Mogwai Teases 30-Year Comp With Iggy Pop Team-Up

Mogwai is celebrating three decades of noise with Happy Tears, a new career-spanning compilation arriving Jan. 8, 2027, via the band’s own Rock Action Records. The announcement comes with a suitably pulverizing new single, “Underground,” featuring Iggy Pop.

The collaboration brings together two generations of artists whose music has rarely played it safe. For Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite, the connection runs deep. In his book Spaceships Over Glasgow: Mogwai, Mayhem and Misspent Youth, Braithwaite describes discovering Pop and the Stooges as a formative experience.

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“Hearing the Stooges had been a life-changing moment for me,” he wrote. “Their self-titled album was pretty much my bible. It was druggy, dumb and completely primal. I’d never heard anything quite like it and even though that band had pretty much fallen apart by the time I was born, I grew to love the three Stooges albums as much as any music I’d heard. I had a VHS video of Iggy playing live and I watched it over and over. His performance was unlike anything or anyone I’d seen before. The spectacle was great but it was his voice and songs that really captured me.”

Pop, meanwhile, had a fairly specific reaction to “Underground.” “I’ve always liked Mogwai,” he says. “The opening of the track reminded me of the crushing modern loneliness. The sung vocal, which was arranged by Matt Sweeney, felt like it was made for someone who is pissed off and doesn’t mind saying so.”

Happy Tears arrives 30 years after Mogwai’s debut single, “Tuner,” and also marks three decades of Rock Action. The compilation pulls together highlights and rarities from across Mogwai’s catalog, including a previously digital-only single and a newly reworked version of “New Paths to Helicon 1.” That new version, titled “Brand New Paths to Helicon 1,” features the Budapest Art Orchestra and was orchestrated by Adam Wiltzie of A Winged Victory for the Sullen and Stars of the Lid.

The collection will be released in 2xLP, 4xLP, 2xCD and digital configurations. The expanded four-LP edition adds 13 tracks to the core collection, including six previously unreleased recordings, two remixes, two live tracks and three rarities.

Mogwai is also looking back on their history in a different format. The band has teamed with creative studio Cup & Nuzzle, whose work includes Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division and New Order, for Happy Tears: The Story of Mogwai, a feature-length audio documentary telling the band’s story in its own words. Narrated by Cup & Nuzzle founder and BBC 6 Music presenter Matt Everitt, the two-and-a-half-hour documentary will be released alongside the compilation and is available as part of the deluxe Happy Tears bundle or as a standalone download.

The compilation also arrives as Mogwai prepares to return to the road with European dates in November, including two hometown shows at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall.

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