The new album from Noah Kahan opens with two dudes driving. “They don’t say a lot, but they know every inch of this ride,” Kahan sings atop a tense ambient wash of autumnal prettiness on “End of August,” mapping out a sense of angst and empathy that’ll become all too familiar before the rest of tracks on The Great Divide, which is out Friday, have had their say. The New England town where these guys live doesn’t have much to offer beyond a future of having kids “who grow up and have kids who build homes for the rich.” To dull the dullness, there are meds that don’t work and memories that don’t heal, and the uncomfortably comforting sense that at least you know you’re not arrogant enough to imagine any other reality. “Everything you see out here will die,” Kahan sings as the song surges toward a beautifully forlorn folk-rock epiphany. “And it’s ours now.”
Imagine a stadium full of people locking into that sentiment, as they surely will this summer when Kahan plays multiple nights at venues like Fenway Park and Citi Field, and you’ve got the indelible appeal of an artist who has spun his small-town ambivalence and early-adulthood apprehensions into massive success (a process captured in the strong new documentary Noah Kahan: Out of Body). A few years ago, Kahan was a guy from Vermont waiting out Covid by writing songs — one of which, the heartsick meditation “Stick Season,” became a hit tied to a breakout 2022 LP of the same name. Now, he’s up there with the Sheerans and Bryans of the world, working a similar regular-guy appeal that makes his stardom something to root for.
The long-awaited Great Divide, co-produced by Kahan, Stick Season assist man Gabe Simon, and Aaron Dessner (the sad-folk Phil Spector), adds top-shelf studio juice to Kahan’s confessional songwriting and improves on its predecessor in other ways. “Doors” sets the ambitious tone early on with a wide-open Americana-rock heft that could win a shoulder-smack of approval from Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen. Kahan’s music is a smart synthesis of Bon Iver’s ethereal falsetto indie-folk, Zach Bryan‘s everyman storytelling, Mumford & Sons’ acoustic stomp, and a Taylor Swiftian eye for lyrical detail, not to mention well-constructed bridges — all carefully weaved, well-wrought, and rendered with a tasteful light touch and a real pop sensibility. It’s a sensitive backdrop to lyrics about people navigating strained relationships and real hardships in an America where just keeping your life on solid ground is a gold-medal achievement.
On “Paid Time Off,” a down-home acoustic guitar and banjo are the backdrop for lyrics that contrast youthful images of freedom and having fun with a more honest assessment of where midlife takes you: “I had the brains for a city job/But you got the taste of a county cop,” Kahan sings tenderly. The sweeping rocker “American Cars” is about helping someone close to you deal with their pain. In “Dan,” two old friends get together to camp and drink and have good-natured political debates that may or not stay good-natured as the Miller Lites pile up. Kahan wrestles with addiction on “23,” and “Deny Deny Deny” is a forensically detailed catalog of personal illusions and slights that culminates in the line “I’m far too tired to watch you lie/So let’s just watch TV.”
Unsurprisingly, Kahan’s newfound success and his guilty distance from the small-town world he left behind is a major theme on The Great Divide. One especially rough moment along those lines is “Porch Light,” a catchy song with an early-2010s folktronica pulse in which Kahan has a heated phone call with a family member who’s mad he’s gotten rich spinning tales about the folks back home without asking their consent. In “Dashboard,” a guy tears a new one into an old friend who got out and hasn’t looked back — “Change your ZIP code/Turns out that you’re still an asshole.” The cathartically hard-strumming, fiddle-swept “Haircut” hands the mic to the guy who got out and made it, so he can argue “some small fame ain’t made me someone else.”
These songs are impressive because they rarely sound like rich rock-star solipsism; they’re conversations with the past, in which the past talks back in the voice of actual people you may or not always miss, but actually love and can’t forget. On “Spoiled,” the well-off rock-star future doesn’t look so hot, either — he sings about working his ass off while already knowing the children he hasn’t had yet are going to live off his success and blame him for their failures.
You’ve gotta like a guy whose distaste for rich people extends to preemptively resenting his own pampered children who aren’t even born yet. That level of unshielded honesty and hunger for connection is one reason millions of people can read their lives and stories into Kahan’s songs. “You know I think about you all the time/And my deep misunderstanding of your life,” he sings on The Great Divide’s soaring title track, reaching out to one of the many people he hates losing touch with. He’s going to have a lot of years in the game and sold-out baseball parks to figure out how you fill in that elusive space between.
Whipped Cream*
Pop Albums Are Getting More Ambitious. Can Audiences Keep Up?
This Music May Contain Hope, the second album from British songstress Raye, makes great demands of its audience. The record nearly runs the length of a feature film and most of the 17 songs sound like they could soundtrack one. When the credits roll at the end — she thanks each and every person who helped create the record for six and a half minutes on “Fin.,” — they conclude a gloriously disorienting listening experience. For most of the album, Raye is asking you to come along as she fights and prays through despair and self-criticism to keep hope alive.
Sometimes that battle is filtered through songs that sound like show tunes or gospel hymns. In the case of “Click Clack Symphony,” they crescendo into a dizzying Hans Zimmer composition. There’s a level of patience and reciprocity the album requires from its listeners: At once confrontational and confessional, This Music May Contain Hope is not designed for detached consumption — and it’s part of a surge of recent releases that find artists creating ambitious records that encourage intentional engagement.
