Austin’s Obscure Animals have written a ghost story in which dying turns out to be the best thing that ever happens to the main character. Their new album, “The Unexpected Tragedy of the House in Montgomery“, brings together Midwest emo, alternative rock and those rough, slower riffs you’d associate with 90s post–hardcore.
Across ten songs, we follow Stanley Monroe, a miserable loner who spends his life pushing people away, dies, gets stuck in his own house and somehow ends up happier than he’s ever been. Of course, there’s a catch. And it’s a pretty heartbreaking one.
The whole thing has been kicking around in the band’s heads for close to two years. Singer and guitarist JR Kaufman wrote a separate short story to go with the record, with characters, conversations and little details that explain what happens between the songs. At the centre is a fairly simple human story about loneliness, friendship and somebody finally learning how to let other people into his life. Stanley just happens to learn that lesson after he’s dead.
The album has a real warmth to it, too. The guitars can get heavy and abrasive, with that slower, slightly scruffy post-hardcore feel, but there’s plenty of emo melody in the mix. The alternative rock side gives the songs room to breathe, and the whole combination sits nicely with the sadness running through the story. Particularly once you get to know Stanley and realise how much the people around him have come to mean.
Funny enough, none of this was supposed to become such a big undertaking.
Back in July or August 2024, guitarist David Menendez suggested doing a quick Halloween song for fun. They worked out the initial riff for “This House Ain’t Clean” together and recorded about 30 seconds of scratch audio, hoping to have the whole thing ready within a few weeks.
Then their recording equipment didn’t arrive in time.
Halloween passed, the song wasn’t finished, and JR made a joke about turning the whole thing into an album.
“I was literally joking when I said it, but once I started, the whole thing just came out.”
At the time, Obscure Animals were concentrating on their second album, “The Dismissive Acknowledgement of A Mutual Existence”. Those songs were the priority, and the Halloween idea had to find its place around that work. “This House Ain’t Clean” eventually came out for Halloween 2025, with another EP initially planned to follow.
But JR had been busy with what the band were calling “The Spooktacular”, and the more they went through their ideas for the EP, the more sense it made to concentrate on that instead.
David still seems slightly amused by how far the whole thing went. He’d suggested writing something spooky, they had a tiny bit of music to work with, and several months later JR was bringing in a complete album outline, a story and ideas for connecting everything they’d already recorded.
There was already a decent pile of unfinished stuff to work from. The band write together, with David coming up with plenty of riffs and demos, while JR spends time pulling those ideas apart, rearranging sections and working out how they could fit into songs.
David is quite happy to admit that naming things isn’t his speciality.
“Personally, all I know how to do is write riffs.”
Sometimes he’ll record something at home and give it a working title based on whatever happens to be in the room. “poster” and “apollo” were two such names, and both eventually became songs the band released. JR has a habit of treating even those throwaway titles as little challenges, convinced there’s something buried in David’s ideas worth following.
For Montgomery, that process went both ways. Some parts of the story were already written and needed the right music. Other songs existed first and gave JR ideas for what might happen next. “Ghost Town” and “Guiding Light” were already in their collection, along with plenty of riffs and unfinished arrangements.
“I knew what I needed and I knew I’d find it in our ideas folder.”
“Panoramic Paranoia” happened while JR was trying to learn “In The End, It Was Our End” and accidentally came up with another piece of music. He already had the relevant bit of Stanley’s story written, but hadn’t found a song for it. “A Bridge, Abridged” came together through a similarly accidental, apparently rather funny bit of writing.
And that song gave the fictional town its name.
Montgomery doesn’t exist, at least not as the specific place in this story. JR needed something that would fit naturally into the lyrics, so he came up with a name without spending much time thinking about it.
“It’s meant to represent Anywhere, USA – those small towns you pass through on a long road trip where you decided to skip the interstates.”
Once he had Montgomery and Stanley Monroe, the rest began falling into place.
Stanley’s the sort of person everybody in a small town knows by sight, but hardly anybody actually knows. He’s lived in Montgomery for years, doesn’t care much for company and spends most evenings sitting at the local bar, quietly watching what everyone else is doing.
