Year: 2026

Hilary Hahn Says Her Career Has a Future Again

The sentence Hilary Hahn used, posting to her own audience in February, was not the one a publicist would have written. She is, she said, now the proud owner of an artificial disc. Her career has a future again, her neck has healthier alignment than before, and she is pain free.

That is the end of roughly two concert seasons of cancellations. It is also a reminder of something the violin repertoire never mentions, which is that the instrument is held between a jaw and a collarbone, and everything else depends on what is happening in the neck.

What the Two Years Looked Like

She withdrew from concerts from July 2024 with pinched nerves. In her own account the first herniation of a cervical disc, about eighteen months before the surgery, was debilitating: muscle atrophy alongside ongoing nerve stress. She recovered from that one without an operation and went back to work.

The return came in late February 2025 with the New York Philharmonic and the conductor Herbert Blomstedt, playing the Brahms Violin Concerto across four performances at David Geffen Hall, with Schubert’s sixth symphony completing the programme. She described it as a homecoming and called the orchestra family.

She was also explicit at the time that the schedule would be managed rather than resumed, saying she was taking a measured approach with adequate rest between concerts, and that this meant cancelling dates that had already been announced. Then, over the summer of 2025, the same disc herniated again and compressed nearly all of her remaining nerve space.

The Surgeon Who Played the Violin

At that point conservative treatment was no longer an option. The disc was replaced with an artificial one, and Hahn noted, in a detail that is either a coincidence or an extremely good piece of referral, that her surgeon used to play the violin.

It matters more than it sounds. A cervical fusion and a disc replacement produce different outcomes for range of motion, and a violinist needs a specific and unusual amount of lateral rotation and flexion to hold the instrument at all. A surgeon who has done it understands what the requirement actually is rather than treating the patient as a generic neck.

The Scarves

She has told audiences to expect scarves for a while, because she has a surgical scar on her neck she wants to protect both offstage and on. She added that it might be a style she keeps.

Announcing that in advance is a practical solution to a problem that only exists in performance. A soloist stands lit from the front for two hours in front of two thousand people; anything visible becomes a subject. Naming it first turns it into a wardrobe decision rather than a rumour.

What She Is Rebuilding

Her stated task now is getting strength and micro-coordination back while the nerves settle. The second word is the one violinists will recognise. Gross strength returns predictably; the fine differential control of individual fingers under a bow arm is a separate faculty, and it is the one that separates a professional from an amateur.

She has been careful not to overstate the position, noting that surgery brings longer-term consequences and that nobody can know the future, while describing the prognosis as really good. Given how much of the past two years she spent not knowing whether the career would continue, that is a measured way to put it.

The Programme She Built for the Comeback

The 2025 return is worth looking at in detail, because the choices were not those of someone easing back in. The Brahms concerto is one of the longest and most physically demanding works in the violin repertoire, roughly forty minutes of sustained playing with a first movement that gives the soloist almost nowhere to rest. Nobody chooses it to test a recovering neck.

Then, on the second night, she added a late-night set with Philharmonic musicians and the New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck: Max Richter’s Mercy, Jessie Montgomery’s Musings, two pieces by Carlos Simon, the Ysaÿe Ballade, a Bach courante and movements from George Walker’s cello sonata. Playing a full concerto and then a chamber programme of mostly living composers, in the same week you return from a seven-month absence, describes a particular relationship with the work.

Curtis at Ten, and an Ysaÿe Lineage

Hahn was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1979 and admitted to the Curtis Institute in 1990, at ten. She studied there with Jascha Brodsky, who had studied with Eugène Ysaÿe, and later with Jaime Laredo, graduating in 1999.

That teaching line is not decorative. Ysaÿe wrote the six solo sonatas that are among the hardest things in the repertoire, and Hahn has recorded them; when she programmed a late-night set during her 2025 return she included the third of them, the Ballade, alongside Bach, Max Richter, Jessie Montgomery and Carlos Simon.

The Grammys came in 2001 for the Brahms and Stravinsky concertos, in 2008 for Schoenberg and Sibelius, and in 2013 for In 27 Pieces. Sixteen albums have appeared since 1996 across Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammophon and Decca.

The Commissioning Is the Career

In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores is the clearest statement of what she actually does. She commissioned twenty-six living composers to write short encores, among them Jennifer Higdon, Nico Muhly, Du Yun, David Del Tredici and Max Richter, then ran an open contest for the twenty-seventh, won by Jeff Myers. She toured the results between 2011 and 2013 before releasing the album.

The list of other commissions is long: a concerto from Edgar Meyer in 1999, Jennifer Higdon’s violin concerto, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, six partitas from Antón García Abril premiered across 2016 and 2017, and a sonata from Lera Auerbach in 2019.

Very few soloists at this level spend that much of their working life on music nobody has heard. It is the same instinct as Víkingur Ólafsson building a studio under his own house, which is a decision to make the conditions rather than accept them. In Hahn’s case the conditions being made are the repertoire itself.

An 1864 Copy

She plays an 1864 Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume modelled on Paganini’s Guarneri, the instrument known as Il Cannone, and also owns an 1865 Vuillaume based on the Alard Stradivarius. Neither is a priceless original, which is a quietly characteristic choice from a player whose reputation rests on control rather than on tone as an inheritance.

Vuillaume was a nineteenth-century Parisian maker whose copies were good enough that soloists have used them by preference rather than by necessity for a century and a half. Choosing one over a period Italian instrument also removes a practical anxiety: a working violinist who tours constantly is carrying the thing through airports, and an instrument that is merely excellent rather than irreplaceable is a different daily proposition. She has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2016, having previously been based in New York.

The best line from the whole episode came a year before the surgery, at the first return, when she wrote that she intended to keep making music for as long as possible, and hoped to manage it until she was ninety-seven, like Maestro Blomstedt. She then added, in brackets, no pressure. On the current evidence the joke has become a plan.

By Will Lisil / August 21, 2026

Article Country Featured Folk Music News

Molly Tuttle’s Pop Record Topped the Bluegrass Chart

The album has a rock producer, an all-woman band with a drum kit in it, and a cover of Icona Pop’s I Love It. AllMusic called it an acoustic musician’s big pop move. It went to number one on the US Bluegrass Albums chart.

That is the funniest and most revealing fact about So Long Little Miss Sunshine, which Nonesuch released on 15 August 2025. Molly Tuttle made a deliberate move out of a genre, and the genre’s chart claimed her anyway.

Made With a Rock Producer

Jay Joyce produced it across October and November 2024 at Neon Cross Studio in Nashville, with mastering at Georgetown Masters. Joyce’s catalogue runs through country and rock rather than bluegrass, and Tuttle has been explicit that this was the attraction.

She has explained the choice in practical terms, saying she looked at his discography and found he had worked with a lot of her heroes while also having an eclectic career, and adding that she liked that he is a guitar player. That last point matters more than it sounds. A producer who plays the instrument the artist is famous for will make different arrangement decisions than one who does not.

The personnel confirm the direction. Tuttle sings and plays guitar and banjo. Joyce plays multiple instruments alongside producing. Byron House plays bass, Ketch Secor adds fiddle, banjo and vocals, and there are two drummers across the record in Fred Eltringham and Jay Bellerose. Bluegrass does not have a drummer.

Twelve Tracks and One Cover

The record runs twelve songs in forty-five minutes. That’s Gonna Leave a Mark arrived first on 3 June 2025, The Highway Knows followed on 10 July, and Old Me (New Wig) closed the run-up on 31 July. Elsewhere the titles are Everything Burns, Golden State of Mind, Summer of Love, Oasis, No Regrets and Story of My So-Called Life, alongside Rosalee, the one track that still sits plainly in bluegrass.

