by Shannon Smith
Lauren Watkins’ If I’m Being Honest makes complicated feelings easy to understand. Watkins spends much of If I’m Being Honest working through that expression. Across twelve songs, she writes about romantic habits, changing desires, endings, hope, and the uncomfortable clarity that sometimes arrives only after an experience has run its course. The album’s strength is that Watkins rarely needs to overexplain any of it.
The music gives complicated feelings legible shapes. Familiar country progressions, acoustic guitars, pedal steel, direct melodies, and steady grooves establish frames the [...]
by Shannon Smith
Broken View finds Sam Barber building songs slowly and pushing them outward. Every arrangement on Broken View begins with something grounded that expands. Starting with acoustic sounds and close vocal phrasing before drums, layered guitars, steel, or fiddle broaden the emotional field around it. The record’s power does not come from oversized hooks or polished melodic repetition. It comes from the motion the song’s bring. Letting the rolling tom patterns, opening choruses, suspended guitar textures, and Barber’s ability to let a vocal line strain slightly against the groove without losing the story underneath it [...]
by Shannon Smith
Megan Moroney’s Cloud 9, released February 20, 2026, via Columbia Records and Sony Music Nashville, arrives as a clear statement by an artist confident in her voice. Across fifteen tracks, Moroney writes from a place of emotional clarity. The result is an album that pairs candid storytelling with polished country-pop production, capturing the feeling of someone who has learned how to breathe again and be comfortable with who they are.
Moroney’s greatest strength has always been her ability to make country storytelling feel conversational, and Cloud 9 amplifies that skill. Her lyrics are easy to relate [...]
by Shannon Smith
In Anna, Dasha steps into a pop-country space, reintroducing herself not just as a pop-country hitmaker but as a songwriter reclaiming her given name and emotional voice. This eight-track EP unfolds as a portrait of growth that captures Dasha’s confidence as a vocalist and fragility in songwriting in equal measure. For country fans, it’s a revealing document of an artist finding equilibrium between commercial appeal and country storytelling.
Opening with the flirtatious “Work On Me,” Dasha immediately asserts her trademark blend of country twang and pop flair. Her phrasing is playful, her delivery effortlessly confident, and her [...]
