| Los AngeLes, CA — Edgar Allan Poewas paid nine dollars for “The Raven.” Across his entire career, by the Poe Society of Baltimore’s accounting, he earned roughly $6,200. In 2025, MC Lars raised $29,917 from 385 people to make an album about him.
Poe would have found this either vindicating or infuriating. Probably both. He was like that.
OnOctober 16, 2026, Oglio Recordsreleases the One Year Anniversary Edition of The Edgar Allan Poe LP, one year after MC Lars delivered the record to his Kickstarter backers on Halloween 2025. The campaign finished at roughly 598 percent of its $5,000 goal, a figure this publicist is professionally obligated to set in bold.
The album is executive produced by Adam F. Goldberg, creator of The Goldbergs, which is the sort of credit a press release usually buries in paragraph nine. We have moved it up.
The One Year Anniversary Edition expands the original twelve tracks with seven bonus recordings, including three new 2026 versions and four songs from the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe EP, among them the Dead Milkmencollaboration “Mr. Raven” (2012) and a 2026 update of that song featuring Chicago’s Gosh Diggity. Nineteen tracks total. Guests across the record include Jaret Reddick of Bowling for Soup, longtime MC Lars collaborator Watt White, Mega Ran, Rodney Anonymous, Schäffer the Darklord, Lacey Johnson, Ash Tell Em, Christina Rotondo and Worm Quartet. The record also enlists underground prank call legends Longmont Potion Castleand Brad Carterof Phone Losers of America, who both turn up on “$3.47.”
The lead and only single, a new 2026 version of “Amontillado” featuring Watt White,arrives October 2. One single. Not a “single moment,” not a “campaign moment,” not a “pre-save activation.” A song, released before the album, so people hear it first.
The part where we explain why this artist is different, except it is checkable
Every press release claims its artist is important. Almost none of them can prove it. The music industry runs on adjectives: acclaimed, seminal, boundary-pushing, essential. These words survive because nobody has ever been asked to produce evidence for them.
MC Lars produced evidence.
In December 2023 he completed a master’s degree in Instructional Science and Technology, and his capstone was not a think piece. It was a controlled study. He built a curriculum module teaching poetry through rap, ran it with actual students, and measured the results with actual statistics, including a Bonferroni correction, which is a thing you apply when you are worried about fooling yourself. Students’ attitudes toward poetry improved. Their retention of the material improved. Both results were statistically significant, with effect sizes that would make a pharmaceutical company nervous.
So when this release says MC Lars makes literature stick, that is not a boast. It is a finding, with a methodology section. He did not invent lit-hop. The term predates him, traced variously to Wayde Compton and to novelist Adam Mansbach, and Baba Brinkman had already built a body of work under the name, including a 2006 album called Lit-hop. What MC Lars did was popularize it, carry it into classrooms, and put it in front of enough people that the term now appears in the Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop. A lesser press release would have quietly promoted him to inventor. He asked us not to. He has been rapping about Poe since “Mr. Raven” in the mid-2000s, released The Edgar Allan Poe EP in 2012, and performed “Flow Like Poe” at Carnegie Hall with a live string ensemble for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. He gave a TEDxUSC talk connecting Tupac’s death to the final act of Hamlet.
A graduate of Stanford and Oxford, he coined “iGeneration” in a 2003 song, a usage ASCAP credited as an early instance. He charted in the Australian Top 30 with “Download This Song,” an anti-RIAA record he made while signed to a label, which the label released anyway. He has toured with Nas, Snoop Dogg, Bowling for Soup, Simple Plan and the Vans Warped Tour, and put out early K.Flayrecords before Interscope found her.
He is also a pioneer of nerdcore, the mid-2000s phenomenon that reached its highest cultural honor in 2016, when a Jeopardy! contestant explained the genre to Alex Trebek and he replied, “Losers, in other words.” Mega Ran, who appears on this album, answered with a freestyle. The scene has never entirely recovered, nor has it especially tried.