The Icona Pop cover is the clearest signal of intent. I Love It is a 2012 electro-pop single with almost nothing in it that an acoustic band can play, which makes covering it a statement rather than a homage. Keeping Rosalee on the same record stops the album reading as a repudiation: the bluegrass is still there, it is simply no longer the organising principle.

The Band That Stopped

Golden Highway went on hiatus in May 2025. Formed in 2021 with Shelby Means on bass, Kyle Tuttle on banjo, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle and Dominick Leslie on mandolin, it made Crooked Tree and City of Gold, and both won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album.

Stopping a band that has just won two Grammys in consecutive cycles is not an obvious commercial decision. Tuttle replaced it with an all-woman touring band including drums, which is a structural change rather than a personnel one: a bluegrass band’s rhythm comes from the mandolin chop and the bass, and adding a kit removes the need for that arrangement entirely.

Old Me, New Wig

The third single was called Old Me (New Wig), released on 31 July 2025. Tuttle was diagnosed with alopecia areata at the age of three, which progressed to alopecia universalis, and she has spoken about it publicly for years.

Putting it in a song title rather than an interview is a different act. An interview answer is a response to a question somebody else asked; a single is something you choose to name and then have to say out loud every night on tour. On a record about self-acceptance and transformation, it is the track that makes the theme literal.

She Has Done This Before

The switch is not out of character. Her 2019 debut When You’re Ready was an acoustic pop and singer-songwriter record from a musician everybody expected to make bluegrass. But I’d Rather Be With You followed in 2020. Only then did she turn to Golden Highway and the two bluegrass albums, encouraged in that direction by Ketch Secor, now her fiancé.

So the pattern runs pop, then bluegrass, then pop again, which suggests the genre question was never really open. She has also said that bluegrass as a genre has opened up to all sorts of different audiences in recent years, which is a generous way of describing an artist who has spent a decade declining to stay inside it.

The Credentials Underneath

The moves land differently because of what she can do. Tuttle was born in Santa Clara in 1993 and raised in Palo Alto, the daughter of the bluegrass multi-instrumentalist and teacher Jack Tuttle. She started guitar at eight, was performing with her father at eleven, and played in a family band with her siblings.

She went to Berklee on merit scholarships and received the Foundation for Bluegrass Music’s first Hazel Dickens Memorial Scholarship. In 2017 she became the first woman to win IBMA Guitar Player of the Year, and won it again in 2018. The Americana Music Association named her Instrumentalist of the Year the same year.

Nobody can claim she left bluegrass because she could not play it. That is precisely why the bluegrass chart kept her.

It is worth being specific about what those guitar awards represent, because they are not a popularity vote. IBMA Guitar Player of the Year is decided by a professional membership of people who play the instrument for a living, in a tradition where flatpicking technique is measured against a lineage running back through Tony Rice and Doc Watson. Winning it twice, as the first woman to do so, is a technical verdict from the strictest available jury. An artist carrying that can spend the rest of her career doing whatever she likes, and the genre will keep counting her as one of its own.

How It Was Received

AllMusic gave four stars and called it a pop move that fully succeeds. PopMatters scored it eight out of ten, describing it as excellently written, impeccably performed and highly entertaining. The Financial Times gave four out of five and made the most useful observation, which is that it never feels like a forced detour.

Commercially it did what a genre departure usually does, which is trade breadth for depth. Number one on the bluegrass chart, forty-five on US Top Album Sales, thirty-two in Scotland and eleven on the UK Americana chart. The Grammy nominations that followed were for Best Americana Album and Best Americana Performance, for That’s Gonna Leave a Mark, at the ceremony on 1 February 2026.

Moving from the bluegrass categories to the Americana ones is the institutional version of the same story. The academy reclassified her; the chart did not.

Guitars on Fire

She opened 2026 co-headlining the Guitars on Fire Tour with Marty Stuart, and opened for the Tedeschi Trucks Band in Dallas and Fort Worth in April. A Cayamo cruise follows in early 2027.

Pairing with Marty Stuart is a shrewd bit of positioning: he is a country institution who has spent his own career refusing to sit still, and a co-headline bill with him reads as continuity rather than defection. It puts her in the same position as Sierra Ferrell taking a string band to Rock Werchter, which is that the audience for American roots music has moved and both are following it rather than waiting.

By Will Lisil / August 20, 2026

Article Classical Featured Music News

Víkingur Ólafsson Made His Bach Album in a Home Studio

There is a room under his house in Iceland with teak walls and enough equipment to run a session without an engineer in the building. He calls it The Nutshell. His description of what it is for is the least grand sentence a Grammy-winning pianist has offered in some time: he can wander downstairs late at night in his pyjamas, press a couple of buttons, and start recording.

Continuum II, which Deutsche Grammophon releases on 13 November 2026, is the first album Víkingur Ólafsson has made entirely in there. Everything about the record follows from that fact.

Bach as a Diary

The project has an unusually plain premise. For more than thirty years he has played a little Bach every day, and he has described it as the one constant in his life regardless of what else is happening. Continuum, whose first volume appeared in October 2024, is that habit turned into a release schedule rather than a concept devised for one.

He has called this instalment his first album domesticum, built around intimate works associated with the home. The word choice is exact rather than decorative: these are pieces written for domestic instruments and domestic occasions, now recorded in a domestic building.

What Is Actually on It

The repertoire declines almost every opportunity for display. Six chorales, including Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, Welt, ade!, and Es ist genug. Six short preludes Bach wrote as practice pieces for his pupils. The Largo from the Keyboard Concerto No. 5 in F minor. The Larghetto from the Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D major, itself Bach’s reworking of Vivaldi, which was released as the second single in August.

There is one ensemble piece: the Adagio from the Violin Sonata No. 5 in F minor, arranged for piano, string quartet and double bass, with the Siggi String Quartet and the bassist Xun Yang. Everything else is a man alone in a room with an instrument, which is what the studio was built for.

Choosing student exercises for an album is a real decision. The short preludes exist because a teacher needed material for children, and they are usually heard played by beginners rather than by soloists who have sold out Wigmore Hall. Recording them at this level is an argument that the domestic Bach is not lesser Bach.

Two Versions of the Same Air

The first single, released in July, was his own arrangement of Air on the G String, dedicated to György Kurtág for his hundredth birthday. He recorded it twice: once on a grand piano and once on an upright.

That is the clearest demonstration of what the home studio changes. Booking two instruments and a hall to record alternate takes of one three-minute piece is an expensive proposition that a label would question. Doing it in your own basement costs an afternoon, and the second version exists because there was no reason it should not.

What Continuum Means

The title points at something specific. Ólafsson has noted that the project is named for the unbroken thread linking all music, and that the composer’s own surname is the German word for a stream. A series of albums assembled from daily practice is that idea made literal: the recording is a section cut out of something that was running before the tape started and carries on after it stops.

It also solves a problem that catalogue Bach usually has. A pianist recording the Well-Tempered Clavier or the partitas is producing a definitive statement on a fixed text, and the format invites comparison with every previous recording. An open-ended journal makes no such claim. Each volume is only what the playing was like during that stretch, which is a far more forgiving frame and, on this evidence, a more honest one.

Why He Built It

He has connected the studio to turning forty and wanting the freedom to record with complete spontaneity. Classical recording normally runs on the opposite principle: a hall booked months out, a producer, an engineer, a tuner, a schedule measured in sessions, and a piano that has to be right on the day.

Under that system a performance has to be ready when the diary says so. Removing the booking removes the deadline, and a musician who plays Bach every morning can simply record on the days when it goes well. For a project explicitly framed as a journal, that is the only sane way to work.