He’s grumpy, suspicious and often downright rude, though he’s never looking to hurt anybody. Most of the people who knew him properly have either died or moved away, and Stanley has got very good at keeping everyone else out.
He’s recently received a sizeable inheritance, too. Enough money to keep living the way he likes, though hardly enough to become rich. News has travelled around town, and he suspects that people suddenly taking an interest in him might have their own reasons. Every friendly knock on the door is another reason to be suspicious.
A new neighbour, Elisa Walsh, has just moved in two blocks away, with a large park separating their homes. She’s an exorcist, though nobody in Montgomery knows that, and her work involves helping spirits trapped in the circumstances of their deaths.
When she walks up to Stanley’s old house to introduce herself, she immediately senses an enormous number of souls inside.
She knocks. Stanley opens the door just far enough for the chain to stop it, gives her a hostile welcome and slams it shut before she can properly introduce herself.
Elisa still leaves him with an offer to talk if he ever wants to.
The house is already a pretty miserable place, full of creaking stairs, leaky pipes and an unsettling presence Stanley has learnt to live with. Most nights he comes home from the bar, crosses the bridge over the river, locks himself inside and checks the windows for anybody who might have followed him.
Lately he’s been convinced somebody is watching him.
One night, after a few too many drinks, that fear proves justified. Halfway across the bridge, a robber rushes him and demands his wallet. Stanley fights back, feels a sudden terrible pain in his stomach and falls over the railing into the water.
When he wakes up, he’s back in his own house.
He can’t quite remember how he got there.
“A Bridge, Abridged” tells the story of the attack, leaving Stanley with bits and pieces of what happened and very little idea of what to make of it. The song also establishes Montgomery itself, a quiet town with a few shops, groceries and bars, where the evening crowd gathering for a drink is about as exciting as life gets.
A police officer soon comes knocking to check on Stanley after reports of an assault near the bridge. Stanley refuses to answer. He’s already convinced somebody might be trying to get him, and he wants as little attention as possible.
Elisa happens to turn up and tells the officer that she arranged to meet Stanley in town for coffee. The officer leaves, and she presses her hand against the door and quietly apologises to Stanley.
He’s listening from inside, of course. Still too stubborn to say anything.
Over the following days and weeks, his paranoia gets worse. He stops going out, keeps the porch light off, hides his keys and watches the street through the blinds. He’s waiting for the news to tell him the attacker has been caught.
“Panoramic Paranoia” follows that nervous routine, while “This House Ain’t Clean” takes things somewhere considerably stranger.
There are voices in the hallways, drafts coming through closed windows and chandeliers swinging for no obvious reason. The lights start flickering so wildly that Stanley assumes there’s a storm outside, but when he looks through the window, the night is completely calm.
At one point he sees blood running down the walls.
He’s convinced he’s losing his mind.
Eventually he catches sight of somebody standing in the hallway, and when he confronts the figure, they explain that the other spirits have just been messing with him. Stanley’s new to all this.
New to being dead, that is.
He isn’t having any of it.
In “Skepticism is for Skeptics“, Stanley insists that he’s alive, that the stranger is trespassing and that the whole thing is some elaborate attempt to drive him mad. He reaches for his phone to call the police, only to discover that he can’t find it. The landline doesn’t work either.
The spirit suggests a test. All Stanley has to do is walk outside, reach the bridge and come back.
He storms out of the house, fully expecting to prove the stranger wrong, and somehow finds himself back at the front door. He tries again, running this time, and crashes straight into the door.
He’s stuck on the property. There’s no getting away.
“Denial” deals with the days that follow. Stanley tries to convince himself that he’s dreaming, that his heart must still be beating somewhere, that he’ll wake up eventually. He can’t feel a heartbeat at all.
Then comes the thought that maybe his old life wasn’t much to miss anyway.
“Come to think of it / It’s not like I was leading / Any life / Worth living.”
The spirit who has been trying to help him eventually introduces herself as Em. She tells him there are others in the house, that he doesn’t have to deal with everything alone and that he can call for her whenever he’s ready.
