Depending on the game, an Ace can be the highest or lowest card, zero or infinity. A breakup feels similar—one path crumbles, while all others remain infinitely possible. How do you write about heartbreak when you’re going through it? Ace, GRAMMY award-winner Madison Cunningham’s third record for Verve Forecast, tracks every part of it: falling out of love, having your heart broken, and then falling in love again. Co-produced by Cunningham and Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Rilo Kiley, Bahamas, Peach Pit), the fourteen-track album is honest and full of heart, even as it breaks. Ace builds off of the success of Revealer (2022), a darkly funny portrait of an artist that won Cunningham her GRAMMY for “Best Folk Album,” but it is a different record. A slow burn until it wasn’t. It follows a period of writer's block. On Revealer and her debut album Who Are You Now (2019), Cunningham says that she was writing songs about heartbreak, but they weren’t about her heartbreak. They were sketches, observations. Cunningham wanted Ace to be emotions first. Heartbreaking and lush and bold. Cunningham’s first single from Ace, “My Full Name,” was released to praise by PASTE who calls the lyrics, “simultaneously sprawling and intimate,” recalling “an ancient work of poetry.” On Ace, which Cunningham serves as co-producer, she wanted piano to move into the foreground. “I wanted it to feel like a mountain peak,” says Cunningham, “I wanted Ace to feel like a mountain we built together.” Ace is a record that feels alive and lush in all the ways Cunningham hoped for when she started writing. It is a record of mastery and honesty. Cunningham loves every single song on it. You can tell.

Ken Pomeroy will break your heart. She’ll do it with a single line––sometimes, just one word. The pain begins as an empathetic ache. Then, as Pomeroy sings her stories, you begin to see yourself in her hurt and hope. And you realize: We’re in this together. Pomeroy’s outstretched hand to the wounded manifests as startlingly good songs. Her soprano is comforting––almost sweet––but perhaps most powerful delivering a devastating line. A deft guitarist, she opts for beds of rootsy strings that can soothe or haunt. But it’s her writing that really shines and stings. Raised in Moore, Oklahoma, Pomeroy is Cherokee. Her mamaw gave her the name ᎤᏍᏗᏀᏯᏓᎶᏂᎨᎤᏍᏗᎦ, which means “Little Wolf with Yellow Hair.” Existing in the intersection of past, present and future; Pomeroy effortlessly channels the ancestral wisdom of her elders and her lived experience through her lyrical and instrumental composition. Writing as a cathartic release culminated in Pomeroy’s new album, Cruel Joke, released May 16, 2025 on Rounder Records. The 12-track indie-folk collection creates a wild but safe space of Pomeroy’s own––a space that, like 23-year-old Pomeroy herself, is brutally honest, proudly Native American, and undeniably brilliant. People have noticed. Pomeroy’s “Wall of Death” made its way onto the Twisters soundtrack, while Hulu’s Reservation Dogs featured her soul-mining gem, “Cicadas,” and The Low Down features Pomeroy performing “Bound to Rain.” Tour dates with Lukas Nelson, Iron & Wine, I’m With Her, American Aquarium, John Moreland and more have followed along with stops at the Newport Folk Festival and Telluride Bluegrass Festival. “A lot of really cool things are happening, but it hasn’t set in. I haven’t had time to bask in it,” Pomeroy says. “Even when I started playing music, I never thought, ‘I’m a musician. I chose this life.’ I feel like something way above me pointed at me and said, ‘Okay, here’s your path.’ And I’ve just been following it kind of blindly ever since.”