He Ran His Own Label First

None of this is out of character. Ólafsson was born in Reykjavík in 1984 to a mother, Svana Víkingsdóttir, who was a piano teacher and gave him his first lessons. He studied in Iceland, then took a bachelor’s and a master’s at Juilliard.

Before Deutsche Grammophon signed him in 2016, he released three albums on his own label, Dirrindí: a debut of Brahms and Beethoven in 2009, a Chopin and Bach programme in 2011, and a Winterreise with the bass Kristinn Sigmundsson in 2012 that won Classical Album of the Year at the Icelandic Music Awards. He also founded the Reykjavík Midsummer Music festival in 2012 and has premiered six piano concertos by Icelandic composers.

Building infrastructure rather than waiting to be given it is the through-line. It puts him alongside Igor Levit naming a new label after a concert he gave in Berlin: two pianists of the same generation who have concluded that owning the means of release is part of the artistic work rather than a business afterthought.

A Billion Streams of Mostly Bach

The commercial position is unusual for a classical soloist. He has passed a billion streams worldwide, about half of them Bach, and the Goldberg Variations won him the 2025 Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. The shelf also holds BBC Music Magazine Album of the Year, two Opus Klassik awards, Gramophone Artist of the Year, the RPS Gold Medal, the Nordic Council Music Prize and Iceland’s Order of the Falcon.

The Deutsche Grammophon run since 2017 has been deliberately varied: Philip Glass, then Bach, then Debussy paired with Rameau, then Mozart and his contemporaries, then From Afar, then the Goldbergs, then Opus 109. A pianist who programmes that way is not repeating a formula, which makes the decision to settle into a multi-volume Bach project a change of method rather than a safe retreat.

The Rest of the Year

The diary around the release is heavy. He created and curates the PULSE festival at Lucerne, where he played the Goldberg Variations in July with the artist Olafur Eliasson. A recital at the Edinburgh International Festival followed in August, then a European tour with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra playing Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto, and three recitals at Wigmore Hall in September.

October brings the world premiere of Mark Simpson’s piano concerto with the London Philharmonic, then a recital tour of South Korea, China and Taiwan. He closes the year on 4 December playing Brahms’s first concerto with the Berliner Philharmoniker in Baden-Baden.

Against that schedule, the argument for the room under the house becomes obvious. A musician on the road for most of a year has very few days at home, and the only way to record on those days is to have somewhere to do it that requires no notice from anybody.

By Will Lisil / August 20, 2026

Article Featured Music News Pop Rock

Mk.gee Made a 33-Minute Debut With No Guests and No Clear Vocals

Almost every instinct in modern record-making pushes the vocal forward. Streaming rewards an identifiable hook early, playlists reward clarity, and a singer buried in the mix is normally a sign that something went wrong in mastering.

Michael Gordon, who records as Mk.gee, did the opposite deliberately, and it produced one of the most decorated debuts of its year.

Twelve Tracks, Thirty-Three Minutes, Nobody Else

Two Star & the Dream Police was released on 9 February 2024 through R&R. Twelve tracks, thirty-three minutes and eighteen seconds — an average of two minutes forty-six per song, with “New Low” at 2:06 and “DNM” at 1:58.

The release schedule showed the same refusal to run the normal sequence. Five singles preceded the album, and the first two — “Candy” and “How Many Miles” — arrived together as a double A-side on 11 August 2023, attached to no announced album at all. A second double, “Are You Looking Up” and “You Got It”, followed on 20 October. Only with “Dream Police” on 19 January 2024 did the record acquire a title and a date. Half a year of music went out before Gordon conceded there was an album behind it.

The more unusual number is zero. The album carries no guest features at all, which in contemporary alternative R&B is close to a statement. Debuts in this lane are normally where an artist spends their relationships.

Gordon had those relationships to spend. He played guitar on Dijon’s Absolutely, worked on Omar Apollo’s Apolonio, has a writing credit with The Kid Laroi, and was sampled on “Fair Trade” from Drake’s Certified Lover Boy. He used none of it. Dijon Duenas appears, but as co-producer on two tracks rather than as a voice.

The Vocal Is Under the Groove on Purpose

The signature is a mix decision. The Line of Best Fit, scoring the record 8 out of 10, describes vocals “layered under the minimalist groove” and intentionally mixed low, with “I Want” noted as “one of the few moments his vocals come through clearly”.

Burying the lead is only viable if something else is carrying the melodic argument, and here it is the guitar. The review characterises his tone as “warm but sharp” and used “as lyrically as his words” — which is the whole design in one phrase. The guitar is not accompanying the vocal; the two are sharing the job, and sometimes the guitar wins.

The rest of the palette is described as “dripping in reverb and sonically barebones”, with pounding toms, distant horns and twinkling synths, and a drum sound the reviewer places somewhere between Prince’s M1 and Meg White’s Ludwig snare. Reverb plus sparseness is a difficult combination: reverb usually fills a mix, and using it while keeping the arrangement bare means the space itself becomes an instrument.

The track listing itself points at the process. One song is called “Alesis”, after the audio-hardware maker whose drum machines and mixers furnished a generation of home studios. Naming a track for a piece of gear rather than a person or a feeling is a small tell about where the writing starts on this record.

He treats it as more than an in-joke. In February 2024 Gordon played the Jil Sander Fall/Winter show in Milan alongside Benji B, and the three songs he performed were “Dream Police”, “How Many Miles” and “Alesis” — a non-single named after a drum-machine manufacturer, given equal billing with the lead singles in front of a fashion-house audience.

Why Mixing It Himself Mattered

A buried vocal is exactly the decision an outside mixer talks an artist out of, and it is worth noting who held the fader. Gordon mixed the album himself.

That is the mechanism behind the whole aesthetic. A mix engineer’s professional instinct — and often their explicit brief — is intelligibility, so a deliberately obscured lead would be corrected somewhere between the first pass and the label playback. Keeping the mix in-house is what let a choice this counterintuitive survive to release.

Mastering was split, unusually, between two engineers: Heba Kadry took “How Many Miles” and “Candy”, Simon Lancelot the other ten. Splitting a short record between masters risks inconsistency, and doing it anyway suggests those two tracks needed something the rest did not.

It is also a deliberate break from his own past. The Line of Best Fit frames the album as a sonic departure from the lo-fi aesthetic of his earlier A Museum of Contradiction — so the reverb-soaked spareness here is a constructed decision, not a limitation carried over from making records cheaply.

Short Songs Are a Structural Choice, Not a Shortcut

Nine of the twelve tracks run under three minutes. That reads as brevity for the streaming era, but the record is not built like playlist bait — the songs are loosely structured and drift rather than resolving into choruses.

Short and unresolved is a harder combination than short and catchy. Without a hook to return to, a two-minute song has to justify itself on texture and feel alone, and it has to stop before the listener starts waiting for a payoff that is not coming. Ending early is how the record avoids reading as unfinished.

Only “Breakthespell” passes four minutes, at 4:27. It is the one place the album lets an idea run.

The writing is almost entirely his as well. Only two tracks carry co-writes — John Keuch and Sam Wilkes on “You Got It”, Keuch again on the closing “Dream Police” — so the same person is responsible for the song, the guitar part, the arrangement and the mix on ten of the twelve. That concentration is what makes a decision as unusual as the buried vocal internally consistent rather than eccentric: there is no seam where someone else would have argued for clarity.

The Critics Reached for the Same Word

Reception was strong and, more tellingly, consistent in what it identified. The album took a Metacritic score of 83. Pitchfork scored it 7.8, called it a “magnificent debut album” and noted that “nothing in contemporary music sounds quite like it”. The Guardian gave five stars, Rolling Stone four, Clash and The Line of Best Fit both 8 out of 10 — the latter praising “an artistry so well studied and expertly executed”.

