For more than a decade, River Shook fronted Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, a raucous but fitfully tender country-rock unit that, for most of its run, hit the bottle as hard as it hit the pavement. In that grandest of country music traditions, the Disarmers’ songs were honest reflections of the blackout-chasing lives the members were living, but that changed when Shook got sober in 2019. The albums that followed, especially 2024’s incisive Revelations, were more clear-eyed; they also exposed the fault lines that had begun to destabilize the Disarmers. In June 2025, Shook played their final show with their longtime band. By then, they’d already begun working on the nervy, forthright songs that would become their eponymous solo debut.
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Each American Aquarium album is best viewed as a slice of BJ Barham’s life. The frontman writes in the moment, and his music is a distillation of the world as he sees it, and the life he has carved for himself along with his wife, Rachael, and their 8-year-old-daughter, Pearl, in the increasingly-suburbanized Wendell, NC, a half hour east of Raleigh. In the two years since the last Aquarium record, as he wrote and recorded what became New Ways to Lose, Barham has been thriving.
Whether some genres or sub-genres are supposed to go together or not is often a moot point, and in more cases or not, depends on whether a band or an artist have the ability and inventiveness to be able to make a musical combination that actually works.
Kristina Stykos is a songwriter, musician, recording engineer and producer who has been a torchbearer for the music of the Green Mountain State since the ’80s. Her Pepperbox Studio is tucked away off-grid and off the beaten track at the base of Mount Abraham in Lincoln, Vermont. Stykos has released six albums under her own name, along with a collaboration with the recently deceased Montanan pianist and composer Philip Aaberg. Her Thunder Ridge Records roster, whilst not full of household names, has showcased the skills of many talented Vermonters. Stykos is also one half of The Cousins Project, the other being Steve Mayone. Up until twenty years ago, they were unaware of each other’s existence. All that changed when Stykos attended a Bow Thayer and…
…Like Hoboken’s finest, 
Where would you choose to be as a singer songwriter if your music would fit within so many categories but having a strong connection to roots and Americana sounds? Well Nashville might be too country bound, and L.A. too away, so, quite possibly New Orleans might seem an obvious choice, as the sounds created there could go in so many directions.
Describing himself as an alt-country artist, St Louis native Adam Gaffney has actually created an album that is full of real country songs, sounding like they’ve come straight from a barroom or dance hall. Product of Another Sad Song is clearly an extremely personal journey for Gaffney, as it holds stories of the loss of his mother, and his own battle to overcome alcohol use, as well as reflecting on love lost and found. If that all sounds like it may be a little intense and hard going, fear not! This is music that is frequently up-tempo, joyous and toe-tapping. Heavy on honky tonk piano and pedal steel that dances around the tunes as much as it weeps, the comparison to a modern-day Buck Owens makes total sense.
Birdland is the fourth album by New England line-up 
Americana artist Jenny Reynolds understands what it is like to have too much time on one’s hands yet not enough time to get the things that really need to be done. She will sit aimlessly and listen to the rain on one cut, then bemoan having to wait for the next. That situation resembles what often goes on in our own lives. The particulars may be different, but the paradoxical psychic pain is the same. We want to be able to be still and simultaneously keep on moving, which causes anxiety. Reynold’s lyrics wryly address our existential challenges with a nod to love as the redeemer.
The Susto Stringband was born in 2022 when 
As the old philosophical question goes, “If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?” That query feels newly relevant in the age of modern music-making.
On his third LP, Tender Country, 
After three excellent but generally underappreciated albums in what is more or less the Americana/singer/songwriter genre, 
…Originally shelved by his label in 2001, this 21-track record has finally seen an official release.
…Former members of Zebra Hunt have got together in Seattle to form 
Heretics & Heritage is the fourth album from Leeds-based 
…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.”