Muchacho

Muchacho is Phosphorescent's sixth studio album. Houck wrote every track and produced it at home in Greenpoint, after the studio he had run in the Navy Yards area was lost to rezoning. He recorded the players one at a time, each in the studio for a day, and used older analog gear that he thought made the sound richer.

He said the opening and closing tracks were a deliberate attempt to have something ascending toward light at both ends. The album reached 59 on the US Billboard 200, 58 in the UK and 5 on the US folk chart. Metacritic gives it 85 out of 100 from 26 reviews, Pitchfork's Jayson Greene gave it 8.8, and Paste gave it 9.3. AllMusic's Fred Thomas heard some of Houck's best songwriting since his early days.

Pitchfork's Greene called it something close to a defining statement and thought it feels like a daylight version of Pride, a point underlined by the two hymnals that bookend it against Pride's Be Dark Night. He singled out the bowed harmonics that open A Charm / A Blade, the mariachi trumpet solo in Down to Go, and the stacked, keening layers of Houck's voice on Sun, Arise! and A New Anhedonia. The engineer John Agnello assisted on the sound. The US vinyl edition, catalogued DOC050 on Dead Oceans, is a gatefold LP that was released on 19 March 2013.