10 New and Upcoming Country and Americana Artists You Need to Know August 2024

It's time for our monthly round up of the 10 Country and Americana Artists You Need To Know.

This month we’ve got a big voiced balladeer signed to Dave Cobb’s Elektra imprint Low Country Sound, a singer from El Salvador who ended up on NBC's The Voice and a soulful R&B superstar finding his way back to his Alabama roots through country music.

Here we go with another of Holler's monthly round-ups of our latest loves; a who's who of the most exciting prospects to begin leaving their mark on the country and Americana landscape.

Here's Holler's 10 New and Upcoming Country and Americana Artists You Need to Know for August:

Released on Dave Cobb’s Elektra imprint Low Country Sound, Cassandra Lewis’ follow up to 2022’s Always, All Ways drew us down even deeper into her mysterious world of jazzy, psychedelic country and belting torch songs.

“Fever dreams of in betweens,” she calls her sound. “For about 12 years I’ve been calling it cosmic Americana, and psychedelic soul. Psychedelic music doesn’t have to be like Pink Floyd , it has to move your soul in a way that is undeniable and frees up untapped emotions. I hope that’s what my music does for people. It feels that way to me…”

An “army brat” who grew up mostly in the Southeast, on the Idaho/Wyoming border and Big Sur, before she got “the wanderlust” and tried to support herself with “construction, busking, working on farms in California, and anywhere else,” she was raised on raised on classic country and 90’s pop country, with a mix of crooners, divas and psychedelic rock, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Pearl Jam. It’s no wonder Cassndra Lewis’ music is almost impossible to pin a tail on.

“My roots were so spread out I just loved things that made me feel connected,” she says, now based in Nashville, the thirty third city she’s lived in.

Falling somewhere between the big voices of ‘70s country like Crystal Gayle, Barbara Mandrell and Connie Smith and the dreaminess of an Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack, there’s a twist of Chris Isaak’s melodramatic Americana and hint of Mazzy Star blended in there too

“I see this life like a movie,” she explains, “and it’s important to me to share my story with music that brings it all to life.”

Recorded alongside Grammy winning producer Dave Cobb, Lost In A Dream chronicles toxic relationships, addiction and mental health struggles, with co-writes for Anderson East, Angaleena Presley and Natalie Hemby, delivered by Lewis as if she was a spellbinding nightclub chanteuse.

“The storytelling is heavy, but it’s relatable,” Lewis said of the record. “I’m using different colors. I love big seventies balladeers, I dig grunge and jazz. I grew up in and on cowboy country so I relate to classic western storytelling. I want it to feel raw and visceral, so it hits people the way my favorite music hits me. I don’t think we should feel comfortable all the time. I want my music to make people feel human - laugh, cry, scream, fucking feel it all.”

“Lost in a dream is about healing the codependent/narcissist cycle and becoming your own hero,” she adds. “It’s about accepting humanity, taking this trippy/chaotic journey to self-love, and letting go of toxic shit so you can finally call in what you actually deserve instead of the same messy situationships over and over. Forgiveness of the self, and those who hurt you.”

Lost in a Dream is out now on Low Country Sound/ Elektra

Listen If You Like: Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Secret Sisters

The direction of country music isn’t ever really changed by the purists. Sure, they keep the good ship steady in stormy waters, but its course has always been set by the outlaws, the outsiders, the misfits and the renegades. It’s the outliers jumping over from the other ships that always bring something new to country music and force it to rethink itself.

Cory Cross is one of those natural born outliers, coming out of country music’s heartland, but never quite willing to sip his country straight up.

“I’m born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where country music is in the air,” he says. “Even before I fell in love with Country Music personally, it had settled into my bones - because it’s built into the culture. My town was built by cowboys, so that music is still the soundtrack to most things around here.”

“When I was a kid I was obsessed with punk rock - Rancid, Lou Reed, Descendants, NOFX- but like I said, country music was played at every party, every car ride, in every restaurant, so I’ve always known the lyrics to every Willie Nelson or George Strait song.”

Writing songs as a teenager, Cross was drawn to the melancholier country songwriters like Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Emmylou Harris, but always saved a soft spot for honky tonkers like George Strait and Alan Jackson and Dwight Yoakam.

“I’d describe my sounds as a marrying of the fuzzy sonic rebellion I first found in punk rock with the Texas Honkytonk that’s always been in my soul,” he says.

The 14 songs on Cory Cross’ debut full length album, There’s More, are the result of over a decade of hauling ass and honing his craft, paying his dues and cutting his teeth all over Texas. Now making the rounds at dance halls and dive bars across Texas, as well as sold out shows in Los Angeles and New York City, Cory and his band, The Burden, mix up the steel guitars and fiddle of classic country with the energy and exuberance of punk and rockabilly.

Vigorous, rowdy and self-assured in the same way that Jason and the Scorchers or X were, Cory Cross nonetheless leans way more towards contemporary neo-traditionalists like Zach Top and Braxton Keith than his cowpunk forefathers ever did to the traditionalists of the ‘80s.

There’s More by Cory Cross is available now.

Listen If You Like: Zach Top, John Prine, Aaron Raitiere

“I’m from Oak Ridge, Louisiana,” Graham Barham declares proudly. “Tim McGraw, Lainey Wilson and Dylan Scott are all from around my same area, so I guess you can say there’s something in the water.”

There certainly does seem to be.

Raised on a farm, the son of a farmer and a schoolteacher, Barham began singing in church as a child and taught himself to play guitar and write music by the age of 10. He moved to Nashville when he was 18 and began writing songs for other artists, bringing in his now distinctive balance of compassion, honesty, and humour in his songwriting, while taking inspiration from classic country artists like George Strait as well as heavy hitters in the pop world

“You can listen to ‘BAYOU BOY’ and really learn everything you need to know about me,” he says. “I grew up in an extremely small town and I watched my parents work hard for our family growing up. It really instilled a strong work ethic in me.”

“Way down yonder off the Mississippi there's a little town of a hundred fifty,” he sings in his gritty Louisiana drawl in ‘BAYOU BOY,’ reflecting on all the things that went in to making him the man he is today. “Cypress knees stickin' outta holy water / Sun's about as hot as the farmer's daughter / Catching crawfish in a ditch off the road / Sunday morning praying in your Mossy Oak / Mardi Gras dancing, catching beads / Hurricane twisted, c'est la vie.”

Due to make his Grand Ole Opry debut in October after being surprised by ERNEST, who also took the opportunity to let Barham know he will serve as support on ERNEST’s Legalize Country Music Road Show.

Whether it’s the trappy country of ‘BAYOU BOY,’ the dark, brooding ‘WHISKEY WHISKEY’ or the crooning duet with Lauren Watkins, ‘STRAIGHT TO MY HEART,’ Barham has released a string of country singles that showcase his versatility and ease with whatever style he takes on and it feels like he’s getting more self-assured with every release.

Shoot the Lock is out now on Sony Music Entertainment

Listen If You Like: Morgan Wallen, Dylan Marlowe, Warren Zeiders

If Blake Shelton, Adam Levine and Pharrell all turn for you then you must be doing something right. After her run on Team Blake on NBC's The Voice in 2016, Jake Owen and his team convinced Angie to move to Nashville and ever since then she’s been making her mark all over the city.

Born in El Salvador, Angie K – real name Angie Keilhauer – lived there until she was 11 and grew up listening to everything from Bonnie Raitt to Dolly Parton and John Denver.

“My mom loves Dolly and would play her records all the time,” she says. “I was so enraptured with the story telling, and my mom would embellish the songs with stories of her family and tell me why she loved them each too. I think that’s what made me start writing. The fact that it’s possible to weave words into emotions and connect with people in such beautiful ways. As much as country music has changed over the past couple decades, the songwriting has always been at the center of it.”

“When I got to the states, I remember hearing Keith Urban and The Chicks on the radio and just thinking to myself, ‘what is THIS?!’ I listened to country radio probably every day since we moved. I think Gary Allan’s ‘Best I Ever Had’ was the first song I ever learned on guitar.”

