April 25, 2026

by Ann Powers

Noah Kahan’s rise to fame, via both sturdy songwriting and savvy social media, is set to hit a new peak with the release this week of his fourth album, The Great Divide. This week, our critic is listening as folk rock’s latest hero heads back to his hometown only to find that physical space is simpler to traverse than emotional distance.

Below is an excerpt from Ann Powers’ review of the album, published earlier this week on NPR Music.

Patrick McCormack

“What right did I have to be so strange?” wonders Jack, the faded antihero of Marilynne Robinson’s 2008 novel Home, reflecting on a life spent first trashing and then running from the semi-rural comforts that are his inheritance. Jack is a problem child grown into alcoholic instability, the prodigal son in Home’s recasting of that story from Luke’s gospel within the gentle, stifling atmosphere of the mid-20th century American Midwest. His return to his hometown of Gilead uncovers buried crises and instigates new ones; though Jack’s destructive streak is considerable, it’s the strangeness he brings, that feeling of alienation and instability, that sets the world on edge.

This is one of the messages of the Biblical tale — that however understandable a son’s departure from home might be, his return will always blow up the new order that emerged after his departure. Adjustments will be torn asunder, scabs ripped off, resentments raised. “I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble,” Jack explains to his sister Glory. This trouble isn’t so foreign to the people Jack has left as he thinks; it’s as much a part of human experience as the longing for order, for peace. The return of the prodigal son simply throws its presence into focus. Then, forgiveness and healing can take place.

Noah Kahan’s fourth album is a prodigal son fable that, like Robinson’s, follows a man’s hesitant return from the city to a small town. It inverts the story in an interesting way: Instead of a lonesome drifter slinking back after losing it all, Kahan’s wanderer has conquered worlds and feels a bit outsized for the home turf he’s re-entered. Like Robinson’s Jack, this character — let’s call him Noah, though not every song on the album is strictly confessional — destabilizes the spaces he once called home.

Song after song in the aptly titled The Great Divide considers absence and presence, stasis and mobility, by engaging with various perspectives: that of Kahan’s old friends, his family members, his steadfast wife and, occasionally, neighbors whose dilemmas resonate though they couldn’t be more different than Kahan’s own. It’s a sprawling and musically variegated song suite, a “journey,” as the ever-self-deprecating Kahan laughed in a short video announcing the album. The lake-dotted valley where Strafford, Vt. sits is his Gilead, the old country where his hopes and neuroses originated. Working on his ability to tell its specific stories has allowed him to move, over the course of four albums, beyond adolescent navel-gazing into the realm of the unabashedly literary songwriter elite, even as his unerring radar for earworms has also made him a pop star.

As he’s risen, Kahan has found a mission in promoting mental health awareness among his fans. A therapy kid the way some were theater kids, open about his various diagnoses and medications, Kahan developed a frame of reference that younger fans who grew up in the age of psychiatry’s medicalization could instantly recognize. A modestly successful touring musician since his late teens, Kahan wrote most of Stick Season — his last album, and a runaway success — in a sibling’s childhood bedroom in the home of his father, whose traumatic brain injury when the 29-year-old singer was in eighth grade permanently altered his family’s life. Revisiting primal scenes in search of a breakthrough, the Kahan of Stick Season engaged in a songwriter’s version of narrative psychology, seeking breakthroughs that could relieve his own anxiety and pent-up anger. Fans heard struggles they could comprehend, voiced in language they knew from being hyper-analyzed kids themselves.

As crucially, Kahan writes his way into immediacy: His songs nearly always begin in the middle of a situation, whether it’s a fight, a confession or an aimless drive that sneakily turns profound. He’s conversational, careful with metaphors, always searching for the words that hit directly, without fuss. In an age that fetishizes face-to-face communication from the shrink’s couch to the TikTok screen, Kahan is a master of making total strangers feel he’s looking them in the eye.

The rousing chorus has been the primary vehicle for his success, which is grounded in live performance. At a Noah Kahan concert, there’s no loneliness epidemic, because everyone is singing along with his leaping melodies tied to undefeatable four-chord progressions, the rocket fuel of anthemic rock. The title track of The Great Divide shows that Kahan and his producer Gabe Simon still fully intend to mine that gold; in that story of an old friend whom its narrator failed (I think it’s about a queer kid damaged by a small town church experience; you might hear a different kind of rupture), the chorus breaks through like the rock Kahan imagines the damaged friend throws through a stained glass window, shattering, letting real light in. It’s irresistible. But Kahan clearly knew big choruses wouldn’t be enough to carry him into the next phase of his career.

Read the full review

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