Esther Rose was on a long solo drive when she started writing the opening title track of Want, her stunning fifth album. At first, the words seemed almost like a joke, something to keep herself amused as the miles passed. “I want a puppy, but I don't want a mess. I want to know where I’m going without GPS,” she sang from behind the wheel. Soon, the idea snowballed into a list of desires that spanned existential, spiritual, and mundane; romantic to platonic to familial; at once wildly ambitious yet piercingly relatable; all set to a catchy melody that blends her pop instincts with country storytelling and the raw immediacy of a basement punk show. In other words, she was on her way to another classic Esther Rose song. This precise blend has made the Santa Fe-based artist one of her generation’s most beloved songwriters: someone whose live shows are known to conclude in mass tears and group hugs. Still, something was different this time. “For me, these songs felt like revelations,” she explains, comparing the 11-song record to a memoir, alive with kinetic storytelling and personal insight. In its newly direct and stirringly nuanced writing, you’ll hear about rock bottom encounters, shifting relationships with substances, evolving perspectives on adult partnership, and, as evidenced by those early lines in “Want,” a few jokes along the way. Vivid and bracing, Want places you in the passenger seat while each of these feelings arrive. To match the multi-dimensional tone of the writing, Rose has made the most adventurous, hardest-hitting record of her career. Working with producer Ross Farbe and recording live-to-tape in Nashville’s Bomb Shelter, she travels as far as she’s been from the stripped-down classic country of celebrated early work like 2017’s This Time Last Night and 2019’s You Made It This Far. Following the wide-open serenity of 2023’s momentous Safe to Run, she now leans toward confrontational arrangements full of distortion and full-band spontaneity, never sacrificing a classicist’s gift for melody that makes each song instantly memorable. “Making this album was the most beautiful experience of my life,” Rose explains, describing the euphoria of sharing these intimate stories among trusted collaborators like guitarist Kunal Prakash, drummer Howe Pearson, bassist Gina Leslie, and pedal steel player John James Tourville. She also enlisted friends like singer-songwriter Dean Johnson (who duets in the stunning “Scars”) and New Orleans rock band Video Age (who she co-wrote “tailspin” with) to flesh out her vision. Ranging from stark solo performances to grungy blowouts, the album maintains a steady focus while never staying too long in one place. (Like David Bowie, Rose would arrive at the studio in carefully chosen outfits to set the tone for each session, guiding her bandmates to follow the mood.) To reach this level of confidence, Rose had to recalibrate her entire relationship with music. When she concluded the tour for Safe to Run, she considered quitting altogether, feeling exhausted and depleted, seeing no way to continue at her relentless pace. But after quitting drinking and finding new momentum in therapy, she devoted herself to the new material, letting ideas flow without worrying about the final product. She considered making an electro-pop album; a self-titled acoustic record. Eventually, she began categorizing her disparate ideas under the working title The Therapy LP. “There are things that I have tiptoed around in my writing—and in my life—that I wasn't ready to look at,” she reflects, “and now I’m going for it.” The results are breakthroughs like “Had To” and “Rescue You” that tether her tightly structured melodies to narratives that bring distressing subject matter down to earth. And where her love songs in the past often found universal resonance in simple questions about heartbreak, these ones explore complex subjects like accountability and true connection: “Baby, I’ve got scars that you cannot see/Love them for what they gave to me,” she sings boldly in “Scars.” This level of vulnerability is new from Esther Rose—a vow to be known more fully by her audience, herself, and the people in her life. “Each time I write a new album, I go a little deeper,” she says. “For me, it’s been very challenging to stay... I’m always packing the Subaru in my mind.” And while she can still craft a road song like nobody else—“Two days on the highway, solo drive/Today is the greatest day of my life,” she sings in “tailspin”—she now searches for stability, even when that means confronting internal chaos. The album’s closing song, titled “Want Pt. 2,” returns Rose to her old hometown of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, watching a Rolling Stones cover band in a bar she frequented back in the day. She’s teary-eyed, surrounded by loved ones, finding new profundity in a shaky rendition of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” As she reflects on the scene—even interpolating some of the Stones’ lyrics and melodic cues—her friends provide celebratory backing vocals as the band thrashes away. It’s a fitting finale for the strongest, widest-reaching album of her career—a moment when the past, present, and future collide, a panorama of emotions, the kind of party you never want to leave.

Dollbaum’s debut Wellswood was released in 2022, drawing comparisons of Justin Vernon and Damien Jurardo (Popmatters) to Richard Buckner and Arthur Russell (AllMusic) for his “compelling lyricism drawing as much from the dark caricatures of Harry Crews and Denis Johnson as Springsteen’s realism” (Beats Per Minute). Shortly after its release, Dollbaum drove along the gulf from his adopted hometown of New Orleans back to his family in Tampa. There, he learned an old friend had passed unexpectedly. “We hadn’t been close in years, and finding out about his death sent me on a sort of journey through memories we had together,” reflects Dollbaum, “places we grew up in and how sometimes you don’t understand how or why relationships change over time.” On Drive All Night, Dollbaum excavates and reconstructs a sense of place from his past. Sometimes directly, like on the title track or “Lives of Saints,” which come across like conversations with that old friend. Sometimes indirectly, too: Dollbaum fills “Angus Valley” with amalgamations of people from his life as the protagonist loops around the titular neighborhood in a car going 110, itching for an exit sign. The ensuing “Whippits/Trailer Lights” is pure hushed tragedy, focused on a toxic couple trying to be sweet for once: “We can go up US 41 until it gets darker than the light can see / I got myself some cocaine from Joe, and maybe it will make you smile with me / Let’s get a smoking room, I got a motel up the street / We can fuck silence in the sheets, something to remember it.” After the layered and labored recordings that became Wellswood, the songs from Drive All Night were tracked with ease by Clay Jones across 2023 in Mississippi, with Kate Teague, Josh Halper, and more from Dollbaum’s Nashville community joining. “William Duffy’s Farm” ends the EP on a cloudy note that pleases Dollbaum, and, like all good EPs, leaves the listener running it back until the new full-length arrives. “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota is one of my favorite poems by James Wright,” he says. “Line after line is sort of a pastoral paradise, ending with ‘I have wasted my whole life.’ I love that ambiguity about wasting time, and I felt that fell well into the theme of Drive All Night.”