Clash also described “an immersive quality” and a “nocturnal wash of acoustics”, which is a fair account of what a buried vocal and a wet, sparse mix do to a listener: you lean in, and leaning in is the point.

Year-end recognition went further than the review scores suggest. It was named album of the year by Clash, by Dazed, and by Jon Caramanica at The New York Times, and Pitchfork later included it among the best albums of the first half of the 2020s.

What the Charts Did and Did Not Say

Commercially it stayed in specialist territory: number eight on the UK independent albums chart, twelve in Scotland, ninety-one on the French rock and metal chart. There is no mainstream chart placing to report.

The audience arrived by other routes. “Are You Looking Up” placed twelfth in Dazed’s twenty best tracks of 2023 and “You Got It” twenty-sixth in The Fader’s hundred best songs of that year, both before the album existed. Gordon made his live television debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in April 2024, and that June “Are You Looking Up” surfaced in the ninth episode of the third season of The Bear. Then he toured it properly — North America from April to May 2024, followed by a world tour through North America, Europe and Australia running from September to December.

None of that is chart activity, and all of it is distribution.

That gap between critical position and chart position is the honest outcome of the decisions above. A record with no features, no clear vocal hook and no song built to be excerpted has almost nothing for the mechanisms that produce chart placings to grab hold of.

What it has instead is a sound that critics repeatedly described as unlike anything else, which is the rarer currency and the one that survives a year-end list. For a writer curious about the opposite approach, our piece on how features became a career strategy covers what Gordon declined to do.

Two Star & the Dream Police is out on R&R.

By Will Lisil / August 18, 2026

Article Featured Jazz Music News Queer Music & LGBTQA+

Meshell Ndegeocello Recast Fifteen Duets as Same-Gender Pairs

Islands in the Stream was written by the Bee Gees and recorded by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. On Synonym it is sung by Meshell Ndegeocello and Chaka Khan. I Got You Babe belonged to Sonny and Cher; here it goes to Ndegeocello and ANOHNI. Golden Ring, a George Jones and Tammy Wynette record about a wedding ring passing between owners, is handled with Brandi Carlile.

The rule holds across all fifteen tracks. Every duet on the album is performed by two people who identify as the same gender, and the songs were chosen from a canon that almost entirely assumes otherwise. Ndegeocello’s third Blue Note album arrives on 2 October 2026, and that single constraint is the whole design.

Why the Album Is Called Synonym

She has been direct about what the title means. “This project is an expression of queer liberation as a synonym for liberation of all kinds,” she has said, and the record is built to demonstrate the point rather than argue it.

A duet is one of the few song forms with gender written into its architecture. The call and response, the harmony parts, the narrative of who is asking and who is answering were all arranged around an assumption. Removing the assumption and changing nothing else is a cleaner experiment than writing new songs would have been, because the listener already knows what these records are supposed to sound like.

Fifteen Songs From Four Decades

The source material runs from the 1960s to the early 2000s and refuses to sit in one genre. I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me), the George Michael and Aretha Franklin record, opens the album with Cynthia Erivo. Don’t You Want Me, the Human League’s, goes to Cat Power. It Ain’t Me Babe, Bob Dylan’s, is taken with Madison Cunningham, and With God On Our Side, also Dylan, closes the album with Bill Callahan and Chris Thile.

Elsewhere the list reaches into R&B and hip-hop: Don’t Stop The Music with Nick Hakim and Robert Glasper, Always on Time with Laura Lee of Khruangbin, Don’t Look Any Further with Lianne La Havas, The Closer I Get To You with Destin Conrad and Moses Sumney. Be Real Black For Me, the Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway song, is sung with Emily King and Lizz Wright. Hunger Strike, the Temple of the Dog track, goes to WILLOW.

Nineteen guests is a large number for a record with any coherence, and the spread of idioms is deliberate. Ndegeocello has described the songs as diverse in tone and representative of various genres, and the effect is to show that the constraint is not a genre trick. It works the same way on a country weeper as on a synth-pop single.

The Producer Who Made Her First Two Records

David Gamson co-produces alongside Ndegeocello and Abe Rounds. Gamson produced Plantation Lullabies in 1993 and Peace Beyond Passion in 1996, which makes this a working relationship resumed after roughly thirty years.

That is a pointed choice given the subject. Plantation Lullabies was noted at the time for presenting a distinctly androgynous persona, and it was one of the first releases on Maverick Records. Returning to the producer of that record to make an album about who is allowed to sing to whom closes a loop that has been open most of her career.

Players Rather Than Features

The instrumental credits explain why this reads as a Blue Note album rather than a covers project. Abe Rounds and Deantoni Parks share the drums. Chris Bruce plays guitar. Jake Sherman, Jebin Bruni and Larry Goldings handle keyboards. Josh Johnson and Levon Henry play saxophone, Elena Pinderhughes plays flute, and Bela Fleck plays banjo.

Goldings, Johnson and Pinderhughes are serious jazz musicians, and Fleck’s banjo on a record containing Dolly Parton and George Jones songs is a straight-faced instrumentation decision rather than a joke. The band is fixed and rotating rather than assembled per guest, which keeps fifteen different vocal pairings sounding like one album.

Ndegeocello has framed her own role in production terms, saying she wanted to do more collective music and to show what she can do as a producer. For an artist whose reputation was built on bass playing and songwriting, that is a real repositioning.

Two Grammys in Two Years

She has thirteen Grammy nominations and three wins. The first came for Best R&B Song, for Better Than I Imagined. The other two are consecutive awards for Best Alternative Jazz Album, for The Omnichord Real Book and then No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, which were her first two Blue Note releases.

Those were also the first Grammys to honour her own albums across a recording career of more than thirty years, which is a strange fact about an artist widely credited with helping to spark neo-soul. Winning the same category twice running, immediately after signing to a jazz label in her mid-fifties, describes a late-career surge rather than a legacy lap.

Go-Go Bands in Washington

She was born Michelle Lynn Johnson in Berlin in 1968 and learned to play in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s, working with go-go bands including Prophecy, Little Benny and the Masters, and Rare Essence. The surname she adopted means free like a bird in Swahili.

Go-go is relevant to what she does now. It is a live, percussive, call-and-response idiom built on continuous grooves and audience exchange, and the habit of treating a song as something two parties do to each other rather than a fixed text runs directly into an album made of duets.

The label history since then reads like a map of an artist nobody could file: Maverick and Reprise, then Shanachie, EmArcy, Decca, Mercer Street, Naïve, and finally Blue Note in 2023. Seven labels across three decades usually indicates a commercial problem. In this case it tracks a musician who moved between R&B, rock, spoken word, covers projects and jazz faster than any single roster could follow, and the Blue Note run is the first time the catalogue and the label have been pointed the same way.

The Argument Underneath

Her other stated position on the project is disarmingly plain: whatever the differences between people, what they want underneath is much the same, and she has named healthy food and a safe place as the example. That is a modest claim to hang a fifteen-track album on, and the modesty is the point.

She has also said she is not defining anything, because the absence of definition is where she feels most free. A record that reassigns famous duets without rewriting a word is exactly that principle applied to material rather than to identity. Nothing is explained; the pairings simply happen and the songs turn out to work.

What Follows

She plays the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York on 18, 19 and 20 September 2026 in a trio configuration with Chris Dave and Eric Gales, ahead of the album’s arrival at the start of October.

A run of small-room dates before a guest-heavy studio release is the right sequencing for what this is, because the album’s argument is finally about performance rather than production. It sits alongside Immanuel Wilkins recording three albums across two nights at the Village Vanguard as evidence of what Blue Note is currently doing, which is signing musicians with a formal idea and then letting them execute it at length.