Last year, Hayley Williams released Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party as 17 individual singles. Fans created their own sequencing and narratives guided solely by the themes and sounds they chose. A few months later, Rosalía released Lux, a captivating 18-track record performed in 13 languages. It shares a musical complexity with This Music May Contain Hope and an interrogative spirit with The Apple Tree Under the Sea, the debut album from Hemlocke Springs released earlier this year. Each record is as all-consuming as the ideas they’re engaging with — mental anguish, faith and religion, internal and interpersonal implosion.
Raye often describes music as medicinal. Backed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Flames Collective choir on “I Know You’re Hurting,” her melodies and harmonies are bandages and sutures. When she instructs the listener to “close your eyes and let this music get to working,” she exudes the wisdom of an elder passing home remedies through generations. At a time when easier access to music often means increasingly passive listening, these albums replace momentary distraction with connection and compassion. They give the audience something to return to.
Raye included the voices of her grandparents at the start of “Life Boat.” The portion her grandfather contributes, where he says, “I’m living, not giving up,” was recorded just days before his death. More voices flood in across the next four minutes. They all repeat some variation of “I’m not giving up, yet,” some with more desperation than others. “Say it,” Raye says, stern and direct. “Say, ‘I’m not giving up, yet.’” The mantra is set against the kind of thudding club beat that defined the earliest phases of her career. Drums and synthesizers are interspersed with delicately arranged strings, but there’s something transcendent about the contours and echoes of Raye’s voice.
That kind of vocal power is something Rosalía speaks about often: Duende. The flamenco term refers to a type of enchantment delivered through an especially evocative vocal performance. It’s not necessarily about technical prowess, or precision. “There’s something so ethereal and divine about el duende,” Rosalía told The New York Times last year. “El duende is something that visits you. It’s something that comes to you.” It makes the listening experience feel targeted and personal. This funneled into Rosalía on Lux. The record unravels in a way that transcends the barrier of language.
Rosalía begins “Mundo Nuevo” in Spanish. Its translation reveals she’s searching for a hint of truth. She finishes “De Madrugá” in Ukrainian with something searching for her this time. “I’m not looking for revenge,” she sings. “Revenge is looking for me.” The London Symphony Orchestra and the Escolania de Montserrat i Cor Cambra Palau de la Música Catalana choir bolster the album, their arrangements ranging from anxious and erratic to soothing and hypnotic.
Rosalía introduced Lux with the first single “Bergain,” which splinters across German, Spanish, and English. When Yves Tumor’s voice cuts through on the song’s outro, the persistent repetition of “I’ll fuck you till you love me” is harsh and abrasive against the preceding moments. Rosalía chases that friction across Lux. Like her mix of languages, she challenges the listener with existentialism and ruminations on the afterlife. It might turn some listeners away, but the ones who stay are rewarded.
Most of the record was inspired by saints, like Teresa of Ávila or Joan of Arc. Their history adds a third layer to the depth of Lux; Hemlocke Springs similarly fixates on religious motifs on The Apple Tree Under the Sea. She weaves in medieval tales and impulsive adventures made for a storybook. Positioning herself as a character in her fantastical stories gives her audience someone to root for while creating some distance between fiction and reality.
In that sense, The Apple Tree Under the Sea shares a theatrical ease of access with This Music May Contain Hope. Raye’s cautionary tales about traitorous South London men who should be banned from WhatsApp play into the same spectacle as Springs’ “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Ankles” and “Moses.” There’s a prelude towards the end of The Apple Tree Under the Sea that features the voice of a man who sounds far away as he preaches about sin and final judgements. It gets even harder to hear him when the sounds of running horses and marching feet cut through. The suspense builds into an orchestral outro that leads into “Sense (Is),” a booming, optimistic song about making the most of a clean slate and a glass half full.
Springs’ journey is the shortest within this set of albums. It spans 10 songs in just over half an hour, but retains its complexities with winding plot twists. Where she leans into communicating through stories and allegories, Raye through a version of theater, and Rosalía essentially through multinational cathedrals, Williams’ Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party brings listeners into an excruciatingly vivid reality. The achingly haunted “True Believer” walks the streets of Nashville. It moves down Broadway and past repurposed clubs. It attends the churches and questions the rhetoric presented in them. It runs parallel to the moments across the album that brings listeners into a home with fragile glass walls.
The album’s most shattering moment arrives towards the end: “Good ‘Ol Days.” It’s not as distressing as “Negative Self Talk,” or as sobering as “Whim.” It glides along a warm groove and drops burning one-liners with pointed specificity. What fortifies it the most is an appearance from Williams’ grandfather midway through the song. “You are so tacky/I think that’s why I love you so much,” he says in a voicemail message. “I just had to call you first on my new phone/I love you, y’all have a blast, bye.” The interlude emphasizes just how interior the content of the record is, made up of real moments, people, and feelings.
There’s a false perception in pop music that the best way to connect with the masses is to keep things broad — that vague generalizations are easier for people to latch onto. But the hyper-specificity and confrontation on these albums form real connection, creating the feeling that the listener is being trusted with someone else’s secrets and struggles — and safe to embrace their own, too.
There’s bravery in how these artists are driven by conviction. They understand the reach their platforms provide, but have little interest in idolatry. They each use different formats to craft a sense of togetherness even in their most intimate moments, like it means more to show someone they aren’t alone than to tell them. They ask for patience as they remind listeners it’s commendable to try. Some people don’t come to music looking for this; it can be challenging to have an artist in your ear telling you to bring your most shattering emotions and memories to the surface. But those are the kind of records that endure over time.