Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1Golden Hour (2018)Golden Hour (2018)Released 1 Jan 2018Kacey Musgraves blended country banjo and pedal steel with disco-pop shimmer and vocoder harmonies, and the result won the Grammy for Album of the Year. For pop listeners it is the easiest door in the genre: Slow Burn eases you in, High Horse is practically a disco song, and the songwriting stays…0
  2. 2Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (2014)Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (2014)Released 1 Jan 2014Kentucky singer Sturgill Simpson pairs a Waylon Jennings-style baritone with lyrics about psychedelics, consciousness and the meaning of it all, plus guitars that wander into psych rock. Turtles All the Way Down is the hook for sceptics: a classic country sound singing about things country songs…0
  3. 3Purgatory (2017)Purgatory (2017)Released 1 Jan 2017Produced by Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers's breakthrough album grounds traditional Appalachian bluegrass in vivid, lived-in sketches of rural Kentucky life. Driven by frantic fiddle runs, clawhammer banjo and Childers's raw, weathered tenor, tracks like Whitehouse Road hit with fierce emotional…0
  4. 4Southeastern (2013)Southeastern (2013)Released 1 Jan 2013Written after Jason Isbell got sober, this is the pick for anyone who loves literary singer-songwriters and assumes country cannot offer them one. Cover Me Up and Elephant balance devastating vulnerability with precise, novelistic detail, and the arrangements are spare enough that the words always…0
  5. 5Traveller (2015)Traveller (2015)Released 1 Jan 2015Long established as a top Nashville songwriter, Chris Stapleton stepped to the microphone with a volcanic, blues-drenched voice. Blending Southern rock riffs, acoustic ballads and soulful country-blues on Tennessee Whiskey, Traveller restored raw muscle and genuine soul to modern country.0
  6. 6Red Headed Stranger (1975)Red Headed Stranger (1975)Released 1 Jan 1975Willie Nelson's landmark 1975 concept album challenged Nashville's polished production style with radical minimalism. Featuring little more than Nelson's nylon-string acoustic guitar Trigger, his sister Bobbie's piano and sparse percussion, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain showed that quiet restraint…0
  7. 7Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998)Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998)Released 1 Jan 1998Lucinda Williams spent six obsessive years crafting this southern gothic tour de force. Blending Delta blues, jangly country rock and evocative rural memories, the title track and Drunken Angel paint indelible sensory portraits of love, grief and Southern geography.0
  8. 8Time (The Revelator) (2001)Time (The Revelator) (2001)Released 1 Jan 2001Gillian Welch and David Rawlings recorded this acoustic landmark at Nashville's historic RCA Studio B. Armed only with two acoustic guitars, banjo and close mountain harmonies, tracks like Everything Is Free and I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll evoke the ghost of early American folk.0
  9. 9At Folsom Prison (1968)At Folsom Prison (1968)Released 1 Jan 1968Performing before two thousand cheering inmates in January 1968, Johnny Cash forged a transformative bond of empathy and outlaw camaraderie. Cash's booming baritone and the freight-train rhythm of the Tennessee Three capture the raw, electric heartbeat of American working-class defiance.0
  10. 10John Prine (1971)John Prine (1971)Released 1 Jan 1971A former postal worker from Illinois, John Prine arrived with an astonishing collection of warm, witty and profoundly compassionate character studies. Hello in There and Angel from Montgomery display an uncanny ability to inhabit the lives of lonely elders and weary souls with humour and grace.0