The Oglio release also closes a loop. The label was founded in 1993 by Carl Caprioglio and previously put out MC Lars’s This Gigantic Robot Kills and 21 Concepts (But a Hit Ain’t One). Its roster over three decades has run from Brian Wilson, whose Live at the Roxy TheatreOglio has kept in print and expanded for a 25th anniversary edition, to Nerf Herder, Barnes & Barnes and Wesley Willis. Horris Records, the label Lars founded in 2004, began as an imprint under Nettwerk and Oglio before going independent. Twenty-two years later the Poe record walks back through the same door, which in this industry counts as a happy ending.
“I’ve been rapping about Poe since before I had any business doing it,”says MC Lars. “The EP was a sketch. This is the actual building. A year ago I sent it to 385 people who paid for it before it existed, which is the most Poe thing imaginable, except henever got the money.”
“I went and got a master’s degree to prove that teaching poetry through rap actually works, because I got tired of people calling it a gimmick. It turns out you can just measure it.”
“I want a kid to hear this record, get obsessed with ‘The Raven,’ and not realize until later that they did their homework.”
MC Lars performs at theGathering of the Juggalos in August, several weeks before presenting a lit-hop project with Stanford University’s English Department and its Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Both are true simultaneously, which tells you most of what you need to know about the audience for this record.
Pre-order here: https://link.content360.io/MC_Lars
TRACK LISTING
DISC 1
- Who Killed Edgar Allan Poe? — 2:16
- Victorian Drip — 2:24
- Amontillado featuring Lacey Johnson — 3:29
- OG Gothic Poet featuring Rodney Anonymous and R2 the Specialist— 4:44
- The Devil’s in the Belfry featuring Christina Rotondo and Worm Quartet — 3:20
- Fatal Pattern featuring Schäffer the Darklord and Brad Carter/Phone Losers of America — 2:29
- Wiggle Wiggle Worm featuring Dory-Loup— 2:56
- The Black Cat Came Back featuring Ash Tell Em— 4:35
- The (Slightly Less) Abridged Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucketfeaturing Somos Animales — 4:30
- $3.47 featuring Schäffer the Darklord, Ash Tell Em, Brad Carter/Phone Losers of America and Longmont Potion Castle — 5:34
- A Dream Within a Dream featuring Ash Tell Em, Christina Rotondo and Liliia Kysil — 5:14
- 99 Ways to Die in a Poem — 4:34
DISC 2
- Amontillado (2026) featuring Watt White— 3:37
- Wiggle Wiggle Worm (2026) featuring Jaret Reddick— 3:08
- Mr. Raven (2026) featuring Gosh Diggity— 3:41
- Flow Like Poe — 4:05
- The Tell-Tale <3 featuring Mega Ran — 3:22
- Lenore (I Miss You) — 3:30
- Mr. Raven (2012) featuring The Dead Milkmen — 3:12
The Edgar Allan Poe LP (Special One Year Anniversary Deluxe Expanded Edition) arrives digitally and on two-disc CD October 16, 2026, via Oglio Records.
Digital UPC: 790058918265
Physical CD UPC: 790058918227
UPCOMING SHOWS
August 19, 2026 — Macks Creek, MO — Gathering of the Juggalos 2026 with Insane Clown Posse, Vanilla Ice and more
September 7, 2026 — Seattle, WA— @ Barboza with Optimus Rhyme and Beefy
September 12, 2026 — Hampton, VA — Supernova International Ska Festival 2026with Suburban Legends, The Planet Smashers, The Impossibles, Eastern Standard Time, Susan Cadogan, Jackie Mendez, Blake Rules, Catbite, The Boy Detective and more
October 3, 2026 — Syracuse, NY— Official Retro Gamer Con Afterpartywith Schaffer the Darklord
October 10, 2026 — Kingston, NY— O+ Festival 2026 with Lucero, Matt Pond PAand more
Tickets available here. |