Stanley sits by the door for days, thinking. He watches the sunlight move across the floor through the blinds and tries to get his head around the fact that he’s dead.
Then, finally, he calls out to Em.
She comes back, and over the following weeks, he gradually gets used to his new existence. The other ghosts begin showing themselves too, cautiously at first. Stanley has spent years being horrible to anyone who approaches him, and even the dead need a little time to get comfortable around him.
But things change.
He starts talking to them, learning from them and getting curious about how everything works. He discovers he can float through the house, although he still occasionally takes the stairs because they remind him of being alive. His usual grumpy responses start giving way to ordinary conversations.
And before long, the whole house has become something close to a family.
Em has been there much longer than Stanley. She knew him before he knew her, and she understands his stubbornness better than he realises. She’s been through her own version of the same experience, and she knows that beneath his bad temper is somebody who’s scared of admitting he needs help.
One day, she notices him smiling.
“It looks good on you,” she tells him.
He’s confused until she explains what she means.
“Your smile.”
Stanley gets embarrassed and struggles to thank her properly. It’s the kind of conversation he would probably have avoided completely while he was alive.
But this time he manages it. In JR’s story, he tells Em how much she and the others have helped him.
“For the first time in my life, I feel like I belong. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
He quickly adds that he means all of them, hoping to make the moment a little less personal.
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It’s a lovely little scene, and “Ghost Town” carries that happiness into the album with the repeated line:
“For the first time in my life / I feel I belong.”
Patrick Shea, David and Jesse Blankenship chose “Ghost Town” as the final single ahead of the album, releasing it on 9 October. JR didn’t vote himself, though he agreed it was the obvious choice.
“It’s just a fun song and probably the only kind of happy moment on the album.”
There’s also a reason Stanley’s story has become so personal to JR.
He admits the character is an odd, almost reversed version of himself. There are things they have in common, particularly in how they protect themselves around other people, though the methods are different.
“Stanley uses harshness as a common defense to protect himself. He doesn’t want to be alone. I use humor instead.”
JR doesn’t go into every detail of where that comes from. He’s fairly open about Em, though, and the unexpected relationship that inspired her place in the story.
“In this story, an unexpected love from the most unlikely of places. Coincidental meeting, in a way. Not so different from my own life.”
That explains a lot about the tenderness in “Ghost Town” and why the ending hurts so much. Stanley has spent his whole life wanting company while doing everything he can to keep it away. Now he’s finally found people who care about him, and he actually knows how to show that he cares about them.
There’s one more lovely detail before everything goes wrong.
“Apparition’s Rejoice“, the interlude between “Ghost Town” and “Guiding Light”, takes us back to the bar Stanley used to visit every night.
Back when he was alive, a popular, confident bloke would sit at the piano around closing time and start playing. Everyone would join in, finishing their drinks and singing along. Stanley always enjoyed listening, even though he pretended it got on his nerves. He’d quietly slip out before they finished.
He never joined in himself.
Now that he’s dead, with his friends around him, Stanley gets to be the confident person sitting at that piano. He’s the one leading the singing, enjoying the company and taking part in something he used to watch from a distance.
The song also brings back a little phrase we’ve heard since the opening of the album.
“I’m a simple man, never hurt no one.”
“Antagonist’s Approach” begins with that communal singing, alongside the sounds of Stanley’s attacker approaching the bar. The door opening marks Stanley leaving for his final walk home.
By “Apparition’s Rejoice“, the words belong to a completely different moment in his existence. He’s finally singing along with everyone else.
JR had a very particular scene in mind for the interlude.
“This album plays like a movie in my mind.”
The happy gathering gradually gives way to unease. Something begins swelling beneath the singing until it becomes impossible to ignore, and the music ends with three enormous knocks.
Elisa is back.
She still believes the house is full of trapped souls who need her help. When she approaches Stanley’s door, she knows he’s still there and tries to explain what she’s going to do.
Stanley remembers how rudely he treated her before his death, and how she helped get the police officer away from his house. He regrets being so hostile. But there’s hardly any time to think about that now.
