country

The “cowboy punks” tag has been following National Photo Committee around, and it fits: all the instrumentation and song structure of a typical Americana band, with the slacker attitude turned up a few notches. The analogue is Tiberius’s farm emo; a genre tag self-applied with enough wink to deflect, accurate enough to stick.

The Chicago four-piece describe themselves on Bandcamp as a band “that sounds like they grew up in Virginia and got kicked out of college in Olympia,” which was enough to make me play the album immediately. The David Berman influence is everywhere, and perhaps it’s just the corner of music I’m currently in, but his ghost is loud right now. You can hear it in Max Bottner’s double entendres and wry lines delivered with a perfectly straight face. At one point a phone goes off mid-song and nobody seems bothered. Bottner’s deep baritone does most of the storytelling. The richness of his voice makes him sound older than his years, and you eagerly sit round and listen to what he has to say.

This sort of thing usually comes across as half-arsed or throwaway. Red Hot Photo Committee is neither. It’s a polished, serious record delivered with a glint in its eye and no small amount of swagger.

The easy comparison would be Berman or Malkmus relocating to northern California and making a CSNY record. Wry couplets about workplace mediocrity, theologians, fish fingers, all set to a gently rocking country-rock backdrop. But the easy comparison isn’t quite the right one. Mildred are four roughly equal parts—Henry, all sharing vocals and writing—as a result the songs feel passed around the room rather than handed down from a bossy frontman.

Age matters too, perhaps. This is a debut by friends who started living together in their early thirties and ended up writing some songs; what emerged has none of the showy push of a younger band. “Charlie” ambles along on accordion and horn, “Cobwebs” has a brisk motorik thing going underneath some genuinely bleak lines, and “Fish Sticks” lands its chorus with unhurried confidence. The whole thing sounds like it was played live in a room, their interviews suggest that more or less it was.

It’s warm, confident, relaxed, reminiscent of plenty of wonderful things without being in thrall to any of them. The kind of record that turns up on a friend’s stereo and you ask what it is.

Brown Horse are from Norwich, which you would never guess from Total Dive. The guitars are pure Crazy Horse and the pedal steel weeps on cue. A song called “Heart of the Country” arrives with no apparent irony. This is the modern Americana mould—the one Ovven, Ratboys, Florry, Tiberius and a dozen others are working right now, all of them tracing the same lines back through MJ Lenderman to Jason Molina, Lucinda Williams, Silver Jews, the Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo.

The geography is the only misdirection. The other song titles (“Wreck”, “Sadness Reigns”, “Oblivion”) tell you exactly where the lyrics live, and they aren’t wrong.

The standout is “Twisters”. You could argue the record doesn’t move around much: the mood, the tempo, the instrumentation and the preoccupations hold fairly steady from start to finish. That’s a fair criticism of a less assured album. Here it isn’t one. When a band sounds this good doing one thing, the consistency reads as confidence rather than limitation, and I’m happy to sit in it for 45 minutes.

If you spent time this year with Courtney Marie Andrews’ wonderful Valentine, Natalie Jane Hill’s Hopeful Woman slots neatly alongside it. Same warm, country-tinged singer-songwriter mode the 70s did so well.

Hill’s voice gets compared to Hope Sandoval and Karen Dalton in the press notes; fair enough, though it’s a sturdier instrument than either. The arrangements are remarkable mostly for how much of them come from one person: Mat Davidson plays bass, fiddle, flute, keyboards and pedal steel, and the record feels fully populated without ever sounding crowded.

Troubadour is a record of genres in conversation. Sag uses on a melodic phrase that briefly nods at Smashing Pumpkins’ Today before settling into something that’s part alt-country, part emo. Other tracks lean folk, country, shoegaze, post-hardcore. None of this is the maximalist everything-at-once approach; the genres are deployed song by song, deliberately, with the range emerging across the album rather than crammed into individual tracks. Singer Brendan Wright calls it “farm emo”, which is both funny and accurate.

It’s a breakup album, but a quiet one. The lyrics circle reflection rather than recrimination, even when the music goes loud. If you want a single comparison, it’s Uncle Tupelo plus Modest Mouse—the alt-country sturdiness of one, the restless dynamics of the other.

Moab and Redwood are the standouts. Both let the band’s range surface inside a single song without losing the deliberate per-track approach that defines the rest of the record.

Cornfield’s first record since becoming a mother in 2023, and it sounds like the perspective shift has unlocked something. The pedal steel (courtesy of Adam Brisbin) threads through the album beautifully—country-tinged without ever tipping into full country, giving even the more vulnerable moments a warmth and sway. It’s her most collaborative album to date, and the guest list reflects good taste and good company: Buck Meek, Feist, Christian Lee Hutson. There’s something worth noting in that openness—becoming a parent seems to have made her more willing to let other voices in, both literally and in how she writes. The themes of renewal and perseverance through awkwardness land without ever feeling heavy-handed. Closer “Bloody and Alive” addresses motherhood most directly, spare and unguarded, and it earns the weight it carries. Highly recommended.