For practically 15 years, Sturgill Simpson has been probably the most attention-grabbing man in nation music. A part of that entails making albums that don’t sound very like nation, like Mutiny After Midnight, his newest effort as Johnny Blue Skies due this Friday. (Although Sturgill leaked the album himself on YouTube for a quick spell.) A self-described “disco hedonism” file, Mutiny After Midnight is a Sturgill Simpson album by means of and thru, twinning lyrics about intercourse and politics with music that seems like a cross of the Allman Brothers Band and Stylish. It’s the type of file solely he may have made.
Sturgill is one among my favourite artists going proper now, and one among my favourite artists to put in writing about. I’ve been tangling along with his physique of labor in print and elsewhere for practically so long as Sturgill has been making albums. So, I’m each thrilled and mortified to rank all of the Sturgill albums so as of desire.
Brace for affect, as a result of right here comes my record!
8. The Ballad Of Dood And Juanita (2021)
Sturgill Simpson’s discography means lots to me. I worth every album for a distinct motive. However I’ve affection for all of them. It’s simply that the method of constructing a listing requires that one thing sits on the backside. In case you are upset that this album is at No. 8 — impacts a Johnny Blue Skies-style rhetorical posture — direct your ire on the system of integers that way back decided that “8” is the bottom of all numbers included right here.
Each Sturgill launch is, in some sense, an idea file. Generally there’s an over-arching theme (fatherhood on A Sailor’s Information To Earth) or story (regardless of the hell goes down on Sound & Fury). However extra usually it’s about no matter style experiment is at present on his thoughts (beginning with em>Excessive Prime Mountain, the trad-country file he made for his pawpaw, the “Dood” referenced in The Ballad Of Dood And Juanita). However of all these albums, the one which feels probably the most like a self-contained film (or, maybe extra precisely, a novella). It’s additionally his shortest file, clocking in simply at 28 minutes. Although the scant operating time shouldn’t be confused for lack of sophistication or concepts.
The Ballad Of Dood And Juantia unfolds like an homage to 2 adjoining varieties that peaked within the Seventies — the Sam Peckinpah-style anti-western, and the “literary” outlaw-country track cycle, particularly Willie Nelson’s epochal Purple Headed Stranger. Willie himself visitors on Dood And Juanita, including to the album’s verisimilitude as a wonderfully pitched interval piece.
Good album! Simply much less thrilling and slighter than all the opposite albums right here.
7. Each Cuttin’ Grass albums (2020)
Upon the discharge of Dood And Juantia, Simpson talked to Rolling Stone about his long-standing promise to make solely 5 albums, a pledge that dated again to the peak of his mainstream acclaim within the mid-2010s. He insisted that he would solely be again below a brand new band guise, a declaration he adopted by means of on upon the discharge of 2024’s Passage du Desir, his debut as Johnny Blue Skies.
Nonetheless, his “5 albums” promise — which I naturally liked as an adherent of The 5 Albums Take a look at — disregard an inconvenient fact: Sturgill had technically put out seven albums at that time. The 2 releases he was excising from the “5 albums” rely have been volumes one and two of Cuttin’ Grass, launched through the pandemic. Now, I perceive the logic of not counting these information — they aren’t “authentic” albums, however moderately compilations of recent recordings of previous songs finished in a bluegrass model.
These usually are not “full-on” Sturgill information just like the others. Nobody disputes this.
So why am I placing each Cuttin’ Grass albums within the No. 7 spot? As a result of they however maintain an essential place in Sturgill’s artistic life as palate cleansers (together with being extremely enjoyable to placed on). Within the annals of Sturgill-dom, the scuttled Sound & Fury — which lasted a handful of dates earlier than being shut down by Covid — quantities to the most important “what if?” of his profession. However given how depressing he was heading into these dates (as he confided to me in a 2020 interview), it’s value pondering whether or not he would have scuttled the tour even with out Covid. For all of the dangerous elements of the lockdown, it was advantageous for Sturgill, who ended up pursuing a a lot totally different sound on his personal throughout his pressured trip.
Cuttin’ Grass quantities to a retrenchment I’d liken to Bob Dylan retreating to folks music on his early ’90s albums Good As I Been To You and World Gone Incorrect, which enabled to recharge his artistic juices and get well his misplaced muse. Given Sturgill’s path since Cuttin’ Grass, these albums really feel equally restorative.
6. Mutiny After Midnight (2026)
The enjoyment of Cuttin’ Grass is that it’s the closest Sturgill — one of many nice stage performers of the final 10 years — has come to placing out an official dwell album. (He advised me in 2020 that each present on the Sailor’s Information tour was taped, although no recordings have but surfaced.) In any other case, his dalliance with Nugs on the (good) inaugural JBS tour was painfully quick (which makes me grateful that I purchased a number of reveals earlier than they have been pulled).
