Anna Graves and Ruthie Foster lead this week’s batch of new albums.
Son Volt
Sound Signal Serenades
I’ve long defended them and will continue to do so, but this is among their most muddled in both sound and theme, even if Farrar enunciates a bit more clearly than usual. Not much here sticks in the craw the way their best material can.
Anna Graves
America’s Greatest Burnout
Tremendous. Graves is in no way the slacker implied by the title track, but she’s gifted enough a writer and singer to make that a believable narrative choice. There’s a specific tone of disaffect to her songwriting that pulls precisely from the alt-country acts of the early-aughts. What impresses about this record is similar to what’s great about Olivia Rodrigo: The specificity of the influences and how those influences turn up in unexpected ways. Graves is fully of a piece of the best of her generation’s songwriters who’ve mastered that exact skill.
This set also builds upon the promising 2024 debut in terms of her vocal control. Her tone evokes Kaitlin Butts and Emily Scott Robinson in all of the best ways implied by those comparisons, but the instinctual phrasing choices are fully her own. Burnout or no, she’s dropped one of the year’s greatest records.
Adam Chaffins
Trailer Trash Doublewide
Takes his fine 2025 EP and expands it into the full-length record he deserved the chance to release in the first place. Hard to overstate what a rare talent he is among new male artists making this kind of accessible, modern country.
And for as terrific a singer and musician as he is, Chaffins is first and foremost a storyteller, and he’s perfectly attuned to the rhythms of rural and working-class folk in ways that allow him to spin yarns that are both empathetic and funny. He’s a wiseass with some actual wisdom to impart.
The Jayhawks
Sanctuary Park
Stalwart alt-country outfit hasn’t lost a step in the six years since their last record; even by their own lofty standards, the vocal harmonies on this set impress, as does the timeliness of the narratives. A most welcome return here.
Ian Munsick
The Mountain GOAT
Surprised it’s taken someone this long to make the wordplay of the title track, and it sure takes some real chutzpah and a staggering lack of self-awareness to lay claim to that title in a timeline where Patty Loveless exists. Especially when you spend most of your album making pretty overt stabs at current mainstream country trends and just nod occasionally in the direction of a holler or a hill. As ever, his high tenor is distinctive and versatile and is the weight-bearing element of his music, and he remains more “promising” than “GOAT” contender.
Stella Lefty
Long Way Home
Who’s ready for some discourse?!?
Kidding. There is honestly not one thing here to justify how deranged people have been when talking about Lefty and her music.
The four-song EP earlier this year was never more or less than fine. At album length, every seam shows:
The melodies that are perfectly serviceable but not really memorable, the lyrics that manage a decent hook or two but betray not even a second of actual interiority or a distinct persona, the singing that clears the Moroney floor but just barely: This is what people cannot stop being so weird about?
Whatever people may want to say about her backstory or her “authenticity,” the last place any of that shows up in any meaningful way is on these songs.
There’s just no cause for the It’s About Ethics In Country Music Journalism high-horsing or the flagrant abuse of the phrase “Nepo Baby.”
Ruthie Foster
Just Say Yes
A full 30 years into her remarkable career, and she continues to step more confidently into her power on every new album. Her collaboration with Larkin Poe on 2024’s excellent MILEAGE brought new depth to her sound, and that pairing pays off again on this record.
But the credit for the absolute tear she’s been on, quality-wise, goes first and foremost to Foster herself. Her writing, her playing, and especially her singing are grounded in a commitment to telling her stories, grounded in a fundamental belief that her stories matter.
Maoli
MMO3
The third album in his correctly-named “Maoli Music Overload” series, this is perhaps the best of those collections at capturing the full breadth of his talents and diverse influences. As ever, the highlights are the tracks that emphasize his native Hawaiian heritage.
And he knows how to incorporate that perspective into hook-forward tracks that, in a better industry, would have made him a major star at least six albums ago. The collab with Maddie Font is a standout, too, but the whole record would elevate the mainland’s mainstream country scene.
Dan+Shay
Young
The cover art gives sleaze but the music gives self-important uplift so cloying and saccharine the album should come with a GLP-1 pen, while the production is spit-polished and dated in such a way that it wants for the comparative edginess of BB Mak. Dreadful, even for them.
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