New Country Music You Need To Hear This Week From Jackson Dean With Laci Kaye Booth, Kassi Ashton, Parker McCollum & More
- All Country News
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
Jackson Dean + Laci Kaye Booth - The Moon And The Wolf
The beauty of “The Moon And The Wolf” is that it refuses to promise daylight. This is not a sweeping love story or a declaration of forever. It is about the kind of connection that may evaporate by morning but feels endless while it is happening. Wild, wounded and suspended in time, “The Moon And The Wolf” turns a lonely night into something nearly sacred, and proves Dean and Booth can create serious magic in the dark.
Kassi Ashton - Chrome Pony
Kassi Ashton has never needed permission to take up space and with “Chrome Pony,” country music’s resident badass is finally getting her flowers. A towering power ballad dedicated to a dancer at the song’s metaphorical Chrome Pony club, the track becomes an anthem for women who refuse to be reduced to someone else’s assumptions. Ashton approaches her subject without judgment or cheap sentimentality, instead celebrating the strength, individuality and complicated humanity found beneath the spotlight. Her voice remains the main event. Ashton’s soaring vocals carry equal parts grit and grace, rising with the song’s emotion while holding onto the no-BS attitude that has made her one of Nashville’s most compelling originals. She does not simply sing the story, she steps inside it, giving every line the weight of something lived rather than observed. “Chrome Pony” also doubles down on the genre-bending edge defining Ashton’s latest chapter. It is country at its core, but far too restless to remain neatly inside the lines. The song feels cinematic, rebellious and emotionally charged, pairing the scale of a classic power ballad with the perspective of an artist who has never been interested in playing by Nashville’s rules. That refusal to conform is exactly why Ashton’s long-overdue moment feels so satisfying. “Chrome Pony” is not an introduction to her power; it is confirmation of what her fans have known all along. Country music may have taken its time catching up, but Kassi Ashton has always been this fearless, this distinctive and this damn good.
Parker McCollum - Big Ole Fancy House (Acoustic)
Parker McCollum has never needed much more than a guitar and a bruised truth to command a room. On the new acoustic version of “Big Ole Fancy House,” the country star strips away the polish and returns the fan favorite to the intimate, vulnerable sound that first made listeners lean in during his live shows. The pared-down arrangement leaves McCollum’s weathered vocal standing almost entirely on its own, giving every crack, ache and hard-earned realization room to land. Without a towering production surrounding it, the song’s emotional contradiction becomes impossible to miss: a man can have the money, the status and the sprawling dream home, yet still feel like he has nothing if there is no one waiting inside. That tension has always been at the heart of McCollum’s best work. He knows how to make success sound lonely and heartbreak feel painfully ordinary. Here, “Big Ole Fancy House” becomes less of a song about wealth and more of a warning about what ambition cannot buy. McCollum delivers it without theatrics, trusting the lyric and the quiet surrounding it to do the damage. The release also serves as the first glimpse of McCollum’s long-awaited acoustic album, a project he updated fans on while recording this summer. If this opening taste is any indication, the collection will do more than simply repackage familiar songs. It will pull back the curtain on the raw writing and restless emotion underneath them.
“Big Ole Fancy House” may be stripped down, but its message has never sounded bigger. Sometimes the loneliest place in the world is the one everyone else assumes means you have made it.
Justin Moore - Missing You Night
Most heartbreak songs live in the wreckage. Justin Moore’s “Missing You Night” finds something even crueler: the moment life finally feels normal again, until one memory blows the whole illusion apart. Moore opens inside the dependable rhythms of an ordinary day. He starts the truck, puts in his hours, grabs a beer and heads home without giving the person he lost much thought. For a while, it almost sounds like he has made it out. Then the jukebox lands on the wrong song, the whiskey starts talking and the emotional dam breaks. Suddenly, all that hard-earned distance disappears. That tension gives “Missing You Night” its punch. Moore isn’t singing about constant misery; he’s capturing the ambush of grief and how quickly a seemingly healed heart can turn tender again. When he admits the memory “hurts just right,” the song reveals its deepest truth: sometimes we willingly revisit the pain because it is the closest thing we have left to the person who caused it. Written by Moore with Jeremy Stover, Mark Holman and Josh Phillips, the track dresses its loneliness in driving drums, electric guitar, keys and bass. The production keeps the song moving forward even as its narrator falls backward, creating a sharp contrast between outward momentum and emotional relapse. Moore delivers it all with the plainspoken conviction that has carried him to 14 career No. 1 hits. He never overplays the anguish because he doesn’t need to. Weathered, direct and painfully familiar, “Missing You Night” understands that moving on is not a straight road. Some nights, all it takes is a drink, a song and one unguarded second to end up right back where you started.