After her run on the voice, her first bilingual single ‘Real Talk’ tipped its hat to her Latin roots blended in with a loose country pop sound, but it was on her 2022 EP, Sun Up to Sundown, that she first wore her country loving heart firmly on her sleeve with songs like ‘Country Is As Country Does’ and ‘Honkytonk Bar.’

Having played over a thousand shows all over the US and Central America opening for country greats like Tanya Tucker, Jordan Davis, Chris Janson, Sammy Kershaw and Jake Owen andwith over 500K+ followers and over 40 million streams worldwide, Angie K made her Grand Ole Opry debut in August and played the main stage at Nashville Pride.

Now, with an album in the works, her two singles so far this year - ‘Death of Me’ and ‘Red Dirt on Mars’ - have doubled down on the earthy country sound or her earlier singles and wouldn’t sound out of place on any recent albums by Miranda Lambert or Lainey Wilson.

“The new record really doesn't have any pop or shine to it,” she says. “It’s a little more from ground up with a real band made up of my friends playing every part. I’m kind of in a place in my career where I’m blessed to feel very comfortable and safe in my community, which lets me not have to feel like I need to try so hard and instead make music from a place of easy vulnerability. These songs from this chapter of my life feel simple in their arrangement but deep in their words. “

‘Death of Me’ and ‘Red Dirt on Mars’ are available now

Listen If You Like: Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson, Gretchen Wilson

A Norway native raised mostly by her mother, Irena Eide AKA Rainy Eyes, grew up dividing her time between the urban congestion of Bergen and her maternal family’s sheep farm in the country’s rugged, western islands.

With Moon in the Mirror, her folky debut under the moniker Rainy Eyes, it felt like her music was very much a reflection of these two distinctly different upbringings, but on Rainy Eyes’ latest album, the recently released Lonesome Highway, it feels like she’s drawing her influences from a world far far away from home.

When she was 18, she left Norway for Denmark and within a year, she’d met and fallen in love with an American free-jazz saxophonist and eloped to San Francisco.

Her days in the Bay Area were spent teaching children old-time folk songs soaking up bluegrass and roots music, while she spent her nights at underground jazz clubs in the Tenderloin. She befriended Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Peter Rowan and ran a music space in San Francisco, while hosting camps and kids’ music classes.

Throughout her failing marriage, as she processed her healing from a difficult separation, she wrote and recorded constantly at her Bolinas cabin, and as her situation in Northern California became untenable and her wandering spirit called, Rainy found herself once again leaving everything behind and relocating to South Louisiana, drawn by the music and culture of the tradition-rich region.

“I’d already been in love with Louisiana,” she says. “So when it was time to make a move, it felt like a natural fit to head down there.”

“Our family has a farm in rural western Norway on an island you can only get to by boat,” she explains, tying it all together. “I think spending a lot of time as a child on our farm in the country really helped to shape me. Part of why I love living in the south is because it reminds me of home. Everyone talks a little slower and moves a little slower, and people are always stopping to chat and visiting with each other.”

Forging a collaboration with noted Lafayette musician and producer, Dirk Powell, the pair worked up the demos she’d recorded in her Bolinas cabin, in his studio on the bayou, adding new songs to the ones she’d already written.

Much of Lonesome Highway was written as Rainy reflected on the joy of motherhood, while simultaneously confronting a troubled relationship that had turned toxic.

“Songwriting was my therapy. It was basically how I dealt with the pain and the trauma. The music helped me heal,” says Rainy. “This album is about how I had to help myself. To take that pain and use it. For it not to destroy me, but to make me who I am.”

These are songs so delicate you almost worry they’re going to break in front of you. From the bluesy honky tonk of ‘Misty Mama’ to the jug band shuffle of the title track and big weepers like ‘Faded Away’ and the stark and beautiful ‘I Thought About You,’ Lonesome Highway sounds like a version of country music that was dreamed up somewhere far away from the rest of the world.

