Trisha Yearwood returns this week.
Sam Williams
ACT II: COUNTRYSTAR [EP]
As an extension of his evolving artistic persona, it doesn’t really work and isn’t a patch on his most distinctive, legacy-challenging songwriting. But as a whip-smart parody of contemporary “countrystar” posturing? Hoo boy, is it ever savage.
Every tired narrative trope of current radio country is here, set to the exact type of hip-hop appropriating arrangements that have made the men of the genre’s A-list so interchangeable for years now. Thing is, Williams actually half-raps better than they do. So does it become what it’s parodying?
Joe Stamm Band
Little Crosses
As ever, there’s nothing revolutionary about their brand of corn-fed heartland rock, which they play better than just about anyone in this space today. It’s the songwriting here, though, that makes this one a new career-best: The title track, especially, is a stunner.
Ketch Secor
Story the Crow Told Me
To the consternation of the authenticity fetishists, he’s throwing his hat into the ring as the heir apparent to Marty Stuart (who guests here, and it’s great) as a preservationist of the genre’s off-trend variations. No surprise he has the goods to pull that off.
No surprise, either, that he’s doing so in ways that are a lot more ribald and seedy than what Stuart, who’s perhaps too prone to playing stuffy museum curator, typically offers. The self-mythologizing elements are smart, too, in how country acts have historically crafted a persona. Great stuff.
Scotty McCreery
Scooter & Friends [EP]
He and his friends are all game, but the quality of the songwriting here went off a cliff after last year’s career-best Rise & Fall. Troubling that this seems to be working in terms of keeping him in prime rotation at radio, when he’s capable of so much more.
Niko Moon
American Palm
This overserved, underwritten beach-themed atrocity had me sneering, “Or we could go home,” like Goth Kid On Vacation long before the worst cover of “Margaritaville” you’ll ever hear closed it out. For the love of Jimmy Buffett, listen to Joshua Ray Walker instead.
Cam
All Things Light
A wild, heady ride that plays as a natural follow-up to her genre-spanning contributions to COWBOY CARTER. No matter the sonic palette she chooses, she remains a singular, recognizable singer and writer and a major talent that Nashville should never had written off.
The best tracks here are the most straightforwardly country: “Everblue” and “Kill the Guru!” are hits in a better timeline. Some of the folktronica tracks sound as dated as that term implies, even if it’s a great fit for her idiosyncratic sensibilities. And she takes a few big swings that connect.
Dylan Gossett
Westward
This week’s This Exact Guy is notable for a mostly acoustic and intermittently twangy aesthetic and for the unearned confidence to open his album with 45 seconds of a capella singing that should’ve had someone saying, “Bro, don’t.” A few strong melodies here, for what it’s worth.
Riley Green
Midtown Sessions 2025 [EP]
The “mid” joke’s right there in the title for the low-hanging fruit. This acoustic set demonstrates that he clears the low bar of being a more competent singer than most of his new A-list peers, but little more than that.
Trisha Yearwood
The Mirror
Already the finest vocalist and the deepest albums artist of her generation of country A-listers, she’s now dropped an album that recontextualizes her entire career. She does so not by making a “roots music” pivot like others have done; this is contemporary country.
Instead, she unveils a heretofore hidden gift for songwriting that impresses for a fearless personal candor (there’s a line about her first marriage that stopped me dead), a shoulders-back confidence, and an unapologetic feminism. She’s pulling the threads on these career-long throughlines.
The result is an album about fully claiming one’s agency and owning both good and occasionally questionable decisions. It’s as inspiring as it is instructive. Here, an icon of the 90s country boom puts the current generation of stars on notice about the compassion and empathy missing in their work.
The aesthetic of the album is important, too. Yearwood is not ceding one single inch of space here: Instead, this album reaffirms that her values belong in the center of the country mainstream and always have, and that the genre is all the better when those values show up in the music.
Yes, I’m loving the Trisha Yearwood album! I heard an interview where she said that Leslie Satcher is the one who kept pushing her to write songs with her and that’s what got her to really start writing. I wish I could find songwriter credits for the album though. I’ve been doing a very deep dive into songwriters lately and it’s frustrating when albums don’t have the writing credits readily available.