On his third LP, Tender Country, Thomas Csorba delves into the softer side of country music, eschewing rowdy barroom burners in favor of a more laid-back, emotional connection to life. The album’s title is fitting, considering the tenderness woven throughout these songs. That’s not to say Csorba is above singing a good drinking song, as evidenced by “Homemade Margaritas.” Only his version involves moving out to the patio and sharing drinks over a citronella candle, with one ear tuned to the sleeping baby inside.
Across ten subdued tracks, Csorba explores love, family, and the everyday emotions of life. Carried by fiddle and guitars, “Lived In” is a perfect example. Csorba describes an ordinary house, with glitter worked into the floorboards…
Category: country
…includes three bonus tracks: covers of Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time,” William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” and Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
“Johnny can do what he wants,” Sturgill Simpson told Uncut when his new alias debuted on 2024’s Passage Du Desir, which found him rolling through Paris streets “like a cork in a bottle” while listening to ‘70s soft rock and Serge Gainsbourg.
His first five albums proper had burned Nashville bridges during an odyssey through outlaw country, psychedelia, synths and Kentucky bluegrass, while tracing the five metaphysical phases of the Western soul.
Johnny Blue Skies blew this preordained cycle away. He feels more real this time round, not…
Americana singer-songwriter Caleb Caudle enters a significant new chapter with his seventh studio album, Heavy Thrill. Arriving at a time of profound personal and artistic transition, the record was created as Caudle and his wife prepared to welcome their first child. It also marks his first venture as a self-producer, giving the North Carolina native complete creative control over the project. Recorded at the legendary Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and later mixed by renowned engineer Jacquire King and mastered by Pete Lyman, the album reflects both growth and self-discovery.
Across its ten songs, Heavy Thrill explores themes of ageing, uncertainty, perseverance, and the feeling of being an outsider…
Brent Cobb is pulling the curtain back on the songwriting that has defined his career on his new acoustic album Live a Song, Write a Memory, Vol. 1.
Recorded at Capricorn Studios, the self-produced album captures every performance live and in a single take, and spans songs from across his catalog, including selections from the Grammy-nominated Shine on Rainy Day, fan favorites from Providence Canyon and No Place Left to Leave, and cuts made famous by other artists. Songs like “Come Home Soon” and “Country Bound” revisit defining moments in Cobb’s journey, while outside cuts like “Tailgate Blues” recorded by Luke Bryan and “Bar, Guitar and a Honky Tonk Crowd” by Whiskey Myers are brought back to the writer’s chair where they began.
Last year, the Red Clay Strays found themselves fully embraced by the country-music establishment, winning the CMA Award for Vocal Group of the Year. Chalk up their Nashville acceptance to the band’s Mobile, Alabama, roots, maybe, or the Southern drawl of chiseled lead singer Brandon Coleman. But on Grateful, the Strays’ third album, they reveal themselves to be not country’s next great group, but a bona fide rock & roll band. And a God-fearing one at that.
Reuniting with Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb, who oversaw the six-piece’s 2024 effort, Made by These Moments, the Strays deliver an urgent, timely record that stands toe to toe with anything coming out of the rock world. There are slippery slide-guitar jams about…
There’s nothing more country than rebelling against country music. Willie Nelson did it. Waylon Jennings did it. And today’s country music is so easy to hate, whether it’s the AI artists flooding the genre, or a new song from Luke Bryan so brain-numbingly awful it gives you an ice cream headache. Still, bitching about country music doesn’t make you a country music outlaw like Nelson or Jennings. What makes you an outlaw is actually doing something about it. For Nashville country singer Nathan Evans Fox that means a host of rebellions, both small and large. On his new album Heirloom, Fox opens small with “Lots of Beginnings,” a heartfelt, moving letter to his newborn child, voicing worries about bullies and about forgetting the family’s rural roots,…
Braxton Keith writes and sings about drinking, loving, losers, and other familiar classic country themes in a squeaky voice with a twang that sounds made for the juke box. He can convincingly act the fool and/or cry tears in his beer, depending on the song and the mood. The title of his new release, Real Damn Deal, suggests he’s the real deal, but his authenticity is purposely insincere. Keith understands the importance of a good façade. He understands there’s more truth in a good lie than in telling things straight.
