both a bold swing and a bit of a stumble—a late-career pivot where big, self-conscious ideas meet the band’s old stadium instincts.
This review digs into how Prizefighter plays as an album, what Jocelyn praises and critiques, and what it all means for a group that’s already rebranded itself more times than most bands get debut singles.
From Banjo Anthems to Critical Aspirations: The Road to Prizefighter
It’s easy to forget just how dominant Mumford & Sons once were. Sigh No More and Babel turned hyper-literate, stomping folk-rock into Top 40 fodder, inspiring a wave of suspenders-and-boot-stomp bands that flooded festival lineups for years. Then came the backlash: critics rolled their eyes at the earnest crescendos and Biblical allusions, while the band’s sound became shorthand for Spotify-core blandness.
Since then, Mumford & Sons have basically treated every album like an escape route. They’ve ditched the banjo, embraced electric rock, flirted with more atmospheric textures, and stacked their résumé with prestige co-signs—singing with Bob Dylan, name-dropping classic literature, stepping further away from the “Hey!”-chant caricature that once made them unavoidable.
Jocelyn’s Pitchfork review positions Prizefighter as another chapter in that ongoing reinvention: an album where the band wants to be taken seriously by the same critical establishment that long dismissed them, even as they still write with arena sing-alongs in mind.
What Hannah Jocelyn Hears on Prizefighter
Jocelyn’s review frames Prizefighter as an album animated by insecurity as much as ambition. Mumford & Sons might be commercial veterans, but they still write like artists who feel misunderstood—hence the album’s title, with its imagery of a battered contender trying to prove everyone wrong.
Across the record, Jocelyn notes, the band cycles through familiar strategies for “serious” rock albums: grand thematic gestures, references to literature and myth, a sense of cohesion that sometimes feels imposed rather than organic. At the same time, the band can’t quite resist their old habits—towering hooks, emotionally obvious punch lines, and choruses that might as well come pre-installed on festival LED screens.
Mumford & Sons have achieved massive success, but they’re still desperate for respect. They’ve drawn from classic literature, sung with Bob Dylan, and reinvented their sound multiple times, and none of it has quite shaken the sense that they’re fighting a losing battle against their own reputation. — Paraphrasing the core argument of Hannah Jocelyn’s Pitchfork review
That tension—between the desire for respect and the instincts of a populist band—becomes the central drama of Prizefighter as Jocelyn hears it.
The Sound of Prizefighter: Between Arena Folk and Art-Rock Ambition
Musically, Prizefighter is less about radical reinvention than about strategic recalibration. Jocelyn highlights how the band leans into moody textures, layered guitars, and a more spacious mix—sonic signifiers of “serious rock” that nod toward bands like The National, Elbow, or Coldplay in their Viva la Vida era.
- Rhythms: Less hoe-down stomp, more mid-tempo sway and clipped grooves.
- Instrumentation: Keyboards and atmospheric guitars nudge the banjo further into the background, if it shows up at all.
- Dynamics: Instead of the old quiet-loud explosion formula, more songs simmer, though the band still can’t resist a few old-school crescendos.
Jocelyn suggests that while these choices help Mumford & Sons sound more contemporary, they sometimes feel like genre cosplay: gestures borrowed from more critically beloved bands without the same lyrical subtlety or conceptual discipline.
Lyrics, Themes, and the “Respect” Question
Thematically, Prizefighter is loaded with metaphor: boxers and battles, faith and doubt, the weight of legacy. It’s very much a “capital-A Album” in how it wants to be read—a cohesive statement about endurance and reinvention.
Jocelyn’s main critique is that the lyrics often strain for profundity. The references to literature and mythology feel less like organic obsessions and more like carefully chosen signifiers, the musical equivalent of leaving a battered copy of Blood Meridian face-up on your coffee table.
Mumford & Sons keep telling us how much they’ve grown, how much they’ve suffered, how hard they’re fighting. The problem is that the songs are more convincing when they stop insisting and just let themselves be huge, messy, and oddly moving. — Critical sentiment echoing Jocelyn’s perspective
Where the album works best, in Jocelyn’s view, is when the band loosens its grip a bit—when the writing leans into direct emotions and slightly awkward sincerity instead of trying to pass a literary exam.
Standout Tracks and Awkward Misses
Jocelyn’s review singles out a few moments where Prizefighter justifies its ambition, and a few where it buckles under its own conceptual weight.
Highlights
- Title track “Prizefighter” – A mission statement that actually earns its drama, with a chorus built for late-night festival sets and verses that frame struggle without over-explaining it.
- Mid-album slow-burner – Jocelyn notes one of the quieter tracks as a rare moment of restraint, letting atmosphere and subtext do more work than usual for the band.
- A closing track – The finale is praised for sounding less calculated and more lived-in, like the band momentarily forgets the critics and just writes from muscle memory.
Weaker Cuts
- Overstuffed anthems – A couple of songs try to cram in every version of Mumford & Sons at once: folk stomp, rock swell, art-rock brooding, all fighting for space.
- On-the-nose ballads – Jocelyn flags tracks where the metaphors become clunky and the emotional beats feel pre-programmed.
Where Prizefighter Sits in 2020s Rock Culture
Part of why Jocelyn’s review resonates is that Prizefighter isn’t just about Mumford & Sons; it’s about what it means to be a big, earnest guitar band in the 2020s. The streaming era favors micro-scenes and hyper-specific aesthetics, while rock’s old gatekeepers have lost some of their power but not their prestige.
In that context, Prizefighter feels like an artifact of a previous era trying to adapt in real time. The band is too big to become a cult act, too self-serious to fully embrace their reputation as crowd-pleasing cornballs, and too self-aware to pretend the discourse doesn’t exist.
Jocelyn’s criticism lands hardest when she implies that the band might be better off accepting their role: writing enormous, unembarrassed songs that don’t need critical approval as a validation stamp. The album’s best songs hint that Mumford & Sons already know this—they just haven’t fully committed to it.
Verdict: A Flawed but Fascinating Late-Career Swing
Jocelyn’s Pitchfork review ultimately paints Prizefighter as an album that’s more intriguing than it is fully successful. It’s messy, sometimes overbearing, and undeniably self-conscious—but that very messiness is part of its appeal. This isn’t a band coasting; it’s a band overthinking, overreaching, and occasionally stumbling into real power.
For casual listeners, Prizefighter will likely deliver exactly what Mumford & Sons have always promised: big choruses, emotional bluntness, and a sense of catharsis. For critics and long-time skeptics, the record offers plenty to pick apart, but also a surprising amount to admire in its refusal to just stand still.
If anything, Jocelyn’s review suggests that Prizefighter might age better than it first appears—not as a flawless reinvention, but as a revealing snapshot of a massive band trying to figure out who they are when the cultural script has moved on.
For full context, you can read Hannah Jocelyn’s original review at Pitchfork’s official site, and explore the band’s film and TV credits on IMDb.
