"This is my Nebraska": Nick Shoulders Announces New Album Refugia Blues for October with Timely Call for Southern Solidarity 'Dixie Be Damned'

As well as there being moments when you want to stand up and fight, anyone who feels at odds with the world right now will also have moments when all they want to do is crawl away and hide. Nick Shoulders' forthcoming album, Refugia Blues, manages to perfectly capture all the confused and contradictory feelings a lot of us are feeling right now.

Rooted in the stylings of Southern traditional music, the nine stripped back and unembellished songs that make up Nick Shoulders fifth studio album aren't just a call to action, but a call to rest too.

"This is my Nebraska," he says, nodding to Bruce Springsteen's lo-fi acoustic record from 1982. "Some people listen to Bruce for the E Street Band and the big radio hits, but I like the intimacy and rawness of Nebraska instead. I'd like to think of Refugia Blues as a little window into the heart, as opposed to the drumbeat of a revolution."

Sparse and unamplified, the sound of Refugia Blues feels older than the sounds Shoulders saluted on albums like 2023's All Bad, with its loud, whooping anthems for roadhouses and sweaty dancehalls. Here, Shoulders isn't shouting over a band. He isn't bringing a crowd to its feet with dance-ready tempos. Rather, he's exploring another side of his craft by stepping up to a ribbon microphone as a solo performer, delivering each song with acoustic instruments and a voice that's equal parts country croon, Appalachian yodel, and high-lonesome field holler.

Due for release on Gar Hole Records on 31 October, it's a record that feels like it contains within it both natural impulses - to fight back or to shrink away - when you feel like your very existence is under attack.

Refugia Blues is a record of big ideas and small, intimate moments. Rooted in the acoustic stylings of Southern traditional music, Shoulders' interpretation of American roots music has always been more progressive and punky than the trucks-and-beers conservatism that passes for modern-day country, and the new album offers songs about climate collapse, radical anthropology, and generative disruption. It balances the macro with the micro, too, making room for love songs and personal topics, packaging humour alongside heavy insights. At once academic and accessible, Refugia Blues isn't just a deep dive into southernness, but also into Shoulders himself. This is a raw, resolute version of American country music, stacked high with songs that go down easy but linger in the minds of those willing to invest the time.

He announces the album today with the first single, 'Dixie Be Damned.' a timely call for Southern solidarity at a time when the aim of the governments political agenda is to divide and conquer. It's a song of faith at a time when faith is harder than ever to hold onto.

"I grew up around stickers that read 'The South Will Rise Again,' and I always knew exactly what that meant," he says. "It didn’t mean the south would rise in literacy rates and quality of life, it didn’t mean the south would rise from the ashes of an apartheid state to embrace its true multi-racial identity, and it definitely didn’t mean that southerners would seek a higher purpose to direct their anger and disenfranchisement. What many of us know is that the south is home to more than half of Black Americans, that a third of poor white Americans live in just a few former confederate states, and that the Indigenous Nations of the southeast are still living breathing humans fighting the same colonial project they always have."

"A land cannot be conquered even by slavery and genocide," he sings resolutely along with a roughly strummed guitar, echoey whoops and a chirpy whistling intro. "Manifest destitution is the endgame of our pride / To those who lost it all we owe at least the truth / Dixie be damned: I believe in you."

"There is revolutionary potential in a pan-racial working class coalition, and no region more readily waits to embrace this mindset than the American South," he adds. "Our history is peppered with uprisings and rebellions against capitalist exploitation, whether on a plantation or in a mine shaft, and for my own ancestors as well as my living neighbors and friends, I truly believe in the southern potential to liberate ourselves from a system that actively benefits from a misrepresentation of our history, and reject suburban homogenization. No American Imperial standardization is welcome in the land of pumpkin and possum."

Watch a field recording video of 'Dixie Be Damned' below

Refugia Blues by Nick Shoulders is released on 31 October on Gar Hole Records

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