Watch the exclusive premiere of the official music video for ‘Misty Mama’ below.

Lonesome Highway is out now on Royal Potato Family

Listen If You Like: Esther Rose, Courtney Marie Andrews, Madi Diaz

As opening lines go, “duct tape on my driver’s side mirror, blowing in the wind” might feel like a fairly unassuming way to begin one of this year’s most beguiling records, but Maddy Kirgo has a gift for lifting the commonplace up and loading it with so much emotion it feels like it’s going to explode, before she lets it sail smoothly off into the air.

Describing, Shadow on my Light, the debut album from Maddy Kirgo, as a thing of beauty feels like underselling the sheer scope of the record.

Based in New Orleans and released on the always reliable Gar Hole Record, Maddy Kirgo’s debut album was produced with Video Age’s Nick Corson and Duncan Troast, and between them they’ve soaked up the city’s eclectic musical atmosphere and created a 10-song odyssey of luscious country-tinged dream pop.

A record that quietly examines the fragility and wonder of relationships and what it is that holds us together or breaks us apart, about half of Shadow on my Light was written and recorded before Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans in August 2021, which forced Kirgo to evacuate to Pensacola. It was there where she learned that a dear friend, Gabryelle Allnutt, had passed away while also fleeing the same storm.

“When I returned to New Orleans after the storm, songwriting was my primary tool for grieving that loss,” Kirgo says, “and that brought on songs like ‘Spare’ and ‘Midnight Flight’…”

Along with the spellbinding piano ballad, ‘It’s About Time,’ the pedal steel pop of ‘Try Harder’ and the more straight forwardly country ‘Trading Partners,’ these are the kind of songs that find their way deep into your heart and live inside you.

“It’s a pretty simple story,” Maddy Kirgo says. “This album was meant to bring me joy and I hope that, when people listen to it, they feel good.”

Job done as far we’re concerned.

Shadow on my Light is out now on Gar Hole Records

Listen If You Like: Weyes Blood, Jess Williamson, Cassandra Jenkins

“I have the best memories tied to ‘90s country music,” Faith Hopkins says. “Artists like Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Kenny Chesney, The Dixie Chicks, and Shania Twain were always playing - whether it was in the kitchen while getting ready for school, during dinner, or on weekends when my dad was working in the garage while my brothers and I played outside. Country music was a constant in our home and being introduced to it at such a young age, with so many significant childhood moments associated with it, is a big reason why I create country music today.”

Despite growing up in a country loving household, singer-songwriter Faith Hopkins was actually raised 2000 miles away from Nashville in Huntington Beach, California. Which probably explains why her take on country has a poppy freshness to it.

“While my music is heavily influenced by classic country,” she admits, “my California roots shine through in the pop elements of my sound.”

She fell hard for Nashville after visiting with her mom when she was still in high school and decided to enrol at Belmont University to study business, where she found a likeminded crew of budding songwriters and vocalists who helped her fine tune her storytelling and shape her sound to fit around the music she’d grown up listening to.

“I love the storytelling aspects of country music and the groundedness you feel when listening to it, and I strive to emulate that in all of my music,” she explain. “My themes often revolve around love, resilience and personal growth, and I aim to keep my music uplifting and positive.”

With her debut single ‘(Oops) There Goes My Heart’ it’s mission accomplished. A giant overflowing cup of deliciously catchy country pop, it’s one of those refreshingly upbeat songs that wears its heart on its sleeve and makes the anxiety of a new relationship feel like it’s all just part of the fun of falling in love.

For anyone who wished Sabrina Carpenter hadn’t stopped at ‘Slim Pickins’ and had made a whole album of country songs, Faith Hopkins is lining up to make it a reality.

‘(Oops) There Goes My Heart’ is out now on Play It Again Music

Listen If You Like: Maren Morris, Kelsea Ballerini, Lauren Alaina

Pulling from influences as diverse as Guns N’ Roses, Metallica and Steve Earle, Josh Ross is blazing his way through country music with a fusion of country pop and euphoric stadium rock that doesn’t care what genre barriers it topples over in the process.