The Band Perry - Pistol
The Band Perry isn’t easing into its next chapter, it’s kicking the saloon doors clean off their hinges. On “Pistol,” the sibling trio turns a flirtation gone spectacularly sideways into a ferocious, wildly fun warning shot. The track arrives loaded with swagger, grit and Southern Gothic drama as Kimberly Perry squares up against a wannabe cowboy who clearly mistook her confidence for an invitation. Bad move. What begins as a little harmless tension quickly erupts into a full-blown showdown, and Kimberly sounds more than ready to pull the trigger. Her unmistakable vocal cuts through the track with fiery authority, commanding every second like she already knows exactly how this confrontation ends and spoiler alert: the cowboy isn’t riding away with the upper hand. Backed by a restless, hard-charging arrangement, she delivers every line with enough bite to make “Pistol” feel equal parts revenge fantasy, outlaw anthem and big-screen Western. There’s a wicked sense of fun beneath all that fury, too. The Band Perry understands that attitude hits harder when it comes wrapped in sharp storytelling and irresistible theatrics, and “Pistol” has both in spades. It’s bold, cinematic and just unhinged enough to keep listeners hanging onto every twist.
As the first glimpse into the Southern Gothic universe of the band’s forthcoming album, “Pistol” makes one thing thunderously clear: The Band Perry is back, fully loaded and absolutely uninterested in playing nice. If this is their opening shot, consider us officially warned.
Thelma And James - The Way That It Wasn't
Some heartbreaks come from losing what you had. Others come from finally admitting you never really had it at all. Across four minutes and nine seconds of cinematic country music, Thelma & James linger inside that crueler kind of loss on “The Way That It Wasn’t.” The rising duo grieves a relationship less for what it became than for everything it once promised to be. Rather than romanticizing a shared history, they mourn an imagined future one built from unfinished plans, unanswered questions and the stubborn belief that things could have ended differently. “So I sleep with the memories left on the table / And I drink with the ghost of what could’ve been,” they confess, turning regret into something nearly tangible. But it is the song’s devastating central line, “Damn it I miss the way that it wasn’t”—that delivers the deepest cut. It captures the strange ache of missing a version of love that existed primarily in hope, rewritten night after night until fantasy begins to feel like memory. Written by Mackenzie Porter, Jake Etheridge, Josh Jenkins and Jordan Critz, “The Way That It Wasn’t” finds its power in that contradiction. Sweeping, tender and painfully self-aware, the song unfolds like the final scene of a love story that never made it past the opening act. Sometimes, it suggests, the hardest relationship to move on from is the one that never had the chance to become real.
Alex Lambert - Beautiful Mind
Olivia is not a heartbreaker, a honky-tonk temptress or another small-town memory. In Alex Lambert’s “Beautiful Mind,” she is a world unto herself—and he wants all the way in. The soul-country singer-songwriter sounds almost dizzy with infatuation as he follows her imagination wherever it leads. “I want to get lost in your high,” he sings before the harmonies bloom around a chorus filled with wonder, color and a name he cannot stop repeating. It feels less like a conventional serenade and more like overhearing someone realize, in real time, that they have fallen for the way another person’s mind works. Lambert’s voice is the hook beneath the hook: textured, elastic and steeped in soul. He lets the melody drift and curl rather than forcing it down a predictable country road, giving “Beautiful Mind” the loose warmth of a late-night slow dance with something slightly psychedelic flickering around its edges. Co-written with Oscar Charles and Madeline Edwards, the song does not sound engineered to fit neatly between everything else on country radio. Thank God for that. “Beautiful Mind” is romantic without turning syrupy, soulful without becoming a throwback and different without trying too hard to prove it. This is the left-of-center country sound fans have been waiting for.
The Georgia Kid - Ethan Garner
Each of the EP’s seven stories adds another layer to Garner’s identity, revealing an artist with deep roots and a thoroughly modern perspective. He isn’t trying to outrun where he comes from, he is using it as the foundation for where he wants to go. By the time the bright, spirited “Up Over” closes the project, Garner has done more than introduce himself. He has given listeners a reason to stick around. The song sends The Georgia Kid out on a high, ending the EP with a bang while leaving the door wide open for whatever comes next. Seven songs may be all Ethan Garner needs to become a new fan favorite. The Georgia Kid doesn’t sound like an artist searching for his lane. It sounds like one confidently paving it.
Check Out Our Full Review
Carlise Wright - Wright Kinda Country
“Wright Kind of Country” arrives with the confidence of an artist who already knows her lane, and has no desire to apologize for taking it. Wright carries an undeniable legacy, but she also brings her own charm, wit and point of view to the table. Country music’s future does not have to abandon its history to move forward. Sometimes, it looks like a young woman with South Georgia roots, Tennessee-raised dreams and a neon rainbow running through her veins.
Carlisle Wright isn’t just the right kind of country. She might be exactly the kind country music needs next.
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