21 Essential Alt-Country Albums

Counting down my favourite alt-country albums - tell me yours in the comments

Jul 11, 2023

#21: Lucero: Should’ve Learned By Now

The newest whiskey-soaked offering from Memphis’s Lucero is a driving, strikingly honest album about drinking. Ben Nichols and co alternate between sorrow (“Macon If We Make It”), nostalgia (“At The Show”) and defiance (“One Last F.U.”) Amidst the album’s perpetual drunken haze, the band stumble upon emotional clarity on the closer “Time to Go Home” - a warm, affecting number that’s emblematic of alt-country at it’s very best: “Before I even met you / It was you I was looking for”.

#20: Kylie Rae Harris: Kylie Rae Harris

Released mere months before her untimely passing, Kylie Rae Harris’s self-titled record is devastatingly fully-realised; moving between anthemic, made-for-radio earworms (“Big Ol’ Heartache”) and classically tinged, on-the-road tunes (“Missouri”). The EP closes with Harris’s most powerful song, “Twenty Years From Now” - an ode to her young daughter, written with the premature death of her own father in mind. “I just wanna see the day / You tell me that I did okay / God, I hope I’m still around / Twenty years from now” is a quintet that was always going to tug at the heartstrings, but is now rendered unbearably heavy by it’s new context.

#19: Esther Rose: Safe To Run

Esther Rose’s most recent and most accomplished LP alternates between the lightest and heaviest songs of her career. Such is appropriate for an album written on the road - where hope and consequences constantly rub up against each other. “Stay” is a breezy ode to putting down new roots, while “Chet Baker” is a joyous, compassionate letter to a younger and more reckless self. Alternately, the title track is consumed by devastation - a wave of nihilism washing over lines like, “Let the whiskey drown me / I don’t care”

#18: Erin Rae: Lighten Up

On her third and most recent LP, Erin Rae perfected her formula of affecting, melodic and endlessly enjoyable Americana - while adding a newfound appreciation of pop melodies into her work. Though breezy, listen closely enough to these songs and you’ll find moments of quiet revelations about how we carry ourselves through this world.

#17: Plains (Waxahatchee & Jess Williamson): I Walked With You A Ways

Jess Williamson and Waxahatchee’s first (but hopefully not last) collaborative LP is a warm, classically tinged effort that takes equal inspiration from Emmylou Harris, The Chicks and Lucinda Williams. Deeply complimentary to both singer’s talents, the album’s a delight from start to finish.

#16: Angel Olsen: Big Time

When artists pivot towards country after a career spent exploring other genres, the result is often entirely unconvincing, but Angel Olsen clearly has an innate understanding of what makes a great country album; with her soul-piercing croon and confessional lyrics. The album’s best song, “All The Flowers”, is an instant country standard; a wistful ode to love against the odds that finds our narrator making peace with transitory states.

#15: Wednesday: Rat Saw God

Wednesday’s best album yet is an immensely powerful combination of alt-country and indie-rock, firmly rooted in the band’s North Carolina origins. The lyrics chronicle life in unromantic and often gruelling environments, with evocative vignettes of drunkenness, self-destruction, love and lingering malaise. The LP is anchored by two centerpieces - the crushing 8-and-a-half-minute epic “Bull Believer” and the grounded love song “Chosen To Deserve”.

#14: Amanda Shires: Take It Like A Man

Amanda Shires latest and greatest album is a stunning interrogation of love at it’s most strained and dysfunctional. The song captures the anger and isolation resulting from such relationships, as well as the reasons we cling onto them still. Closure and resolution finally emerge on “Everything Has Its Time” - which affectingly contrasts a relationship’s honeymoon period with it’s present day stagnation. Reluctantly but resolutely, Shires admits it’s the end of the line.

#13: Margo Price: Midwest Farmer’s Daughter

Margo Price’s honky-tonking debut moves between anthemic, broadly relatable and ready-for-radio anthems like “Hurtin’ (On The Bottle)” and startlingly personal numbers like “Hands of Time” - which includes the heartbreaking lyric “But my firstborn died and I cried out to God / Is there anybody out there looking down on me at all?” Anyone who has read Price’s memoir will appreciate how years of persevering as an idiosyncratic songwriter in a genre that rewards conformity resulted in this hugely satisfying debut.

#12: Justin Townes Earles: Harlem River Blues

The definitive album from Justin Townes Earles’ sadly-short career contains it’s fair share of blues, as suggested by its title. The title track contemplates a drowning death, while “Slippin’ and Slidin’” documents falling back into addiction (making it particularly painful to listen to given Earles’ cause of death). But some of the album’s best moments occur when Earles finds hope against the odds – on “Christchurch Woman”, he refuses to surrender his belief that there’s someone waiting out there who can take away his pain. “It’s early evening so there’s hope for a better day”, he sings - a simple but powerful affirmation that it’s never too late for any of us.

