Koe Wetzel - 9 Lives

Koe Wetzel has certainly earned a reputation in country music. Over the last decade, the unrepentant provocateur has carved out a niche in the genre, only to litter it with spent dime bags, empty fifths and diatribes of debauchery. While this portrayal may come off as two-dimensional, it’s tell-tale of an artist who has, up until now, inundated us with a steady flow of party anthems and bender-fueled ballads.

This latest album, however, is different. Ahead of his fifth studio effort, Wetzel noted a change, apprising fans to ready themselves for a different side of the country-grunge frontrunner.

With 9 Lives, he’s delivered. The record finds him contemplative rather than keyed up, trading drunken nights for sleepless ones on moody, pop-punk-infused tracks like ‘Damn Near Normal’, in which he ponders his choices – “Fake job, no wife, no kids / Can’t believe I’m living like this” – or ‘Sweet Dreams’, where all that he sees when he closes his eyes are nightmares.

Throughout the album, he sinks into himself to search his depths, cresting with a long-stifled vulnerability and an oft-masked melancholy in hand. While he uses covers of XXXTentacion’s abyssal ‘Depression and Obsession’ and Keith Gattis’ pleading ‘Reconsider’ to put words to such despondency, he’s unguarded in other ways, as desperate country-rockers like ‘Leigh’ and ‘Runnin’ Low’ reconcile a poor track record in life and love.

The artist is by no means turning over a new leaf. He’s still his rabble-rousing self on much of the album, especially on the white-powdered title track and the brawling anthem, ‘Bar Song’. This time around, though, he’s more concerned with showing us the Koe underneath his disguise of depravity, the person he is when his vices no longer shield him.

While 9 Lives is ultimately a contradiction of an album – equal parts outrageous and subdued, proud yet self-deprecating, volatile and still virtuous – it's a welcome one. The album is all the best of Koe Wetzel, featuring his hallmark genre-blurring and convention-shrugging style. Yet, it’s more than just a collection fueled by a fuck-all attitude and a little Sweet El Paso Dust; it gives the artist some long-awaited depth and only serves to secure his stardom for the long haul.

8/10

Koe Wetzel’s 2024 project, 9 Lives, is available everywhere now via Columbia Records.

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