The primary attraction on Mutiny After Midnight is Simpson’s chemistry along with his backing band, The Darkish Clouds. The main target, neatly, is bottling up the swampy choogle they conjure on stage. (There’s additionally the promise — nay certainty — that this music will sound much more potent dwell.) The sound of Mutiny After Midnight is so intoxicating that it practically makes up for the weaknesses of the songwriting, that are appreciable. If Mutiny After Midnight have to be counted as one of the visceral Sturgill albums, it’s one among his lesser efforts on a song-by-song foundation.
Once I reviewed the album final week, I in contrast it to Midnite Vultures, Beck’s stab of greasy funk laced with hyper-sexual lyrics that continuously ventures into “you’ll be able to’t be severe” territory. An identical vibe pervades probably the most “in warmth” sections of Mutiny After Midnight, the place Sturgill compares himself (favorably!) to Hunter Biden whereas going one step past endorsing threesomes (which, naturally, means stumping for foursomes).
I can’t actually take this album critically, nor can I wipe the massive grin off my face at any time when I put it on.
5. Excessive Prime Mountain (2013)
On social media proper now, as I sort this, there’s a particularly self-serious fan of Sturgill Simpson that posts below the title “Waylon Jennings’ Gonads” (or one thing like that) who could be very upset that he made an album like Mutiny After Midnight and never an album like his debut, em>Excessive Prime Mountain. This wing of Simpson’s fanbase — let’s simply name them the “Waylon Jennings’ Gonads” folks — continues to hearken to Sturgill simply to allow them to voice their displeasure each time he deviates from a traditionalist nation template. As a result of he made that album first, there’s an inclination to imagine that em>Excessive Prime Mountain is his “common” sound and all of the information that got here after are his “experiments.” However I don’t suppose that’s true. em>Excessive Prime Mountain was additionally an experiment, and that experiment was in “making music Sturgill’s grandfather likes.” Sorry to make one other Bob Dylan analogy however: It’s like how he’s nonetheless categorized as a protest singer by a portion of his viewers as a result of he wrote songs within the model waaaay initially of his profession, despite the fact that these tunes characterize a tiny of fraction of his total physique of labor. Equally with Simpson, the down-the-middle nation music of em>Excessive Prime Mountain is an anomaly in his catalog.
As a result of I discover the “Waylon Jennings’ Gonads” folks to be usually unbearable, these detrimental emotions generally rub off on em>Excessive Prime Mountain by affiliation. And that’s unfair, as a result of at any time when I play it, I’m reminded that that is an extremely gratifying honky-tonk file. It’s so good that it’s really makes me really feel empathy for the WJG crowd, as a result of Sturgill actually is basically good at pulling off this model.
The one motive it’s not greater on this record is that — in contrast to the 4 information forward of it, and even those earlier than it — I don’t know that em>Excessive Prime Mountain is the type of album that solely Sturgill may have made. Irrespective of the skillful execution, it’s nonetheless primarily the type of throwback style train that many different artists have mounted. After this, he stopped making nation information and began making Sturgill Simpson information.
4. A Sailor’s Information To Earth (2016)
If there’s a “common” or house base sound for Sturgill, it’s not the revivalism of em>Excessive Prime Mountain, it’s some mixture of this file and 2019’s Sound & Fury. The latter’s anti-careerist irreverence displays his worldview, whereas the stew of southern rock, laidback funky R&B, and intense religious introspection cooking on A Sailor’s Information To Earth factors to his bedrock palate. The final two albums, specifically, owe one thing to A Sailor’s Information, which is ironic on condition that the music Sturgill has made below his supposedly divergent Johnny Blue Skies identification most resembles the file that put him on the coronary heart of the music business.
Whereas Metamodern Sounds teed him up as a media darling, A Sailor’s Information is the place he turned a real star, the purpose the place he wowed audiences on Saturday Night time Reside and vyed for the highest awards on the Grammys. It’s additionally the interval when he was probably the most depressing — he’s lengthy lamented his psychological state on the album’s lengthy help tour, when he apparently retreated into chemical dependency amid the chilly and oppressively lonely environs of numerous resort rooms on the street. It’s the very frame of mind he’s labored to actively keep away from ever since.
However the precise music on A Sailor’s Information — a hearty mixture of ’60s soul, ’70s Elvis, and Little Feat — really looks as if probably the most pure match for him. And it’s a skeleton key for understanding the entire of his profession, beginning with the reference to “the dread pirate Johnny Blue Skies” within the liner notes.
