First Listen: HARDY, Cameron Whitcomb and the Albums You Need to Hear This Week

This week we've got big new albums from HARDY, Cameron Whitcomb, Amanda Shires, Clover County and Marcus King Band.

After spending the morning listening to all of this week's new releases, the Holler staff have their say:

How many different ways can you say ‘I’m country and I’m proud?’ Well, for HARDY, it’s 20. And they’re all pretty damn good.

The theme of this album is clear from the get go. Opening with ‘Country Country’, HARDY sets the scene - it’s country pride, roots, hometowns, backyards, dogs and trucks. And it’s all covered in a thick layer of mossy oak.

Through songs like ‘Bro Country’, he acknowledges the changing reputation of country music and his hopes for what ‘Bro Country’ means in the modern space, whereas songs like ‘Who Don’t’ play out like a battle cry for the genre.

Further cementing his relationship with the inimitable Stephen Wilson Jr., the pair pull together for ‘Bedrooms In The Sky’, which is a fun halfway point in the album.

Renowned for his ability to straddle rock and country music, HARDY balances heavy guitar riffs in tracks like ‘Country In Me’ with poignant vocals like those in ‘Bottomland’. ‘Y’all Need Jesus’ is a big middle finger to the online trolls and ‘Everybody Does’ rounds off the album in an all encompassing country boy hallelujah.

HARDY has once again raised the bar in country music and songwriting. There aren't many who could spin out 20 tracks that all pretty much say the same thing, and still have you hanging on for more.

Maybe the reason that COUNTRY! COUNTRY! is penned twice in the title is because someone heard the album and said, ‘Louder for the people at the back’. HARDY is country, and he really means it.

9/10

In her groundbreaking 2004 book, Broken Open, Elizabeth Lesser celebrates life’s great irony: that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are often the very ones that break us open - and help us blossom into who we were meant to be. It’s a critical read for faithful souls trying to make sense of life’s often heartbreaking conundrums, and it serves almost as a spiritual companion piece to Cameron Whitcomb’s unshakeable debut album, The Hard Way.

Across this impactful collection, Whitcomb relentlessly mines his lived experience with addiction, fearlessly breaking open every barrier of shame and self-doubt.

He sings with soul-baring abandon, as if his life depends on it - because, in many ways, it does. The triumphant testimony of the folk-tinged title track reverberates with thrilling survival, just as the rockabilly croon of ‘Fragile’ soars in celebration of Whitcomb’s newfound sensitivities. Similarly, fan-favorite ‘Hundred Mile High’ pulsates with a full-throttle alternative-pop edge, while the Americana tussle of the rollicking ‘Quitter’ sizzles with Western flair. With blacksmith-like exertion, Whitcomb and his team hammer and weld genres together with such scintillating heat that it’s impossible to pinpoint any one song’s exact musical origin.

In a cultural moment crowded with big-voiced young male artists, it’s reassuring to finally encounter one with a critical story to tell - and how lucky we are to witness Whitcomb’s at the very beginning.

9/10

You know when you’ve been driving down a dirt road for a few hours, and there’s that arching clean line on the windscreen cutting through the layers of dust: Darling Blue feels like that line. It’s a dazzlingly clear view of the skies ahead, yet so obviously bordered by the dusty sounds that have built up Southern rock for decades.

King’s writing is organic, his bluesy falsetto only occasionally becoming a repetitive listen, but it’s the killer musicality that really defines the album. This band is seamless and full of new collaborative life, standing at both the forefront and foundation of every track. No doubt this will be an exceptional album to hear live. Just in case the band wasn’t enough, though, a Wild West story with the inimitable guitar work of Billy Strings is thrown in for good measure.

