Margo Price reaches new artistic heights this week.
Margo Price
Hard Headed Woman
Welcome home, cowgirl. She says she re-discovered her love for country songs, and every second of this album lays plain her affection for the form. After a couple of not-fully convincing detours, she’s back where her talents are best suited.
And country is all the better with Price fully in its fold. Her writing is insightful and often hilarious, she’s never sung more evocatively than she does here, and the production ranges from born-again honky-tonk to steel-drenched weepers. And that Childers duet.
A career-best and genre classic.
Tift Merritt
Time and Patience: The Tambourine Kitchen Recordings
The “kitchen session” versions of Tambourine standout tracks are all solid, if none surpass the original recordings. It’s the handful of previously unreleased / new tracks here that shine, reaffirming her status as one of her generation’s finest singer-songwriters.
Walker Hayes
17 Problems
Replaces most of his gross hip-hop appropriations and affectations with Imagine Dragons style stomp and reverb. It works better, and what he passes off as a newfound maturity actually works pretty well most of the time, too. Not great, but a pleasant shock from him.
BettySoo
If You Never Go Away
As ever, her vocal tone is just astonishing, and her guitar work in nearly the same league. Production, alas, is perhaps a bit too one-note to capture the full breadth of the emotional range in this collection, which highlights the savage humor in her writing.
Old Dominion
Barbara
Shows more personality in the album cover than on their recorded output to date, including this. Still, there are baby steps here toward greater substance and a more coherent artistic vision than “slightly less cringe Parmalee.”
Daniel Donato
Horizons
At once one of 2025’s best-produced and most abysmally-sung albums, which makes for a frustrating listen. He has the exact right taste in influences to be great, but he simply lacks the technical skill to execute. Nothing a vocal coach couldn’t fix, and here’s hoping.
Chosen Family
Generation Us
Pleasant and melodic folk-pop that feels very much dated to the post-Garden State era, and every second of it is so sincere that to say it’s never particularly interesting or insightful feels like puppy-kicking. It’s giving worst of the Avett Brothers.
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