3. Passage du Desir (2024)
It’s that very prescient nod to JBS on A Sailor’s Information that joins his third album along with his eighth. Although, once more, they’re additionally linked by how comparable they sound. As I wrote in my evaluation of Passage du Desir on the time, “If A Sailor’s Information was an unintended Grammy-baiting album, this seems like Sturgill’s most “intentional Grammy shit” file conceivable. It’s easy, rigorously thought of music, and positively yacht-rock-ian.” There are additionally the plain jam-band overtones, which Sturgill acknowledged by pointing to his participation within the Useless Forward Competition with Bob Weir and Mickey Hart because the catalyst for his renewed love for taking part in dwell. On the album, that is signified by extra-crunchy, prolonged guitar autos like “Mint Tea” and “One For The Street.”
But it surely actually manifested on the good help tour for Passage, which quantities to the very best music he’s but made in his profession. Solely as a file, I would barely want A Sailor’s Information To Earth. But it surely’s inconceivable for me to separate my emotions concerning the Passage du Desir tour from the album. “To not belabor the purpose, however he’s having a goddamn ball on stage as of late,” I wrote on the time. “He’s smiling broad, he’s standing on amps, and he seems intent on destroying each viewers standing earlier than him. (The military jacket he donned on stage underlined the ‘joyful warrior’ posture.) The present I noticed ended with ‘Name To Arms,’ which at practically 14 minutes was additionally the longest variety of the evening. Each second of that was earned, with Sturgill imploring his band to play tougher and louder and sooner. Then the band drifted right into a space-rock jam, with (guitarist Laur) Joamets sending slide-guitar strains to the outer rings of Saturn. Proper when nirvana was about to be achieved, Sturgill steered the track again into ‘tougher and louder and sooner’ territory, guiding the band to an overwhelming climax of sound. It was half Jerry Garcia in 1972, and half the E Road Band on the Darkness On The Edge Of City tour.”
2. Metamodern Sounds In Nation Music (2014)
I used to be sitting right here for a minute attempting to provide you with an insightful principle about why this album is so central not solely to Sturgill’s profession however for the whole style of no matter “Americana” means in 2026. However then I noticed this quote from the primary piece I ever wrote about Simpson, culled from an interview within the spring of 2014 earlier than a present in Madison, Wisconsin.
“Our era proper now, everyone is caught up on nostalgia, and expertise has by no means been shifting sooner,” he advised in a resort room simply down the street from the live performance venue. “You get these bizarre juxtapositions coming collectively, so I needed to do an album that was type of a curler coaster between nostalgic sentimentality after which distinction it with company media fucking killing the world and all that type of factor. I used to be like, yeah, Metamodern is type of like the proper title.”
That virtually sums up issues completely. If something, Sturgill was a bit of forward of the curve. Significantly the half about “nostalgic sentimentality” and “company media fucking killing the world” colliding collectively to make a shit sandwich of contemporary tradition. I keep in mind these issues feeling current in 2014, however they’re far more overwhelming a dozen years later. The grasp stroke of addressing these pressing modern issues within the type of a country-rock file that lovingly impacts a mixture of Merle Haggard and The Infamous Byrd Brothers stays one among his most singularly good concepts, and it’s what makes this such a related and, nicely, metamodern pay attention all these years later. Greater than another file of its variety that I can consider, it captures the sound of being alive in its second kind of fully.
1. Sound & Fury (2019)
This one, in the meantime, performs like a overture for the oncoming chaos, confusion, dysfunction, and dissonance of the 2020s. When it got here out, lots of people (together with a few of his largest proponents) hated this self-described “sleazy synth-rock dance file.” And but, now, it’s arduous to think about anybody who nonetheless calls themselves a Sturgill fan not completely loving this file. It’s like a secret code that will get you admittance into the membership.
Within the second, although, it was introduced “as a type of profession suicide transfer,” I wrote in 2019. However “what comes by means of the audio system is free, liberated, and deeply pleasurable. Whether or not he’s emulating the grandeur of David Gilmour on the majestic country-prog ballad ‘All Stated And Completed’ or burning although the heavy riffing desert rock of the defiant nearer ‘Quickest Horse In City,’ a hybrid of Dwight Yoakam and Queens Of The Stone Age, Simpson seems like a person doing precisely what he needs, and getting away with it brilliantly.”
That sense of liberation from any lingering types of country-music orthodoxy is what animates this album, together with Sturgill’s “fury” at any variety of topics — his file label, the music business at giant, the media, the “Waylon Jennings’ Gonads” folks, anybody who may not perceive his crazy-ass excursions into samurai-cowboy anime, and so forth. However probably the most essential growth, musically, needs to be Sturgill stepping out as one among our nice trendy guitar heroes. Who knew that setting his songs towards Giorgio Moroder-style disco grooves would unlock his interior Billy Gibbons?
Anybody who has heard Eliminator, I suppose. Actually, Sturgill studied that file and carried the teachings ahead in his profession. Whereas his subsequent information sound hotter and fewer artificial, Sound & Fury however informs the spirit of every little thing he’s finished ever since. His work is sleazier, dancier, and all the higher for it.