Orville Peck leads a remarkably strong slate of new releases.
Orville Peck
Mule
On which our masked hero drops the equestrian iconography of his past albums and embraces a different sort of beast. Mules are known both for their strength and their incorrigible stubbornness, and those are the two traits that carry Peck through every step of this song cycle in which he lays bare his uneasy path through heartbreak, addiction, and suicidal ideation to something resembling clarity. These are songs on which he’s left feeling impotent– again, characteristic of a mule– by his vices and spares no self-lacerating detail.
What’s so effective about Mule, though, is that it doesn’t wallow in any sort of reductive, damaging Destructive Artist myth. The record is downright joyful, full of bangers and twangers that draw from Peck’s full range of influences and genre savvy. He croons, wails, and even yelps like Elvis on songs that showcase the very real and very admirable work he’s put into his already formidable instrument. There are very few men in the country space today who could match his performances on this record.
And, give or take his records with Brandy Clark, Jay Joyce does career-best country album production here, too. There’s just enough mess in the arrangements and mixing to reflect the themes of Peck’s narratives in a way that works, rather than some of the noise-for-noise’s-sake of his productions for Eric Church or Little Big Town.
Still, this is fully Peck’s show. Whether he’s using his booming voice to fill the empty spaces of his “Big Ol’ House,” giving into the artifice and the blues of rehab, or invoking his literal muses (Noah Cyrus! Allison Russell! Emmylou!), Peck keeps his shoulder to the plow and shows just what a modern country album can do and be.
Jenny Tolman
Music City Mutt
The title alludes to the fact that she’s more of a stylistic dilettante at this point than someone with a cohesive identity as an artist. She has a solid enough singing voice, too, but she also squanders a lot of goodwill on an utterly retrograde duet with Gretchen Wilson.
Rhiannon Giddens
Hope is the Thing With Feathers
The rough-hewn production on this album splits the difference between last year’s bare-knuckled collaboration with Justin Robinson and her more polished recent solo work, and it may be the sweetest spot in which to capture her certified Genius-level gifts. For years, she has been showcasing ever-greater range as a vocalist, and her performances on this album suggest that there’s simply nothing she cannot do, and do with a real virtuosity and presence.
The songs she’s written and selected here also feel personal in a way that hasn’t always been the case even on her best albums. She’s one of our finest and most important genre artist-historians, yes, and her albums that function as such are no less riveting or essential. Still, the vibe of this one is more lived-in in ways that foreground the depths and knottiness of her roots.
Jake Blount & Friends
Single-Footing Horse
A generational talent who operates within a singular niche, Blount follows-up 2024’s essential Afro-futurist collaboration with Mali Obamsawin with what he’s billed as his final “stringband” album. It’s understandable that an artist of such formidable skill and such a studied, intellectual approach to his work might find it restrictive to be tied to a particular tradition, and there are fewer flourishes of his most progressive genre influences on this record than were on 2022’s The New Faith.
Still, what this album highlights is how uniquely Blount is positioned to disrupt rigid genre conventions, whether that’s through the queering of familiar tropes or through his intuitive and surprising rearrangements and rewritings of standards. How lucky we were to have had him as part of the broader country universe for as long as we have.
Angela Autumn
Believer
It would be so easy for her idiosyncratic approach to structure to lapse into affectation, but the weirdness of what she does here scans as fully organic at every last shift in tone, style, and tempo. Her playing is a wonder, too. The arrival of a vital new folk talent.
Renée Fleming with Béla Fleck
The Fiddle and the Drum
Fleming rightfully gets top billing here, which in no way diminishes how organic and inspired this collab with Fleck proves. This is truly masterful interpretive work, even by their respective individual standards. Tremendous.
Oh, and Dolly’s on the single.
The War and Treaty
Country Baptism [EP]
They already dropped one of 2026’s finest and most stylistically diverse albums, and now they’re back with an EP that leans harder into a contemporary country aesthetic, and it’s no less essential. These songs wouldn’t have fit with the thematic focus of the preceding album, but they match it in terms of the consistent quality of the songwriting. And, of course, they sing the absolute fire out of these tracks in ways that put so many of their contemporaries to shame. Country remains so lucky to have them in its fold, gatekeepers be damned.
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