Just five years after the former collegiate football player first arrived in Nashville, the UMG Nashville/Universal Music Canada artist has flipped songs like the atmospheric power ballads ‘Single Again’ and ‘Trouble’ into platinum-certified Top 5 Canadian country radio hits and earned Ross five nominations at this year’s Canadian Country Music Awards (CCMAs) including Entertainer of the Year, Album of the Year, Fans’ Choice, Male Artist Of The Year, and Single Of The Year.

Following up his EP Complicated from earlier this year, his latest single, ‘Want This Beer’ - a duet with Julia Michaels, written with HARDY, Zach Abend and Hillary Lindsey, and produced by Ross’ frequent collaborator Matt Geroux alongside Abend - is proof that the momentum doesn’t show signs of slowing up anytime soon.

His Single Again tour continues throughout August and September, while he continues as support on Luke Bryan’s Mind of a Country Boy Tour.

The Complicated EP is out now on UMG Nashville/Universal Music Canada

Listen If You Like: Chase Matthews, Austin Snell, Dylan Marlowe

“This guy’s tone is crazy and he just has this vibe’s that’s just insane and I just love it,” Justin Bieber enthused to Zane Lowe about Clever back in 2020. “It’s raw and you can feel the pain through the music… you can feel just raw emotion and I just think it’s powerful.”

Hailing from Gadsden in rural Alabama, Clever is the stage name of Joshua Tyler Huie, a teenage poet turned freestyle rap battle contestant who has released four albums since his debut in 2019. One of pop music’s great eccentrics and true visionaries, he’sbeen busily collaborating in the world of hip hop and R&B with artists such Post Malone, Lil Wayne, Juice WRLD, Travis Barker and Bieber among others.

After first making an appearance in the country world when he guested alongside Julia Michaels on ‘Real Life Stuff’ off Diplo’s Thomas Wesley: Chapter 1 – Snake Oil project, Clever realised, that when he stripped down to his true artistry, his soulful vocals and his own story resonated with his Alabama roots and the storytelling traditions of country music.

His first tastes of this new direction came with previous singles, ‘Candlelight’ and ‘Sandcastles’,and now he follows them up with ‘Cowboy Killers’, his most explicitly country single yet and something of a spiritual homecoming as he poetically celebrates the stories and experiences that have shaped him through his life and led him up to this point of return.

“It doesn't feel like a transition,” Clever says about his move into the country music space. “It feels like something I've always known.”

Written with Sean Small and Sam Sumser the moody country power ballad has an undeniable ‘90s soul pop centre, as Clever looks back on his life so far on the pains and pleasures that come with chasing a dream. If Duran Duran had ever made a country record it might sound something like ‘Cowboy Killers,’ and that’s a good thing.

‘Cowboy Killers’ is out now Ricochet Recordings/StreamCut

Listen If You Like: Post Malone, Jelly Roll, Bailey Zimmerman

West Virginian Jesse Lynn Madera draws her inspiration from the golden age of empowered female artists and singer-songwriters as she seamlessly blends country, folk, soul and jazz into something at once both incredibly powerful and almost fragile in its intimacy and tenderness.

“I was born in Parkersburg, WV, and we moved states a few times before I was eleven years old,” Madera says. “My family was planted in Houston, TX for all my teen years. All the moving around, experiencing vastly different parts of the US, must have impacted the way I take in the world around me, and the way I tell my stories, musically. I listen to, and love, a lot of different styles, and my creative output is probably diverse because I have lived a lot of different rhythms.”

Often with just a piano for accompaniment, Madera’s stark country ballads bring to mind Lady Gaga’s country tinged Joanne or Carole King’s Fantasy along with echoes of Dolly Parton’s stripped back bluegrass albums and the sweeping melodramatic pop of Tori Amos.

Speed of Sound is out now on Big Fat Dress

Listen If You Like: Mary Chapin Carpenter,Sarah McLachlan, Melissa Etheridge

For more of the monthly editions of Holler's 10 Artists You Need To Know, see below: