Lambchop

Lambchop started in Nashville in 1986 under the name Posterchild, and spent its early years introducing itself as the most messed-up country band in a town that takes country music very seriously. Forty years on, the only fixed point is Kurt Wagner, whose droll, low-slung voice and sidelong, porch-level lyrics have steered a rotating collective through horn-lit country soul, hushed chamber arrangements and, on 2016's FLOTUS, a sharp swerve into synthesizers and Auto-Tune. The band never quite left country. It just kept finding stranger rooms in the house. Their seventeenth album, Punching the Clown (2026), was recorded in three days with Justin Vernon on banjo and a six-part choir, and it grew out of a song Wagner half-heard on the car radio on the way to buy gas and never managed to identify. The search led him to lined-out hymnody, an old call-and-response gospel form, and back to the plain banjo-and-voice songwriting where he began.