Darling Blue is overflowing with confidence because King has it in spades, it’s a culmination of the sounds of his South Carolina roots and he grasped onto them with all the strength and pride he has. Yes, some tracks work better than others - ‘Carry Me Home’ is a bit of a miss with too many vocal harmonies and electric guitar solos cluttering up the track - but that just suggests that King’s still got a lot of roads to travel down, and he's still finding his route. ‘Heartlands’, ‘Levi’s and Goodbyes’, and the soulful, Noah Cyrus-featured duet ‘The Shadows’ jump out from the tracklist. But even with a couple of downs, he’s carving out that crisp, clean line between the dust of the past and the blinding possibility of the future.

A spectrum of shades are painted across Darling Blue, from deepest of sorrowful seas with the hopes of swimming on ‘Die Alone’ to highest of endlessly clear skies on the electrically alive Marshall Tucker vibe ‘Levi’s and Goodbyes’.

Throw in the inspiration of The Allman Brothers’ ‘Blue Sky’ lightness, the duskiness of Otis Blue and you’ve got Darling Blue. Original, yet endlessly inspired.

7.5/10

Amanda Shires has never been one to hold anything back, but her eighth solo studio album and follow-up to 2022’s Take It Like A Man finds her with a lot to unpack. Nobody's Girl marks her first release since her high-profile divorce from fellow country songsmith Jason Isbell, the passing of her grandmother and her father, and a period spent in the throes of grief.

Following such a brutally formative time, it’s only natural that the pain, the healing, the growth would reveal itself in an artist’s work. What happens throughout Nobody's Girl, though, is not so much a retracing of transformative events as it is a reclamation of self.

“I could show you how he left me,” Shires sings in the album’s resonant opening track, ‘A Way It Goes’, preparing to tell her side of the story and pull no punches while she’s at it. “Paint a picture, growing flowers for nobody / But I'd rather you see me thriving / Vining my way back up…”

From the album’s first trembling rhythms to its last dogged notes, she never sits in the thick of past transgressions or succumbs to upending heartache. Listeners, instead, get to actively move through the mire with her, work their way to the sunny side of rock bottom alongside her, and get to witness Amanda Shires reborn – lyric-by-lyric, song-by-song.

With tracks that artfully waltz between gentle and biting, exposing and hardened, Nobody's Girl is an intoxicating dance with an artist who has recently been through hell and back - and came out on the other side all the better for it.

8/10

Mixing the dark humour and dry wit of The Bell Jar with the soft, pastel-hued, dreamlike feel of The Virgin Suicides, the debut full length from Clover County is a thing of wonder. A mix of ice cool, slacker pop and countrified indie folk, it's a soft focus depiction of girlhood that perfectly captures those lost years between 18 and 23 as we follow the romantic misadventures of one of love's great true believers.

Starring in her own self-penned coming-of-age tragi-comedy, Finer Things is a reminder of how exciting it is to be young and idealistic, but how sad and lost you can sometimes feel too, as she carefully picks over the pieces of broken relationships and puts them back together again as beautiful, bittersweet break-up anthems.

Like Sally Jay Gorce, the wide-eyed, hilarious heroine in Elaine Dundy's 1958 novel Dud Avocado, Clover County - the nom de plume of 24-year-old Georgia Girl A.G. Schiano - delivers her playful put downs and eye-rolling one-liners with a bright, honeyed twang as she flits between romantic recklessness and lightly existential ruminations on lost time. She's like Megan Moroney for people who listen to NTS.

With its soft and sugary production, in the world of Clover County, tragedy and comedy are served up alongside each other as she balances classic country stoicism with a peculiarly Gen-Z light-heartedness that refuses to take anything as silly as life too seriously. All soaked through with that strange nostalgia you feel in your early twenties for a life you've only just left behind, that weirdly already feels like someone else lived it.

In a similar way to Phoebe Bridgers or Faye Webster, the crux of Clover County's songwriting hangs in the little details she slips into her songs. The moments we relive over and over in our heads once we get far enough away from them and try to untangle them. As she moves on from everything she left behind, the songs carry with them a subtext of hope, joy and a quiet resilience bubbling up under the surface. Perhaps that's why Finer Things feels like such a perfect album for these dark, confusing days.

You won't hear a more beautiful record this year.

9/10

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