The first-person narrators of his story songs claim to be patient, understanding, hurt, and ready for a good time, but their tales generally proclaim the opposite. Life’s funny that way. The man who brags, “I am running a few minutes…
On her latest effort, Villain Era, India Ramey digs deep into the past for influences and lands on an inspired mix of Wanda Jackson and Johnny Cash. To be fair, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cooler mix than the Queen of Rockabilly and the Man in Black for inspiration.
The album opener, “We Ride at Dawn,” starts things off strong with a clarion call for women to take action and is a song cloaked in a story about seeking revenge on bandits who came to town. Between the lines, however, it’s a song about women justifiably enraged and seeking revenge against men who strip them of their bodily autonomy. And it segues perfectly into the title track, with Ramey embracing her “villain era,” and opting out of being the perpetual…
Telecaster twang-master Bill Kirchen’s life template was stamped early when as a key member in the original Commander Cody & his Lost Planet Airmen outfit. For nearly a decade starting in 1967, Kirchen, Cody and an expansive, wildly talented lineup brought deep country, rockabilly, Western swing, and trucking songs, along with retro rock and roll to the young masses who might never have experienced this frantic music live. An early titled Hot Licks, Cold Steel & Truckers Favorites, describes their sound with typically wry humor.
The San Francisco-based group opened for many huge acts of the day including the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead, exposing their audiences to good time, bar band, retro-spirited rocking. “Hot Rod Lincoln,” their…
This may be Willie Nelson’s 79th solo studio album, and his 156th in all, but despite such prodigious and prolific writing, the Red Headed Stranger is still a minimalist in his 93rd year. Case in point: Dream Chaser’s 10 tracks clock in at half an hour, and they’re each as astute, funny and affecting as ever.
Title song and album opener “Dream Chaser” lasoos Bobby Tomberlin into the very well-oiled Cannon-Nelson writing team, for a sweet bout of lossless reflection, while “Fly Away”, penned by Cannon and Bobby Whitlock, is a sweet, spare heart-breaker. The more intimate, gravelly vocal of “We’d Make a Good Movie”, with it’s sad, witty chorus – classic Willie – sits well with his guitar Trigger’s grace notes, and his punctuations and runs throughout the whole set are as deft and as…
The Deslondes are a five-piece group from New Orleans, Louisiana. The band splits up songwriting and lead vocal duties among its five members, continuing its democratic ethos and musical versatility.
Now, with their latest record, Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1, the band continues to build on their inventive take on New Orleans country and R&B by covering some of their favorite songs that have inspired their sound and love of music. Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1 finds the band covering select songs from artist such as Swamp Dogg, Johnny Cash, Pat Reedy and Hurricane Smith but Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1 is the sound of a band that understands the history of American music, while embracing their own contemporary approach.
Since his last record, Ben Chapman got married and had a kid, so his perspective as a songwriter has naturally pivoted to his new role in the world. And while his music is still rooted in an inspired mix of country guitar picking and honky-tonk funk, lyrically, Feet On Fire travels into new territory for Chapman as he searches for stability after a life lived on the road. That new direction is laid out on the opening track, “Everything’s Different,” with an organ leading the way before Chapman’s deep, distinctive Southern drawl kicks in.
“Out in the Country” is a laid-back, delicately strummed ode to carefree living outside the city that would have fit nicely alongside any of the tracks on his first two records. Lyrically, it’s not treading any new ground,…
Flying Mojito Bros released The Swamp Fox, an album featuring their remixes of recordings by late singer-songwriter Tony Joe White. Tony Joe White, known as The Swamp Fox, was a native of Louisiana and wrote such noteworthy songs as “Polk Salad Annie,” “Undercover Agent for the Blues” and “Rainy Night in Georgia.” White died in 2018 at age 75. White’s son and official archivist, Jody White, contacted Flying Mojito Bros (London-based duo Ben Chetwood and Jack Sellen) to collaborate with them on the remix album.
…”During the late 70’s and early 80’s, Tony Joe was blending country, swamp and disco into his own recipe of funky dance music,” Jody White explains. “With some help from the Flying Mojito Bros, these songs are about to see the light…
49 Winchester the six-piece outfit from southwest Virginia release Change of Plans. The record features 10 tracks, nine of which were written by Gibson, the band’s frontman and lead vocalist. The title is apt for a band that, were it not for the blend of folk, soul, and country that define 49 Winchester, would be unrecognizable from the group that recorded Leavin’ This Holler.