#11: Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains

Released less than a month before his suicide, David Berman’s final LP is an intense swan song - and perhaps the most powerful ‘goodbye album’ we’ve had since David Bowie’s Blackstar. It’s often incredibly bleak - consumed by a breakup and the death of his mother. But the LP is melodic, even peppy, at times - disguising some of the darker depths for casual listeners - and filled with moments of dark humour that showcase Berman’s singular lyrical gift (“If no one’s fond of fucking me / Maybe no one’s fucking fond of me”).

#10: Drive-By Truckers: Decoration Day

The Trucker’s first album with Jason Isbell finds them expanding their sound following their breakthrough Southern Rock Opera, while further refining their already exemplary songwriting talent. That Isbell would go on to become one of the genre’s most celebrated stars is no surprise, given the ample charms of the title track and “Outfit”.

#9: The Highwomen: The Highwomen

On their self-titled debut, the quintet of Amanda Shires, Natalie Hemby, Brandi Carlile and Maren Morris made a convincing case that they’re best supergroup currently working. The songs resist the genre’s worst emerging trends and add needed feminist perspectives to the world of country music without ever becoming coldly political.

#8: Lucinda Williams: Sweet Old World

Lodged between two career defining albums, Lucinda Williams’ 1992 album often gets overlooked. But this dark masterpiece contains some of the heaviest, most compelling music of her career - with reflections on suicide and mortality on “Sweet Old World” and “Pineola”, and horror at the world’s many injustices documented on the stunning “Sidewalks of the City”. “Something About What Happens When We Talk”, meanwhile, ranks among the greatest love songs of all time - capturing the magic and ecstasy of love and surrender in a way few have ever managed.

#7: Jason Isbell: Southeastern

Written shortly after getting sober, Isbell’s fourth solo album is his most definitive - an exquisitely written set of pristine country-rockers about the ways the world breaks us and the ways we piece ourselves together in the aftermath. It is equally powerful in anthemic moments like “Cover Me Up” and in moments of slower, crushing contemplation (“Elephant”).

#6: Songs: Ohia: Magnolia Electric Co.

Jason Molina’s 2003 album Magnolia Electric Co. would prove to be such a landmark release for Molina that he would go on to name his band after it. Of all the albums on the list, this one is the heaviest and most bracing - a brutal confrontation of suffering that demonstrates how hope can be the most painful emotion of them all. It’s the sound of a tortured soul yearning for the peace that alludes him - “just be simple again” he pleads to the world.

#5: Silver Jews: American Water

David Berman's third album as Silver Jews solidified his status as a singular songwriter - a talented, often cryptic poet who could turn everyday banalities, like wedding ring tan lines, into rich stories. Though Berman had a reputation as a perpetual depressive, he ends American Water with notes of grace and resolute optimism ("The Wild Kindness").

#4: Emmylou Harris: Wrecking Ball

Emmylou Harris's 1995 Magnum opus offers an alternately mournful and optimistic take on middle age - filled with open ended questions about the future and regular revelations. Though Harris didn't write the bulk of these songs, she surely made them her own via her rich, moving voice. The stunning highlight "Blackhawk" is filled with nostalgia and longing - an ode to the power of love to transcend hardship.

#3: Waxahatchee: Saint Cloud

Waxahatchee’s latest and greatest solo LP is the sound of hard-won resolution. Written amidst newfound sobriety, it is a testament to Americana at it’s most incisive, melodic and compelling. The stunning “Fire” is revelatory in a way most albums aren’t across their entire runtime - ruminating on endless desire, deceiving one’s self and, making peace with ourselves and our past.

#2: Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

Lucinda Williams’ critical and commercial breakthrough - the result of a torturous, six year process - is a testament to the rewards of taking the road less travelled. After being considered too rock for country and too country for rock, she established a sound wholly her own. Though this isn’t the highest ranking Williams’ album on this list, it surely contains many of her most compelling tunes - from the tough but tender Blaze Foley tribute “Drunken Angel” to the tear-jerker “Lake Charles” and the richly evocative title track.

#1: Lucinda Williams: Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams’ self-titled LP boils down Americana to its core essence; encapsulating all it’s very best qualities so well that it went on to single-handedly shape the genre’s future. Moving between desolate confessionals (“Abandoned”) and celebratory anthems like “Crescent City” and “Passionate Kisses” (later a multi-Grammy-winning hit for Mary Chapin Carpenter), it is an unrivalled feat of songwriting excellence. Nowhere is the more readily apparent than on “Side Of The Road” - a rich collecting of affecting intimacies that capture isolation and questioning at their most.

Where's The Black and Blue?

Discussion about this post