Shaboozey’s sophomore effort is one of the year’s strongest efforts.
Shaboozey
The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Western Tales
Rather than taking a victory lap for what he’d accomplished with his prior album, ‘boozey digs real deep into genre iconography on a concept album that impresses equally for his command of so many forms and for the scope of his world-building. While Music Row keeps peddling 90s cosplay as its new credibility movement, he’s pulling from Morricone film scores and interpolating both bluegrass standards and early aughts hip-hop hits to create something that shows an actual understanding of traditions and creates something contemporary.
What’s fascinating is the extent to which the album’s concept creates a deliberate first-person remove, and there have been plenty of reasons over the last three years to drive speculation as to why he might be interested in such a defense mechanism. Single “Cowgirl” says an awful lot about that.
He delivers the early line, “Got another Bar Song for you and all your friends,” with a disaffect that borders on contempt, like he knows exactly what he’s expected to deliver and for whom in terms of following up on a massive hit. But it’s who shows up as collaborators– Orville Peck, Kehlani, Sam Elliott (!), Gunna(!!)– that really highlights the extent to which Shaboozey is in full command of what he’s doing and of why he’s making the choices he makes. What he’s doing in the country space is smart, provocative, and artful. Underestimate this gunslinger at your own peril.
Jensen McRae
I Don’t Know How But They Found Me…Again!!
She completes her song cycle about two back-to-back heartbreaks by adding a full second disc to her 2025 album, giving even greater depth to what was already a thoughtful collection. As a whole, these songs capture her singular gifts: An idiosyncratic syntax that impresses for both its economy of language and her emotional acuity. No one else writes quite the way McRae does, and her songs fare best when she leverages actual country and folk signifiers rather than settling for a nebulous “contemporary folk” aesthetic that doesn’t sound like anything.
But it’s the collabs with two of the best singers in this shared space– Brandi Carlile and Brittney Spencer– that also draw into relief the liabilities in McRae’s singing. While she’s a unique writer, she shares many contemporary folk singers’ vocal affectations: Dropped or unenunciated consonants and vowel curlicues that are deployed without any real purpose or choice-making for how those affectations actually impact the phrasing of a lyric. Carlile and Spencer show up and show up McRae on her own songs because they know better.
McRae is hardly the only singer who still does this but she may have the absolute highest ceiling, artistically, of any of the artists who sing like this. It’s the only thing really holding this great young artist back from being a potential all-timer. At least she’s sharing space with peers who may show her a better way in the long term.
Waylon Wyatt
Dustpiles
His first full album reaffirms that, among the many, many Zach Bryan acolytes flooding the market, Wyatt might be the most capable lyricist and the least capable vocalist. The latter is at least fixable, but there is some very real work he needs to put in.
Tucker Wetmore
Sunburn Mixtape
Temu Wallen can’t help but lace his summer escapist playlist with a mile-wide streak of casual misogyny underneath broke-ass beats and his piss-poor attempts to rap and half-sing.
He already has a #1 country radio single from this because that ocean water is wet.
Old 97s
One More Ride [EP]
Not an essential addition to their catalog, but I’m not mad at this brief, breakneck set of not-obvious-choices of Johnny Cash covers. Squarely within their wheelhouse and avoids the type of Cash hagiography it could’ve been in lesser hands.
John R. Miller
The Great Unknowing
Course-corrects for the understated production on his last album by taking some big swings this time out, the best of which recall Social Distortion. A bit overlong– the Dire Straits cover ends the album on the wrong note– but there’s never any faulting his writing.
Lakelin Lemmings
Lakelin Lemmings
Encouraging that any woman at all actually got an opportunity to record a full debut album after a test-the-waters EP; arching an eyebrow that such opportunity is reserved for one who’s not not MAGA-coded. Which is to say, she shoehorns references to Jesus into her songs in ways that come off as strident and inorganic, even when the faith-centered songs are thoughtful enough to stand on their own. As on her EP, the song structure has an early-Ballerini type promise as modern pop-country goes, and she has a strong voice. Keeping an eye on her for several reasons.
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