“Each record we’ve made has been a distinct chapter in our life,” Gibson tells Rolling Stone. “I’ve felt it kind of level up, up, and up. I think that this jump is more drastic than it has ever been from album to album. The big, overarching theme of this record is how much our lives have changed since we started this band. We’ve got families. We’re getting married.
“Look out for one another, watch your drinks, respect each other.” It seems simple, but in such fraught times Emily Nenni is keeping an eye on her people. In her world, the dancefloor is a sacred space where everyone is welcome. The Nashville-based Californian has been releasing music since 2018, filtering the present through the honky-tonk of yesteryear. Movin’ Shoes is her fourth album and second collaboration with producer John James Tourville (the Deslondes) who also helmed her 2024 standout Drive & Cry.
Like that album, Movin’ Shoes has a vintage flavor and the type of classy live arrangements that were de rigueur in the studio system of the ’60s and ’70s, but are now the domain of niche specialists. Too often, artists miss the point…
Fifty years after leaving Oklahoma to chase a dream in Nashville, Vince Gill delivers one of the most personal and rewarding projects of his career with the 50 Years From Home series. Rather than simply revisiting past glories, Gill uses this ambitious sequence of EPs to reflect on memory, aging, friendship, heartbreak, faith, and the long emotional road that comes with a lifetime in music.
Spread across multiple releases, the series feels less like a conventional album rollout and more like an ongoing musical autobiography. Each EP carries its own mood and identity while remaining connected through Gill’s unmistakable warmth, elegant songwriting, and deeply human storytelling. The production stays understated throughout, allowing the emotional…
After a twenty-year spell away from the genre, Canadian Rae Spoon returns to their formative years with Assigned Country Singer at Birth, their thirteenth album.
Born in Calgary in 1981, the non-binary singer and writer wrote their first song as a twelve-year-old, basing it on the religion they had grown up with but subsequently finding a strong connection with country music. This dissipated as Rae Spoon became compromised and threatened by issues of gender, race and sexuality within that genre, but they tackle these in the first song written for the new record, ‘Country Music Breaks My Heart’: “Well we fit and we fit just fine / And we’re just singing to stay alive / Cause there’s more of us than them / We’re the ones they say just don’t fit in.”
On her fifth studio album, Wild, Ashley McBryde continues to navigate the ragged edges that shape an individual’s life. In these hard-charging songs that blend raucous rock and searing country, she peers into the fissures of the human heart as they reveal the jagged darkness of despair and trauma, even as those tears contain within themselves the faint light of redemption and hope.
The album opens with the prowling, growling rocker “Rattlesnake Preacher,” full of screaming lead guitars, squealing fiddles, and McBryde’s soaring vocals. The song captures perfectly the defiant tone of a fundamentalist preacher whose message about the love of Jesus is cloaked in a narrow hellfire and damnation vision of salvation. The echoing psychedelic…
…includes three reimagined tracks: a revamped version of fan-favorite “Delilah,” a duet with Billy Strings on “Dirt – Macon version” and a cover of The Allman Brothers‘ “Ramblin’ Man”. The remaining nine tracks explore walking the line between letting go of old love and addiction.
Last year, Marcus King deviated from his norm with the Rick Rubin-produced Mood Swings. He scaled back his vaunted guitar and valiantly focused on his vocals, experimenting with soul. Now he follows that up by returning to his roots, reuniting with his longtime live band for their first album since 2018’s Carolina Confessions. The new release, Darling Blue, is a safe, guest-filled, country-tinged offering that still manages to deliver a few changeups to King’s sound.
On Middle of Nowhere, Kacey Musgraves doesn’t so much return to her roots as redraw the map entirely — one where solitude isn’t a pit stop between relationships but the destination itself. Written in the aftermath of a breakup and shaped by long stretches of intentional aloneness, her seventh LP and debut for Lost Highway finds her toggling between self-sufficiency, mischief and the occasional bout of well-earned chaos.
The opening title track sets the tone within seconds: sunlit acoustic strums, a low-end thump and Musgraves calmly declaring, “It’s just me and me and that’s all I need.” It’s both a mission statement and, as the record unfolds, a thesis she keeps testing. Because even in the wide-open emotional space she’s carved out, desire…