August 22, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic listens to a pair of new albums on which unconventionally lovely singing manages to capture the feeling of being struck by the divine or the trust that deep friendship can instill.

Trent Wayne

Hey shouters and crooners,

I’ve written in this newsletter about my love of vocal harmony, the long kiss that plays out in the background (or sometimes the foreground) of so many pop songs. If you love a spine-tingling blend the way I do, you might already be aware of The Womack Sisters, whose debut album of perfectly executed retro soul came out last week, or Julia Holter, who manipulates harmony in revelatory ways in her electronic compositions, most recently on the just-released Materia. I love the otherworldly quality of Holter’s music and the dazzling skills the Womack women exhibit. But listening to two other albums released this week, I’ve been thinking about vocal interplay that feels a little ragged — like a difficult but necessary conversation, or a rush of intrusive thoughts that raise long-buried emotions. The ear thrills at a perfectly executed triad, but the brain is stimulated in a different way when a singer’s raw tone complicates the mix.

Kurt Wagner, leader of the beloved Nashville indie music ensemble Lambchop, has a voice that shows a few cracks. Over the 40 years he’s led that revolving ensemble, he’s applied it to erudite poetical ramblings informed by country, jazz, lounge music and pastoral indie rock. The past decade has seen him using electronics in smaller ensembles to distort and sometimes nearly bury his vocals, in part because he wanted to figure out how he, as a white Southerner, could relate to Black culture and specifically R&B and hip-hop. Recently he found another path into that dynamic when he stumbled on a form of hymnody known as “lining out,” or “the old way of singing,” in which a main voice, or clerk, intones a song’s lines one by one, followed by a group of congregants.

“Lining out” is an oral tradition that predates better-known call-and-response forms like shape note singing and the Sacred Harp. It originated in 17th century churches whose faithful were mostly illiterate. In America’s early days, it established a crossroads where colonizers and enslaved Africans met. As the Black church grew out of its members’ determination to preserve their own dignity and strength within institutions thrust upon them, and white believers developed their own ways of celebrating in tough circumstances, the approach evolved. “Lined out” singing is, indeed, a free form; without the rules set down by notation, its practitioners have always incorporated whatever sounds their bodies wanted to make. One contemporary observer, the composer Thomas Mace, listed these noises as “whining, toting, yelling or screeking.”

There isn’t much screeking on Punching the Clown. Wagner wanted to reenact the impromptu exchanges the legacy preserves, but his choral arranger, Blake Morgan, convinced him that the singers he engaged would do better with notation. The album’s vocals were recorded in Eau Claire, Wis., where six singers joined Wagner and a small band that included Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on banjo, and in London, where Morgan enlisted a 10-voice choir. The ensembles sound mellifluous, though they push the edge of tunefulness at times. What Wagner and his collaborators do capture is that startling feeling of being struck by the divine that great sacred music can inspire, even in the humblest circumstances.

Wagner’s lyrics, full of quips and bawdy interjections, dwell on the unexpected ways that grace interrupts and realigns mundane existence. I mean “grace” in a secular sense: It can be a religious experience, but also a sudden psychological insight, political zeal, romantic passion, anything that feels generative instead of soul-numbing. (“Punching the clown” is a typically self-skewering phrase, both slang for masturbation and the title of a 2009 cult movie about a hapless touring musician.) When the choral voices enter, Wagner’s sometimes surreal musings on an ailing dog or the inadequacies of medical testing grow profound, mystical. A goofy joke expands and shows its depths. His prosaic delivery brings everything back to earth, but he’s always on the verge of transcendence. It’s a fascinating musical way of showing how the mind (or call it the soul) contains dimensions just waiting to be explored, and how ordinary occurrences can contain all the dread and glory of holiness.

A very different album released this week also got me thinking about how voices aligning unexpectedly can say more than a more conventionally beautiful blend might express. I’ve been following the Georgia-based hey, nothing since the early 2020s, when the duo of Harlow Phillips and Tyler Mabry started posting videos of their boisterously heartfelt performances from various high school stages. In 2022, the teenage pals enjoyed a viral breakthrough with the Jane Schoenbrun-style ghost story “I haunt ur dreams” and I’ve enjoyed watching their world expand since then. Hound is hey, nothing’s second album, released the year both members turn 21. It abounds with killer emo riffs, shoutable choruses and stories of frayed family ties, lost friendships, trips to the hospital and broken hearts that weigh as much as a beluga whale — you know, typical leaving-adolescence stuff. But there’s something fundamental about hey, nothing that separates it from the average folk-punk contenders: the way that the voices of Mabry and Phillips interact.

These two, who have been singing together since middle school, haven’t ironed out their vocal blend. Each has a distinct tone — Phillips is full force, with a ringing upper range, while Mabry is more inward and conversational. In their songs they often trade off verses and burst into harmonies without warning. When they sing together it feels more like a dialogue than an attempt to merge. On “Drywall,” about the baffling forms grief takes after a loved one’s death, Mabry takes the lead with a bit of deliberate shakiness until Phillips enters as support without resolving the track’s vulnerability. “Arteries” stages a battle that’s both internal — the self-doubt of a would-be lover who fears or has felt rejection — and leaking outward as frustration and anger; Phillips’s mournful tone gains risky energy when pushed forward by Mabry’s rough-edged sneer.

The vocal interplay throughout Hound excels at expressing the whiplash of being young and open to every emotion, yet caught in the static generated by anxiety, depression, family disasters and self-doubt. The experience of pain and hope colliding is a common subject in pop, but it’s deceptively difficult to express honestly. It takes two to do so in hey, nothing — a couple of pals who know each other’s voices so well, they can let each other go all the way into the feeling.

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A few things that have me singing in the pews this week

Like so many movie maniacs I know, I absolutely love Jane Schoenbrun’s new queer horror-comedy adventure, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The director visited the IndieWire podcast and revealed all the secrets about the blood, guts and love that makes this movie magical.
Foundational rock critic Dave Marsh passed away after a long illness this past week. Many of the writers he mentored or influenced posted moving tributes; here are a few. And if you want to check out Marsh’s legacy, start with his masterpiece, The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made.
Are you a DJ who believes in democracy? You may have the chance to DJ a polling place during the midterms. DJs at the Polls is organizing an effort to bring hot beats to voters this fall.
I’m very excited to hear Dopamine Chamber, the promised-to-be-trippy fifth album from young rock titans Fontaines D.C., dropping October 16. However, unlike the singer-songwriter/comic poet/character Jim. E. Brown, I did not have a psychotic episode in a Brighton Travelodge after meeting Grian Chatten. (That last link is a good laugh.)
I’m so excited to be heading to the Chicago area soon to host several conversations during the Evanston Folk Festival. Indigo Girls, a fantastic songwriters' round and Roses for the Roches — it’s going to be a time! If you’re anywhere near, you must come.

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