Margo Price has something to say but nothing to prove. In just three remarkable solo albums, the singer and songwriter has cemented herself as a force in American music and a generational talent. A deserving critical darling, she has never shied away from the sounds that move her, the pain that’s shaped her, or the topics that tick her off, like music industry double standards, the gender wage gap, or the plight of the American farmer. (In 2021, she even joined the board of Farm Aid.)   Now, on her fourth full-length Strays, a clear-eyed mission statement delivered in blistering rock and roll, she’s taking on substance abuse, self-image, abortion rights, and orgasms. Musically extravagant but lyrically laser focused, the 10-song record tears into a broken world desperate for remedy. And who better to tell it? Price has done plenty of her own rebuilding—or as she shout sings in explanation on “Been to the Mountain,” the set’s throat-ripping opener, “I have to the mountain and back alright”—and finds herself, at long last, free. Feral. Stray.    Price began writing for the set in the summer of 2020, not long after the arrival of her enthusiastically reviewed That’s How Rumors Get Started LP. She wanted to go deeper into rock and roll, and dive guitar-first into psychedelia. “I wanted the album to feel like a lifetime,” she says, “or a 10-hour hallucination where you remember everything again.” She and her husband—songwriter and frequent collaborator Jeremy Ivey—holed up in a rental house in South Carolina to find the swirling sounds rattling around in her head. They ate a bunch of mushrooms and sat outside, albums from Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Bruce Springsteen playing in the background, writing as inspiration struck. Six days passed and the songs piled up.    The stack only grew once back home in Nashville. “I feel this urgency,” Price says of this moment in her creative path. “I need to keep moving, keep creating.” Maybe it’s getting older, Price suggests, or the years the pandemic stole from us all. It’s thrilling—and downright terrifying. “It’s scary to not make the same record over and over,” she explains. She has yet to. Moving from the sparse folk of her 2016 debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, into the rollicking roots of its follow up, All American Made, the following year, and, in 2020, into classic rock with Rumors, Price has established herself as a sonic explorer of the finest ilk. Still, she says, “This could be too out-there for people. But I just have this morality where I feel like, it has to be this.”