By Will Lisil / August 18, 2026

Article Country Featured Folk Music News

Sierra Ferrell Named Her Forty-Date Tour Heavy Petal

Her last album was called Trail of Flowers. The tour supporting whatever comes next is called Heavy Petal. The joke is doing a fair amount of work, because it signals that an artist who has just won four Grammys for a record of alternative country and bluegrass has no intention of behaving solemnly about it.

The run covers more than forty dates between May and October 2026, opening at McMenamins Edgefield in Portland on 30 May and finishing with two nights at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville in late October. In between it takes in most of the American festival circuit and a full European leg.

The Route

The American dates favour outdoor rooms and fairgrounds: the Salt Shed Outdoors in Chicago, the Santa Barbara Bowl, the State Fair of West Virginia, the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand, Artpark in Lewiston, Thompson’s Point in Portland, Maine. Festival appearances include Buckeye Superfest, Grand Targhee Bluegrass and the Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion.

Europe runs tighter and mostly indoors. Manchester Academy on 24 June, the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow the following night, then Le Trianon in Paris, Paradiso in Amsterdam and Gruenspan in Hamburg, closing at the O2 Forum Kentish Town on 7 July. The festival dates around them are large: Roskilde, Down The Rabbit Hole and Rock Werchter across three consecutive days.

Playing Roskilde and Rock Werchter is a specific kind of statement for an American roots act. Those are not Americana festivals; they are general European rock and pop bills where a fiddle and an upright bass are the exception. Booking them suggests the audience has outgrown the genre circuit.

One American date carries more weight than its billing suggests. On 16 August she plays the State Fair of West Virginia in Lewisburg, in the state where she was born and raised. State fairs are not prestige bookings and nobody takes one to advance a career. Playing the fair in your home state after a Grammy sweep is a different kind of decision, and it sits oddly and deliberately among the Santa Barbara Bowl and the European festival run.

A Dollar From Every Ticket

The tour runs a partnership with PLUS1 under which a dollar from every ticket sold goes to charity. North American proceeds are directed to the National Immigration Law Center.

Naming the recipient is the part worth noting. Tour charity tie-ins are common and usually vague, pointed at a general fund or left unnamed in the announcement. Specifying an organisation is a decision that will be read as a position, and it was made anyway.

Freight Trains, Not Bedrooms

Sierra Elizabeth Ferrell was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1988 and grew up in a trailer with her mother. She was singing Shania Twain covers in bars at seven. The records she actually absorbed were nineties cassettes, 10,000 Maniacs and Tracy Chapman, rather than the bluegrass her home state is known for.

School brought clarinet and choir, then guitar. As a teenager she sang in a band called 600 lbs of Sin!. In her early twenties she left, hitchhiking and freighthopping and busking between Seattle and New Orleans, and that period is the one everything else is measured against. The New Yorker put it plainly, observing that she built her act not from the comfort of a bedroom but in freight-train boxcars.

That is not a marketing biography. It explains a specific thing about how she performs, which is that the material was tested on people who had not chosen to listen. Busking selects for songs that stop a stranger walking past, and it produces a vocal delivery built to carry without amplification.

Four Albums, Two of Them Self-Released

Pretty Magic Spell came out in 2018 and Washington by the Sea in 2019, both self-released. Rounder Records then issued Long Time Coming in 2021, which reached fifteen on the Billboard Americana and folk chart, and Trail of Flowers in March 2024.

The genre list attached to her is unusually long even by Americana standards: alternative country, bluegrass, folk, gypsy jazz, tango and calypso all appear in it. That is what a repertoire assembled on the street looks like, because a busker learns whatever holds a crowd rather than whatever fits a format.

The two self-released records matter to how the rest reads. They were made before any label was involved and before there was a version of her career worth protecting, which means the eclecticism was never a positioning exercise. By the time Rounder signed her the repertoire already existed in that shape, and the label’s contribution was distribution rather than direction. Very few artists arrive at a roots label with their strangeness already intact.

What the Grammys Did

At the 67th ceremony she won four awards in one night. Trail of Flowers took Best Americana Album. American Dreaming won both Best Americana Performance and Best American Roots Song. Lighthouse took Best American Roots Performance. She had already been named Artist of the Year and taken Album of the Year at the 2024 Americana Music Honors and Awards.

Sweeping a category set like that changes the booking conversation rather than the music, and the Heavy Petal routing is what the change looks like in practice. Three years ago she was playing clubs; the 2026 run includes state fair grandstands and two arena nights.

The Arena Nights Are Support Slots

The Bridgestone Arena dates on 22 and 23 October are opening for the Red Clay Strays, in her adopted home city. Taking a support slot for two arena shows after winning four Grammys is a deliberately unhurried move.

It is the same calculation Sturgill Simpson made by warming up for an arena tour in a bar with a two-hundred capacity. Both are artists who understand that the room teaches the set, and that arriving at an arena without having earned the arrangement in front of people is how a roots act loses what made it work.

No Album Yet

Nothing has been announced. Unreleased songs have appeared in recent sets, which is the usual signal, but Rounder has confirmed no record and no single. Announcing a forty-date tour before an album is a reversal of the standard order, where the release sets the schedule and the tour follows it.

The last twelve months suggest why she can afford to wait. In 2024 she recorded Never Love You Again with Post Malone and covered Someone Like You with Lukas Nelson, and in February 2026 she performed with Mumford and Sons on Saturday Night Live. That is a profile maintained without a new record, which removes the pressure to rush one.

The Sentimental Gentlemen

She tours with a band called the Sentimental Gentlemen, and no lineup change has been announced for 2026. Continuity matters more than usual here, because the arrangements depend on acoustic instruments played live rather than on a production that can be reproduced by any competent hired players.

That is ultimately what the Heavy Petal name is signalling. An artist who came up busking, who won four Grammys for a record named after flowers, and who is now taking a string band to Rock Werchter, is not going to pretend the situation is serious. The routing says the ambition is.

By Will Lisil / August 18, 2026

Article Featured Holiday Music Music News

Pentatonix Booked Twenty-Eight Arenas for Six Weeks of Christmas

The first date is 5 November at the Tacoma Dome. The last is 22 December at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. Between them Pentatonix play twenty-six other arenas, which works out to roughly one show every other night for seven weeks, all of it Christmas music. Tickets went on general sale on 14 August.

Six days before the tour opens, on 30 October, a deluxe edition of Christmas in the City arrives, adding ten songs to the sixteen on the original. That album came out on 24 October 2025 through Republic Records and is the group’s eighth Christmas record. The sequencing of album, then deluxe, then tour is the machinery of a seasonal business that Pentatonix have been building since 2012.

The Route

November runs west to east and back again: Tacoma, then Vancouver’s Rogers Arena, Bozeman, Casper, Lincoln, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Louisville, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Hamilton, Charlottesville and Albany. December opens in Baltimore and works south through Columbia, Greenville, Raleigh, Nashville and Atlanta before turning west via North Little Rock, Bossier City, Austin, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Glendale and San Diego.

Two things stand out in that list. The first is how many mid-sized markets it includes: Casper, Wyoming and Bozeman, Montana are not standard arena-tour stops, and playing them in mid-November suggests an audience that is geographically spread rather than concentrated in major metros. The second is the pairing of Vancouver and Hamilton as the Canadian dates, both listed as firsts.

The density is the other notable feature. Twenty-eight arena shows inside forty-eight days means very few days off, and the run includes stretches of three shows in four nights. For a group whose entire instrumentation is human voices, that schedule is a physical proposition rather than a logistical one. There is no guitar to hide behind on a night when a voice is tired, and no backing band to carry a song, which is why a cappella acts historically toured less than their record sales would suggest they could.

