First Listen: Dasha, Lauren Watkins and the Albums You Need to Hear This Week

It's the ladies' week in country music!

This New Music Friday is serving up all the girl power with a pair of highly-anticipated EPs from the likes of country-pop princess Dasha and traditional crooner Mae Estes.

Elsewhere, we've also been gifted a pair of follow-up records–one from Holler favorite Lauren Watkins and another from recovering party girl Priscilla Block who seems to have a new story to tell with her new release, Things You Didn't See.

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

Anna is a window into Dasha’s world, bringing fans infinitely closer to her as an artist and allowing them to set up home in her carefully curated Dashville. It’s familiar and fun, cosy yet purposeful and provides echoes of vulnerability for the California native.

With a 49x Platinum single to her name, Dasha has been breaking records with her internationally recognised smash hit, ‘Austin.’ Now, though, she delivers a softer side, channeling her younger self and demonstrating her undeniable talent as a songwriter and musician.

Her latest project blends signature guitar-driven tracks with her beautiful lyricism. Her sound is as distinct as it was when she released ‘Austin,’ becoming her favoured recipe for a country hit: a prominent banjo, a strong narrative and a toe tapping beat.. and this EP is full of them.

Four out of the eight tracks are new, with the other four already established tracks in their own right. ‘Not At This Party’ is her second most successful hit and follows a strong new opener, ‘Work On Me’–a Sabrina Carpenter style country bop. Currently a slept-on release, ‘Train’ finds comfort in familiarity and carries a quietly clever locomotive beat while the painfully relatable ‘I Don’t Mean To’ combines her love for twangy guitars and heartbreak. Its catchy and upbeat melodies mimic a forced smile on a new relationship that doesn’t stand up against the one before.

Dasha closes the album with a love letter to her younger self, craving the innocence and purity that she now misses, marking the end of eight tracks that firmly keep Dasha at the forefront of country music.

Rating: 8.5/10

Whilst Lauren Watkins exudes the charm of an edgy girl-next-door with good music taste, her viewpoint isn’t always so rose-tinted. In A Perfect World sees Watkins proud of the flowers and the dirt in her own garden and seeks out some astute observations on the fun and flaws that sit behind the white picket fence, too.

It’s not a perfect world and it never will be, but Watkins has got pretty close to faultlessly capturing the ebbs and flows of emotions that come with a life situated on the edge of fame and normality, all in a strikingly good track sequence. Her desire for the everyday is captured on ‘Average Joe and Plain Jane,’ a witty, warm love song dedicated to the “ordinary, sweet, mundane”–the kind of love in which “perfectly predictable” could not be more… perfect.

The airy freshness on this album takes a step outside of the smoky barroom of Watkins’ debut album when needed, somewhat a sonic capture of that moment in the night when you step outside the bar door and for a moment things get just a little clearer.

If we were back in Kacey Musgraves’ Same Trailer, Different Park era, ‘Britches’ would’ve fit in seamlessly with its shamelessly indulgent country bitching–a quick guitar solo nicely ties in the record’s '70s-leaning vibe. The vintage sound is pushed further on the dreamy, steel-decorated reclamation of independence, ‘I Was Fine Before I Met You.’

The vulnerable album closer, ‘Pretty Please’, situates Watkins on that one barstool at the edge of the room that an anxious observer longs for, a couple of lines leave that reminder that Watkins might be one of the genre’s sharpest penned upcoming writers. The glimpses of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton we’ve come to expect from Watkins are taken one step further with the genius line “red hair, green eyes, she could pass for second comin’ of Jolene” finding that other girl POV that’s so often been attempted.

In ten songs, In A Perfect World perfectly depicts that we might not need to take every day, every minute, every song so seriously, we just need to feel them as they pass by.

Rating: 8/10

The biggest problem with Mae Estes’ self-titled EP is that there’s not more of it.

Over the last few years, single after single, it’s been so easy to fall in love with the fiery country songstress. Her words are charming; her voice lovely; her songs fun, and with each and every release, fans are left wanting more from the ‘Hell You Raised’ starlet.

Her latest 5-song collection, especially, offers a strong–but condensed–taste of all that Estes is capable of. Armed with the controlled pipes of Trisha Yearwood, the undeniable sass of Reba McEntire and the sharpened delivery of Martina McBride, tracks like the dreamy ‘Mr. Fix It’, the introspective ‘I Better Go’ and the earnest ‘Drunk On That’ will undoubtedly become fast additions to her vast country-pop songbook.

Throughout the EP, as she dances between love and heartbreak, bounding from ballad to anthem, Estes’ impressive range and artistic intuition is clear. After nearly five years of single and EP releases, however, it would be nice to have a little more from this hit-worthy talent.

Rating: 8/10

A week after all the fun and frivolity of Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl, Priscilla Block offers up an unflinchingly honest portrait of the other, unseen side of fame and fortune. Like a Broadway musical based entirely around the misattributed Marilyn Monroe quote, "If you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best,” Things You Didn't See is a 14-song show-and-tell of all the worst bits of fame, the embarrassing bloopers and the brutal truths that usually get left on the cutting room floor.

The follow-up to 2022's Welcome to the Block Party finds Block sitting out on the front porch, picking over the debris the morning after, suffering from an almighty hangover of the soul as she looks at all the red solo cups stacked up around her, the red, white and blue bunting half-hanging off white picket fences and the piles of sick on the sidewalk, wondering if the party was even worth it.

At its heart, Things You Didn't See is a record about longing to be fully seen and understood. This is Priscilla Block, just a girl, standing in front of the world, asking it to love her; not for the pop star they think they know, but for the person she actually is. Turning the mirror back on herself. it's an album full of rawness and uncertainty as she carefully unpacks the past for the promise of something new.

It's a record about people telling you they love you but you not actually feeling it or believing it, knowing that, deep down, even if you do believe it, you're not really that person who everyone thinks you are. "Everybody’s got a hurting heart they're hiding underneath," she sings on the album's title track. "You think that you know me / But how ‘bout all the things you didn’t see."

Collaborating with songwriting royalty like Tyler Hubbard, Jessie Jo Dillon, Laura Veltz, Sarah Jones and Aaron Raitiere, Block has crafted an album full of vulnerability, wry humour and heartbreak that feels so genuinely honest and hard relatable it's exhilarating to listen to.

"It hurt like hell, finding myself," she sings on 'Good On You.' Having listened to the record, we're happy to report that Things You Didn't See was definitely worth all the pain she had to go through to get here.

Rating: 9/10

––

For more on this week's artists, see below: