Alabama born neo-country-soul artist Kashus Culpepper encompasses the sound of the South. A student and reverent purveyor of Southern music – country, soul, blues, folk and rock – Culpepper found his voice in church as young as five years old. It wasn't until 2020 that Culpepper went from listener to performer, picking up a guitar and learning cover songs to play at barrack bonfires in Rota, Spain during his deployment with the Navy. Covers soon became originals, and once he landed home on U.S. shores, Kash played dive bars up and down the Mississippi Gulf Coast, making a name for himself with the fresh-yet-reminiscent sound that oozes from his very being. Crashing into prominence, Culpepper sold out headline club shows throughout the South before formally releasing a single song. With Nashville taking notice, Culpepper found a musical home at Big Loud Records. Culpepper has joined Leon Bridges, Sierra Ferrell and Darius Rucker on tour – embarking this year on a headlining run as well as dates with Niall Horan, Eric Church, Shaboozey, Jelly Roll, Thomas Rhett and Wyatt Flores. Named one of the 2026 Shazam Fast Forward Class, WXPN's Artist to Watch for January 2026, 2026 Nashville Scene Artist to Watch, GRAMMY.com's 25 Artists to Watch in 2025, Apple Music Zane Lowe's 25 Artists for '25, 2025 Variety Power of Young Hollywood Impact Report, Opry NextStage Class of 2025, Billboard's February 2025 Country Rookie of the Month, 2025 Amazon Music Bonfire Artist to Watch, Apple Music's February 2025 Country Riser of the Month, 2025 Pandora Country Artist to Watch and Martin Artist Showcase Class of 2025. Culpepper's debut album Act I, and seasonal addendum Act I: Summer Nights, are out now.

The latest album from Maggie Rose, Half Moon reveals the rare magic of hard-won momentum meeting a creative spirit in peak bloom. After devoting more than a decade to deepening her craft and unlocking the full force of her extraordinary voice, the Nashville-based singer/songwriter experienced a rapid rise in recognition, including scoring back-to-back GRAMMY nominations for her 2024 LP No One Gets Out Alive and 2025 single “Poison In My Well” and earning an Emerging Act Of The Year nod from the Americana Music Association in 2025. Rather than succumbing to the pressure of heightened expectation, Rose immersed herself in the making of her new album with effusive abandon. With its lovely alchemy of soulful symphonic pop, R&B, and Americana, Half Moon arrives as a document of divine expansion and self-discovery—ultimately extending an invitation to embrace every facet of ourselves with grace, courage, and a wide-open heart. “At first it felt strange to receive all these accolades I’d been wanting for a long time—instead of grounding me, it made me feel anxious,” says Rose, who made her acclaimed full-length debut with 2013’s Cut to Impress. “But then the new songs started pouring out, and it felt like such a gift. I realized the recognition had come at a time when I was finally able to fully articulate who I am through my music, because of how my voice and my songwriting have evolved over the years. So if people are looking at me more closely, I’m glad they’re looking now.” Co-produced by Lawrence Rothman (Amanda Shires, Margo Price) and Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves, Leon Bridges), Half Moon took shape through a charmed and fluid process that began with the three musicians meeting up every few weeks to write in Tashian’s home studio, taking advantage of his abundant stash of instruments (e.g., Mellotron, upright bass, a saloon-style piano). “We’d leave each session with these beautiful, fully conceived demos, and after a few songs it became apparent that something special was happening,” says Rose, who was eight months pregnant at the outset of the album’s creation. As they gave voice to the complexities of her inner life—her lived experience of womanhood, the sacredness of her closest bonds, the thrill and overwhelm of expecting her first child—the trio of collaborators surrendered to a shared journey Rothman sums up as “a year-long wild ride of writing, producing, crying, laughing, babies being born, and dreams coming to life.” Tashian, meanwhile, compares their creative kinship to “a bunch of kids building sandcastles on a beach and just enjoying the sunshine…We were all passengers, and the songs were taking us wherever they wanted to go.” Six months after the birth of her son Graham, Rose headed to the historic RCA Studio A in Nashville and recorded Half Moon with an elite lineup of over two dozen musicians, finding the album’s true cohesion through the kinetic energy of people gathering in a room and giving the songs their fullest life. Along with top-tier players like guitarist Tom Bukovac (Emmylou Harris, Stevie Nicks), bassist Dennis Crouch (Elvis Costello, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss), and keyboardist Peter Levin (The Highwomen, Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit), that lineup included Rose’s touring band: percussionist Tim Burkhead, bassist Judd Fuller, guitarist M.P. Gannon, and multi-instrumentalist Cav Mims. The follow-up to her 2025 EP Cocoon, Rose’s fifth studio LP marks a bold departure from the rootsy soul of No One Gets Out Alive—a Best Americana Album GRAMMY nominee featured on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of Rolling Stone. Thanks in part to its lavish string arrangements and velvety horns, Half Moon unfolds with both sophisticated ease and daring grandiosity—a direct reflection of her newly widened emotional world. “There’s a bigness to this music that was really exciting to explore,” says Rose, who names the orchestral pop of the Brill Building era among her touchstones for the album. “I think that has everything to do with this album coming from a moment when I was feeling a depth of love I’d never felt before, and the subject matter being more awe-inspiring than anything I’d ever had to work with.The sound is orchestral and wide-ranging because I was trying to capture and portray the duality within the album.”     Partly recorded at Sound Emporium Studios, Half Moon takes its title from its soul-searching centerpiece, written just two days before Graham was born. “My labor was induced so I knew he’d be born under a full pink moon, which led to Lawrence and Daniel and I talking about the link between the phases of the moon and the way we see ourselves,” Rose recalls. A low-lit reverie adorned in sumptuous strings and spellbinding piano melodies, “Half Moon” inhabits a moody intensity as Rose muses on the nature of identity. “At the time I was overcome with emotion; there was so much love and excitement, but also fear and anxiety about what parts of myself I might lose and not be able to reclaim,” she says. “As I was working through all that, it helped me to think about how the moon is always whole—it’s just presented to us in different ways at different times, like all the many aspects of ourselves that we’re constantly trying to navigate.” A gorgeous showcase for the vocal prowess that’s found her hailed as one of the finest singers in Nashville, Half Moon begins with the slow-burning grandeur of “Used To It”—a rapturous expression of longing and lust, spotlighting an artist in total command of her inimitable voice. “Even before most of the album was written, I knew I wanted ‘Used To It’ to be the first track," says Rose. “It felt like the start of a new thread for me; there’s something elegant and elevated in its structure, but it’s got some teeth as well. From a sonic standpoint, I wanted it to open the record because it feels like an unwrapping: there’s a smoldering, simmering build-up to a bombastic ending, pulling the listener into the album’s journey.” Next, on the wildly fun “Red Shoes,” Rose’s vocals take on a joyful ferocity as she delivers a dance-ready anthem of unapologetic pleasure. “It’s a song about forgetting your responsibilities and everything happening in the world and just going out and having a good time, which I think we all deserve,” she says. And on “The Mission,” Rose strikes a winning balance of assured sensuality and playful flirtation—a dynamic echoed in the groove-driven track’s glossy guitar tones, effervescent strings, and vibrant hand percussion. “There’s a confidence to ‘The Mission’ that feels really good to me,” says Rose. “At the core it’s a love song, but it’s also about owning your sexuality and however that manifests for you.”  While Half Moon’s A-side radiates a lighthearted vitality, its B-side brings nuanced introspection and tender emotionality to tracks like “Gentle Man”—an acoustic-guitar-led meditation on the trappings of masculinity. The album’s latter half also includes “Hiding In Plain Sight,” a wistful piece of self-reflection penned with country luminary Natalie Hemby (one of her few co-writers on the LP apart from Rothman and Tashian). For Rose, the album intimately chronicles a season of profound personal transformation—a period in time she refers to as “this amazing moment of expecting and then giving birth, and re-emerging with a completely new part of my identity.” In sharing Half Moon with the world, she hopes to provide listeners with a similar sense of refuge and release. “We’re in an extremely vulnerable time, so I hope this record gives people space to feel whatever they need to feel,” says Rose. “I hope it helps everyone to be more gentle with themselves and give themselves grace—and reminds them that, just like the moon, we don’t need to shine full and bright all of the time to do what we’re meant to do. Like the moon, the whole of us is always there but just revealed differently depending on the light.”

Florida native Luke Preston picked up his first guitar at 7 years old. Learning to play by listening to everything from Bay Area punk rock to Chicago blues, he started writing songs shortly thereafter. Preston moved to Nashville in 2011 to attend college. Following graduation, Preston worked as a sideman for several artists including Walker McGuire, Jackson Dean, Jordyn Shellhart and Dave Hause. In September of 2019, Preston signed a publishing agreement with Anthem Entertainment. Since signing with Anthem, Preston has had songs recorded by the Lone Bellow, Elvie Shane, Iam Tongi, Boy Named Banjo, and many others.

Ben Burgess is the pride of East Dallas, a renaissance man with a golden pen. After landing his first career cut with Jonas Brothers’ “Chillin In the Summertime,” he packed up a blossoming career born on Austin’s 6th Street to chase dreams in Los Angeles, but quickly relocated to Nashville shortly thereafter when his twang got a little too loud for the West Coast. Burgess started writing with Warner Chappell Music Publishing in 2015, where he stockpiled cuts including the BMI 2020 Country Song of the Year, Morgan Wallen’s 7X platinum “Whiskey Glasses,” Tyler Rich’s gold “The Difference,” Pat Green’s Texas radio #1 “Drinkin’ Days,” Lil Wayne’s “Dreams,” Martin Garrix & Troye Sivan’s platinum “There for You,” Dierks Bentley’s “My Religion,” HARDY’s “SIGNED, SOBER YOU,” and more. His tracks have landed TV placements on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and commercial spots for Major League Baseball, Xbox, and Lexus. Breaking out as an artist in his own right, Burgess signed to Big Loud Records in 2020, and in the same year, was featured on Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley’s buzzy Chapter 1: Snake Oil album on “Heartbreak.” He was featured on HIXTAPE: Vol. 2's “Red Dirt Clouds” alongside David Lee Murphy and Big Loud labelmate ERNEST. Burgess’ debut album Tears the Size of Texas is out now.