Listen to my favorite tracks off each album on my Spotify playlist! Updated weekly with all the best new country, Americana, and whatever else I feel like — this is music like your life depends on it.
Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters — The Ones That Stay
Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters deliver surefooted folk rock on The Ones That Stay. That confidence belies the album’s central themes: missed connections and wondering what happens to the people who leave our lives with little explanation. The band is exceptional here, tight on uptempo rockers, but truly inspiring when they allow themselves to slip into extended reveries. This is the kind of music that justifies Americana as an art form, rather than a marketing gimmick. Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters are making some of the most thoughtful, considered music in the genre and command your attention.
Teni Rane — Goldenrod
Teni Rane explores life’s greatest upheavals on Goldenrod. But this album is by no means a downer; instead, Rane uses string quartets, jazz tones, and an earnest songwriting approach inherited from folk music to navigate every aspect of those changes. There’s a sense of liberation, as well as some fear and regret. Rane’s crystalline voice is angelic and anchors this eclectic set of songs. The arrangements here are probing and complex, capturing that sense that one never truly can settle — and perhaps that’s not a bad thing.
RR Williams — Unremarkable Lives
It’s usually a good song when the opening chords of an album make you think “Oh, fuck yeah.” RR Williams’ Unremarkable Lives is a heartland rock album that’s become all too rare lately. Give me three chords, the truth, a distorted guitar, and a forceful delivery and I’m sold — and I know you are, too. Williams has told us before that he sees himself as a journeyman songwriter, calling it like he sees it and amplifying the stories of people who are all-too-often cast aside. But it’s the quiet songs that allow Williams to shine: the storytelling in “Photographs” and “” is breathtaking, and Williams just might be the heir apparent to an Americana that’s born of punk rock dives and hard-won experience.
Kaia Kater — Strange Medicine
Kaia Kater has proven herself to be a master of weaving tapestries, and Strange Medicine is truly Kater at her peak. These songs about alienation, isolation, and an anxious eye towards the future embrace Kater’s musical curiosity. Her trademark banjo is still there, but these songs are resplendent in beats, samples, and electronic textures that send a thrilling rush through each song. Kater centers a certain discordance that meshes with her themes, but there is something about these meditative melodies that ultimately soothes. With Strange Medicine, Kater invites us along with her on her journey towards peace.
Um, Jennifer? — The Girl Class EP
Um, Jennifer? takes the uncertainty and awkardness of transition and transforms them into hilarious queer punk. The duo’s ironic sense of humor on The Girl Class leads to an inviting vulnerability — as well as a new one-liner a minute. I’ve written about the band on Rainbow Rodeo but The Girl Class has a sharp edge to it that better lends itself here. The humor doesn’t mean the very well frustration and danger that comes with living in a hostile world is absent. But somehow, with The Girl Class, we get the sense that things will work out.
You can check out tracks by these artists and more on the Adobe & Teardrops playlist — on Spotify.