What the Deluxe Adds

The original Christmas in the City runs sixteen tracks and forty-six minutes, opening with a twenty-one-second piece called Snow and closing on a Christmas Classics Medley. In between it moves between originals like Bah Humbug, Christmas Movie and Moody Rudy and standards including Holly Jolly Christmas, Silver Bells and Caroling, Caroling.

The deluxe brings ten more, made up of new material, covers and live recordings from the touring cycle. The lead single, released on 6 August, is a mashup of Get Happy and Happy Days Are Here Again, a pairing with a long history in American entertainment. Kirstin Maldonado has framed it as a tribute to the Christmas music of Hollywood’s golden age and the jazz era, which describes the whole record’s ambitions fairly.

A Big Band Without a Band

Scott Hoying has said the group wanted a big band orchestral sound with no rules, aiming for something “fun and bold and theatrical and camp” built around the idea of Christmas in New York. That is a demanding brief for five voices, one of whom is providing the percussion.

The a cappella constraint is what makes the record interesting rather than what limits it. Reproducing a brass section and a rhythm section vocally forces arrangement decisions that a real orchestra would make invisible, and the reviews picked up on it. The Associated Press’s Maria Sherman included it among the best holiday releases of 2025 and pointed to the group’s vocal athletics; another critic praised the multi-part arrangements, rhythmic precision and stylistic range.

Not Everyone Was Convinced

The reception was not uniform. Eric Saeger at Hippo gave it a B minus, finding the original songs largely unsuccessful while rating the traditional carol covers highly. That split is worth noting because it identifies the actual creative problem with a long-running holiday franchise: the standards are what the audience wants, and writing new Christmas songs that survive alongside them is close to impossible. The canon is effectively closed: most of what gets played every December was written between the 1930s and the 1960s, and the handful of later additions can be counted on two hands.

That is the trap every artist making an eighth holiday record walks into. Fill it with standards and you are competing against definitive recordings; fill it with originals and you are asking an audience to learn new songs during the one month a year they most want familiarity. Christmas in the City splits the difference roughly down the middle, and the reviews split along exactly that line.

Commercially the album performed as a catalogue release rather than an event, reaching twenty-eight on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart and six on Top Holiday Albums. The bigger chart story came from a track rather than the record: the group’s version of I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, built around a Frank Sinatra vocal, reached number one on the Adult Contemporary chart last December.

How They Got Here

Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi and Kirstin Maldonado were schoolmates in Arlington, Texas. Hoying recruited the other two for an audition on NBC’s The Sing-Off, adding Kevin Olusola, found through a video of him beatboxing while playing cello, and a bass vocalist. The five met the day before the audition and won the third season in 2011, taking a cash prize and a recording contract.

Matt Sallee took over bass duties in 2017. Along the way the group won three Grammy Awards: two for arrangement, in 2015 and 2016, and one in 2017 for a version of Jolene recorded with Dolly Parton. They received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 2023 and signed to Republic Records in early 2025.

The label move matters more than it looks. Republic is a pop major, and arriving there after more than a decade elsewhere, immediately before an eighth Christmas album and a twenty-eight-date arena run, indicates a group being handled as a year-round commercial asset rather than a seasonal one. Two non-holiday singles this year, Heaven on Earth in February and Sacrifice in July, point the same way.

The Christmas Catalogue Is the Business

Eight Christmas albums in thirteen years, plus compilations, is a genuine body of seasonal work. That’s Christmas to Me in 2014 remains the commercial peak: number two on the Billboard 200, double platinum, the fourth best-selling album in the United States that year at 1.14 million copies, and the highest-charting holiday album by a group since 1962. A Pentatonix Christmas in 2016 eventually reached number one.

Building a career around a season that lasts eight weeks is a strange structure, and it works because the catalogue compounds. Every year the older records return to the charts, and every new one adds to the pool. The tour is the part that cannot be automated, which is presumably why it runs to twenty-eight arenas.

The Donation at Checkout

One detail sits outside the commercial logic. The tour partners with the Save The Music Foundation, a music education nonprofit, with an optional donation offered during ticket purchase. It is a small thing and easy to dismiss as brand alignment, though the fit is closer than most: a group formed by school friends, discovered on a television competition, funding school music programmes.

It also puts them in company with acts making deliberately awkward commercial choices this year, in the way Sturgill Simpson capped his own resale market at face value across a comparable arena run. Pentatonix are working the most commercial season in music and have added a line at the checkout that asks for money to go somewhere else.

By Will Lisil / August 18, 2026

Article Country Featured Folk Music News

Sturgill Simpson Warmed Up for an Arena Tour in a 200-Capacity Bar

The announcement went out about two hours before the doors opened. Twenty-five dollars, cash at the door, at The Cobra in Nashville, a room that holds two hundred people. Sturgill Simpson and his band then played for close to three hours. Nine days later he opens a twenty-nine-date arena tour.

That contrast is the whole story of where Simpson currently sits. Mutiny After Midnight, released in March under the Johnny Blue Skies name, went to number three on the Billboard 200 and topped both the Americana and rock album charts. The Mutiny for the Masses tour begins on 4 September at the Moody Center in Austin and finishes on 30 October at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, with no opening act on any night.

Three Hours, Two Hundred People

The set on 26 August was his first full show since September 2025, which explains the length. According to JamBands, it opened with A Good Look from Sound & Fury, moved into the new album’s opening track, then returned to A Good Look, which is the kind of structural joke a band plays when nobody is watching from a distance.

What followed was less a rehearsal than an unusually long night out. The covers ran from Prince’s Purple Rain to Bad Company’s Feel Like Makin’ Love, played live for the first time, to Eddie Murphy’s Party All the Time and William Bell’s You Don’t Miss Your Water. The show closed on the band’s first ever performance of Talking Heads’ Life During Wartime.

The Band Behind the Alias

The Dark Clouds are Miles Miller on drums, Laur Joamets on guitar, Kevin Black on bass and Robbie Crowell on keyboards and saxophone, each credited on the record under a nickname: Easy Luvin, Little Joe, Black Daddy, Raw B. Simpson himself is credited as Johnny Blue Skies, plays rhythm and lead guitar and produced the album.

The nicknames are not entirely a joke. Presenting the group as a named band rather than a solo artist with sidemen matches how the record was made and how it plays live: a saxophone in a country band is not a guest appearance, it is a structural choice, and the material leans on it.

It is also the third distinct project name Simpson has operated under. He spent a decade building a reputation as a country traditionalist who kept refusing the label, then made a loud rock record in Sound & Fury, then a pair of bluegrass reworkings of his own catalogue, then adopted Johnny Blue Skies for 2024’s Passage du Desir and again here. Retiring your own name at the point of greatest recognition is a strange career move, and it has been consistent enough across two albums now to read as a working method rather than a stunt.

An Album Released on Purpose Awkwardly

Mutiny After Midnight came out on 13 March 2026 through High Top Mountain and Atlantic Outpost, and it arrived as a physical-only release, no streaming at launch. Nine tracks run forty-five minutes, recorded at Easy Eye Sound in Nashville, mixed and engineered by M. Alan Parker with Howie Weinberg mastering.

Physical-only is an unusual decision in 2026, and it did not entirely hold: the album leaked to YouTube on 1 March, twelve days ahead of release. It still opened at number three. Charting that high with a release strategy that actively removes the largest distribution channel is a fairly precise measurement of how committed the audience is.

Disco, Funk and a Country Chart

The music is not what the Americana chart position implies. The record moves through funk rock, disco and country rock, and Simpson has described it as a protest against oppression and suppression, with what he called unfiltered and relentless disco-hedonism as the antidote. The opening track is a profane inversion of a political slogan, and it sets the register for everything after it.