Elisa starts the exorcism.
The house begins shaking, papers fly through the rooms, and her voice becomes so loud that Stanley can’t hear Em shouting for him to move away from the door. A bright opening appears above the gathered spirits, and some begin floating towards it.
Stanley understands what’s happening and panics.
In “Guiding Light“, he tries to warn the others about the exorcist and begs them to resist the pull.
“Some of us don’t want to leave / We never asked / To be released.”
He’s terrified of being alone again, and he can’t bear the thought of losing everyone.
But Elisa has reasons for doing what she’s doing. She’s spent her life helping spirits escape the terrible circumstances in which they’ve become trapped. Some of the ghosts in Stanley’s house really do want to move on. They’ve been there so long that they’ve almost forgotten the pain that brought them there in the first place.
Em wants to go as well.
JR wanted the final part of the story to play out like a car crash, with everyone acting on what they believe to be the right decision and everything going horribly wrong in a matter of seconds.
“The interesting thing about this part of the story is, there are no villains. It was a literal tragedy due to the inability to convey desire in a way that all parties could understand.”
Elisa misunderstands what Stanley and the others need. Stanley, meanwhile, has got it into his head that everybody is being taken away against their will.
Em is already rising towards the light when he runs over and grabs her hand. He pulls as hard as he can, desperate to stop her leaving.
She looks at him and tells him to let go.
Stanley thinks she’s asking him to release her hand. He believes she’s chosen to leave without him, and that all he can do is accept it.
What she actually means is that he should stop resisting the exorcism and come with her.
He loosens his grip.
Em immediately realises what he’s misunderstood. She starts to correct him, but the portal shuts before she can finish.
And that’s it.
Stanley falls to the floor, completely drained, and everybody he has come to love is gone.
The closing song, officially titled “In The End, It Was Our End”, was written with that exact moment in mind. JR imagined Stanley collapsing as the portal slammed shut, almost in slow motion, with the two lead guitars carrying a long, sad passage through the outro.
In his head, he’s looking down at Stanley lying on the floor, trying to understand how everything has disappeared so quickly.
Outside the house, Elisa believes she’s succeeded. Stanley has been left so weak that she can no longer sense him inside.
With tears in her eyes, she puts her hand against the door and says, “Rest well, Stanley.”
He tries to call after her.
“Wait… Don’t leave! I’m still here!”
She can’t hear him.
The closing lyrics return to the connections Stanley made after his death, and the fact that he only learnt how to live among other people when his life was already over.
He calls out to his friends, hoping one of them will give him a sign. Move the walls. Flicker the lights. Do something, anything, to show they’re still around.
Nothing happens.
Then the little song from the bar returns for the last time.
“I’m a simple man / Never hurt no one.”
JR imagined Stanley quietly singing it to himself, remembering all those people around the piano. He used to leave the bar early because he couldn’t bring himself to join in. Now he’d give anything to hear those voices again.
The album finishes with the words:
“Just passing through life / An apparition.”
It’s a sad ending, and JR had been working towards it almost from the beginning. The whole story exists in prose as well, written by him and reviewed alongside the album by the other members of Obscure Animals.
The band had originally imagined a fairly elaborate physical release that would incorporate the story, although those plans haven’t happened yet. JR still hopes they’ll eventually get to publish it that way.
“I believe the album can stand on its own, but I really do believe knowing the story makes it hit different.”
He’s spent nearly two years living with Stanley, Em and the rest of the characters, and he wants people to understand the record on that personal level. It’s easy enough to enjoy the rougher post-hardcore guitars and the emo side of the band on their own terms, but the story gives those little musical returns and changes in mood a lot to work with.
And once you know why that piano singalong keeps coming back, the final song is a tough one.
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“The Unexpected Tragedy of the House in Montgomery” is set for release on 16 October 2026, with the full album available on major streaming platforms. You can follow Obscure Animals through their official website, listen on Spotify and find their music on Bandcamp.
Stanley’s still in that house, though. He spent his whole life keeping people out, finally found a bunch of friends who wanted him around, and now he’s calling for them from an empty room.