Reviewers responded to the swerve rather than resisting it. Pitchfork’s Stephen M. Deusner heard disco and country rock working together; Paste called the album uncensored, depraved and totally batshit; Rolling Stone read it as joyous. Consequence framed it as Simpson dancing on America’s grave, which is a review headline but also a reasonable summary of the tone.

Songs Built for a Long Night

The track lengths explain why a warm-up set ran to three hours. Ain’t That a Bitch is six minutes forty-two, Venus six minutes three, Situation five forty-four, Viridescent five fourteen. Only Excited Delirium, at two minutes and two seconds, is short. This is a record designed to be stretched on stage rather than reproduced.

The Cobra setlist bore that out, running through Stay On That, Everyone Is Welcome, Excited Delirium, Venus, Ain’t That a Bitch, Viridescent, Don’t Let Go and Situation, which is very nearly the whole album, alongside older material like Welcome to Earth (Pollywog). A band that plays eight of its nine new songs at a bar gig is not testing which ones work.

The chart spread underlines how awkwardly the record sits in any single lane. Number one on the US Americana and Folk chart and number one on Top Rock and Alternative, simultaneously, for an album whose dominant mode is disco. Internationally it reached seventeen in Scotland, eleven on the UK Americana chart and seven on the Croatian international chart. Those are the numbers of a record that different territories filed under different genres because none of the available boxes fits.

Twenty-Nine Arenas, No Support

The tour routing is substantial: from Austin through New Mexico, Arizona, California, Washington, British Columbia, Oregon, Colorado, Missouri, Minnesota and Illinois in September, then Nashville on 2 October and on through Indianapolis, St. Louis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Washington, Raleigh, Charleston, Atlanta and New Orleans before Lexington.

Booking arenas with no opening act is a statement about how the evening is meant to work. It also puts the full weight of a three-hour show on one band every night, which is presumably why the warm-up happened in a room where nothing was at stake.

The choice of closing venue is not incidental either. Rupp Arena is in Lexington, and Simpson grew up in Kentucky; ending a national arena run there rather than in a larger market is the sort of routing decision made for reasons that have nothing to do with ticket sales. The same instinct runs through the September leg, which crosses into British Columbia and works through secondary markets in the mountain west before turning east.

Tickets at Face Value

The detail most likely to outlast the tour is the ticketing. Simpson routed resale through Ticketmaster’s Face Value Exchange and AXS Resale, so fans reselling tickets can only do so at the original price. That removes the secondary-market margin entirely rather than capping it.

Artists complain about scalping constantly and rarely give up the revenue that flows from tolerating it. Doing that across twenty-nine arena dates, having already released the album on physical media only, describes an operating philosophy that is consistent even where it is commercially inconvenient. The two-hundred-capacity bar show a week before the first arena fits the same pattern, and so does Zoh Amba’s decision to set aside the instrument that made their name. Neither is the move that maximises anything except the work.

By Will Lisil / August 16, 2026

Article Featured Folk Jazz Music News

Zoh Amba Put Down the Saxophone and Went Home to Tennessee

The first thing on Eyes Full is a guitar figure, plainly played, and a voice singing about a child whose medication changes how the world looks. The song is called OCD, it runs four and a half minutes, and there is no saxophone anywhere on it. For anyone who knows Zoh Amba’s work, that absence is the loudest thing about the record.

Amba spent the first years of their career as one of the most physically committed saxophonists in New York’s free jazz scene, a player critics reached for Peter Brotzmann and Albert Ayler to describe. Their first album, O, Sun, was produced by John Zorn. Eyes Full, released by Matador Records on 5 June 2026, is thirteen guitar songs with singing on them, and it was made by going home.

Kingsport, Tennessee

Home is Kingsport, in the north-east corner of Tennessee, and the return is both literal and structural. Guitar was Amba’s first instrument before the saxophone, so the record reaches back past the work they are known for to something earlier. The label frames the album as muddy, loose blues with sweet burnishes of Appalachian folk, which is accurate as far as it goes and undersells how much noise is in it.

The subject is the town rather than the self. Amba has described the songs as being about people who really need to be seen and heard, and the record keeps its attention on working-class lives in places that do not get written about. Dead End Street is a driving Southern rocker built over layers of guitar noise, and its subject is small-town American life without any of the softening that phrase usually carries.

Every Song Is About Looking

The unifying idea is stated in the title and then worked through thirteen times. Eyes Full, Child You’ll See, Smile With Your Eyes: the track list alone tells you what the record is circling. KLOF Mag identified vision as the thread running through all of it, tied to being noticed, to care, to belonging and to divinity.

That last one is not decorative. Amba practises monastic Hinduism, and the search for faith surfaces repeatedly, most directly on Another Time, the lead single, and on Weed Eating, which the same review called an extraordinary character study. A record about being seen, written by someone with a religious practice, is not really about visibility in the social-media sense. It is about being witnessed.

That framing also explains why the album resists the obvious autobiographical reading. Amba is the one who left the small town and made a name somewhere else, which is the standard shape of this kind of record: the narrator returns, observes, and reports. Eyes Full mostly declines the narrator’s vantage point. The songs sit level with their subjects, and the recurring language of sight is applied to other people at least as often as to the singer.

What It Sounds Like

The palette is wider than the folk description implies. OCD opens on minimal guitar and finds a chorus that sounds drawn from old, strange American songcraft. PG Tips sets nagging strums against screeching electric guitar. Thousand Years travels from bluesy licks into something closer to emo crunch, and Blueberry Thorn breaks down into what the review fairly called an avant-country finale.

Against those are the quiet ones. Southern Soil is a shuffling acoustic piece where the voice jumps and skips with emotion held back too long. Emahoy is sweetly acoustic and apparently casual while staying completely controlled. On the title track Amba’s voice sounds cracked and strong at once, old and ageless, which is the register the whole album is reaching for.

The Band Behind It

Amba did not do it alone. Jim White plays drums and Kevin Hyland plays lead guitar, and the trio’s instrumental approach has drawn comparisons to The Band, which is a compliment about interplay rather than about sound. The arrangements leave the guitars room to be ugly when the song wants it, and the drumming is loose in a way that a session player would have tidied away.

Thirteen tracks run just over forty minutes, and only one passes four minutes. Odd Jobs lasts two minutes and one second. That compression is unexpected from a musician whose free jazz work regularly runs to long-form improvisation, and it is the clearest sign that this is genuinely songwriting rather than an improviser borrowing the format.

The sequencing supports that reading too. The two most abrasive pieces, PG Tips and Child You’ll See, sit at eleven and twelve, deep in the second half, where a record aimed at winning over a new audience would have buried them or cut them. Placing them there and then closing on Smile With Your Eyes, a folk-rock track that folds in Southern Appalachian mountain music, gives the album a shape that returns to where it started rather than resolving outward. The circularity is deliberate: a record about seeing ends by handing the phrase back.

The Reviews Split

Reception has been genuinely divided, which is more interesting than acclaim would have been. One critic called it a wild, beautiful thing; another found it a missed opportunity. KLOF Mag landed emphatically on the positive side, calling it so complete and accomplished that it is hard to believe it is a first attempt at songwriting.

The split is easy to understand. Listeners who came for the saxophone playing that earned Amba their reputation will find none of it, and the songwriting, while strong, is working in a crowded field where Adrianne Lenker has already set the terms. Judged as a debut in an unfamiliar form, it is remarkable. Judged against the free jazz records, it is a different artist entirely, which is the point.

Why the Pivot Reads as Honest

Musicians change lanes for all sorts of reasons, and commercial ambition is usually somewhere in the mix. That reading does not fit here. A free jazz saxophonist with an avant-garde following does not increase their audience by making an album of Appalachian-tinged guitar songs about a Tennessee town, and Matador is not a label that requires it. If anything the move costs an audience: the free jazz constituency is small but devoted, and it does not automatically follow a player into songwriting.

The press around Amba’s saxophone work makes the contrast sharper. The Guardian described scalding emotional intensity and wildly uplifting music; The New York Times wrote of passion coming from somewhere deep inside alongside a soft and prayerful side. Those are notices most improvisers spend a career trying to earn. Setting that down to sing about odd jobs and weed eating in a Tennessee town is a decision that only makes sense if the songs were the point.

What the record sounds like instead is someone dealing with material they could not get at through improvisation. KLOF Mag read the return to Kingsport and the return to guitar as the same movement, an acceptance of the past that includes some difficult childhood memories. That is a hard thing to play on a saxophone and a straightforward thing to write a song about, which may be the whole explanation.

Where It Sits

Coming from the improvising world into songwriting is a well-worn path, and it usually produces respectful, slightly stiff records. This one is neither. It is unpredictable across its thirteen tracks and it commits fully to a form its maker had not previously worked in, in the same spirit as Immanuel Wilkins releasing three volumes of unedited live playing rather than one tidy album.

Both are musicians declining to give the audience the version that would be easiest to sell. Amba’s case is the more extreme, because it involves setting aside the instrument the audience came for. On the evidence of Eyes Full, the songs were always there underneath.

By Will Lisil / August 14, 2026

Article Featured Music News Rock

Turnstile Put Elton John and a Death Metal Band on the Same Album

Somewhere on the guest list for Never Enough: Versions, Elton John’s name sits a few lines away from Dying Fetus, a death metal band from Maryland whose song titles are not printable in most contexts. Both are reworking material from the same album. That single fact tells you more about where Turnstile have arrived than any chart position does.

The record is out today, 28 August 2026, and it reinterprets Never Enough, the band’s fourth album, which came out on Roadrunner in June 2025 and won Best Rock Album at the 68th Grammy Awards. More than twenty artists contribute. When the project was announced a week ago, the band had not said which guest had taken which song, and that omission looks deliberate.

The Guest List Is the Statement

Read it in full and the logic emerges. There are pop figures of the largest possible scale and there is extreme metal. There is electronic music from several unrelated corners: Four Tet, Floating Points, A. G. Cook, Kettama, Dan Deacon. There are songwriters working in confessional registers, Julien Baker and Mustafa and Faye Webster, alongside Blood Orange, Oklou, Porches, Alex G, Chanel Beads and Nourished by Time.

Then there are the Baltimore inclusions, which are the ones that explain the rest. Rod Lee is a Baltimore club producer. Brandon Woody is a Baltimore trumpeter. Angel Du$t is a band Turnstile members play in. A remix album assembled purely for reach would not bother with any of them, and their presence turns the project from a marketing exercise into something closer to a map of where the band actually come from.

What They Are Reworking

Never Enough runs fourteen tracks and forty-five minutes, produced by the band’s singer Brendan Yates, with Will Yip engineering and contributing additional production, and A. G. Cook adding production to Dull. It arrived after three singles: the title track in April 2025, then Seein’ Stars paired with Birds later that month, and Look Out for Me in May.

The album is already an unusual object for a hardcore band. Look Out for Me runs nearly seven minutes; Ceiling lasts seventy-three seconds. Kerrang! called it cinematic in scope and execution and made it their album of the year. The Guardian, giving it four out of five, described a profusion of ideas deftly handled. Metacritic settled at 83 from nineteen reviews. Pitchfork was cooler at 7.8, hearing 1980s nostalgia in it.

The structure is what makes it reworkable. A record built from uniform three-minute songs offers a remixer one obvious job: change the drums, extend the intro, deliver a version. Never Enough does not offer that. Its lengths run from Ceiling at seventy-three seconds to Look Out for Me at six minutes forty-four, and the album keeps interrupting itself with short instrumental passages that function as breathing room rather than transitions. Handing that to twenty-three artists produces twenty-three different problems rather than one repeated exercise, which is presumably the point.

Five reviewers gave it full marks, including Kerrang!, NME and The Arts Desk, while Rolling Stone stopped at three and a half out of five and AllMusic gave four and a half. That spread of enthusiasm without consensus is characteristic of records that cross over from a scene: the outlets closest to the genre were the most emphatic, and the general-interest press admired it at a slight distance.

A Hardcore Band at Number Nine

Commercially the record did something the genre rarely does. It entered the Billboard 200 at nine, the highest placing of the band’s career, on 38,000 album-equivalent units of which 27,500 were pure sales. It went to number one on both the US Top Hard Rock chart and the UK Rock and Metal chart, eleven in the UK overall, five in Australia and seven in Germany.

Then the year-end lists arrived and the spread was telling: first at Kerrang!, fourth at Exclaim!, eighth at NME, tenth at Billboard, fifteenth at The Guardian, eighteenth at Consequence, thirty-first at Rolling Stone. Publications with no shared readership all found room for the same hardcore record, which is the precondition for a guest list this wide.

Two Grammys, and Which Ones

At the 68th Grammy Awards the band won Best Rock Album, and Birds won Best Metal Performance. They were also nominated for Best Rock Performance for the title track and Best Alternative Music Performance for Seein’ Stars.

Those four nominations sit in three different genre families, which is the institutional version of the same point the guest list makes. Birds runs two minutes and twenty-six seconds and was judged metal; Seein’ Stars, from the same session and the same album, was judged alternative. The band did not change between tracks. The categories simply could not agree on what they were listening to.

Ninety-Four Shows and Counting

The touring has been relentless. The Never Enough Tour opened in Nashville on 15 September 2025 and ran to 94 shows across nine legs, through North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Latin America and Asia, originally closing in Australia in January. Venues climbed accordingly, from clubs to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, Alexandra Palace in London and the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona.

More than thirty-five support acts appeared across it, and the choices repeat the pattern: hardcore institutions like Hatebreed, Terror and Agnostic Front on some nights, Blood Orange, Yves Tumor, Clipse and Vince Staples on others. The 2026 festival run took in Coachella across both weekends, Lollapalooza in Chicago, Austin City Limits across two weekends in October, Fuji Rock, Outside Lands and Osheaga.

Ninety-four shows across five continents in roughly sixteen months is a workload closer to a legacy act’s than a hardcore band’s, and it explains why the reissue arrives when it does. The album has been played nightly for a year; the songs have already been reshaped once by the road before any guest touched them. A remix collection released at the end of that cycle is documenting a record that has stopped being fixed rather than one that was ever finished.

Pt. 2, and the Nonprofits

Never Enough Tour Pt. 2 opens on 9 September in Milwaukee, a sixteen-date headline run with curated bills rather than a single support act. The lineups again refuse to pick a lane, mixing Clipse and Vince Staples with Hatebreed, Pennywise, Ceremony, Cold World and Texas Is the Reason.

The detail worth noting is that the band are partnering with local nonprofit organisations at every date, with an on-the-ground presence at each stop. That is a hardcore-scene convention scaled up to amphitheatre level, and it is the clearest sign that the band’s growth has not come with a change of operating principles.

Why the Anonymity Matters

Withholding which artist took which track is the most interesting decision in the whole project. A remix album normally sells itself on exactly that information: you go to the track by the person you already like. Removing the index forces a listener through the record in order, which is how the band sequenced the original, with its seventy-three-second interludes and its seven-minute centrepiece.

It also protects the thing that made Never Enough work. This is a band who won a metal Grammy and an alternative nomination for two songs recorded in the same room, in the same way Leon Thomas took Best R&B Album for a record he produced himself after years of being credited on other people’s. Turnstile have spent an album cycle refusing to be sorted. Handing twenty-three artists the same fourteen songs, and declining to label the results, is the most consistent thing they could have done next.

By Will Lisil / August 13, 2026