No Smoke, All Fire: The Raw Return of Josiah and the Bonnevilles
- All Country News
- 28 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Josiah Leming has never been an artist built for the middle of the road. His songs tend to live on the shoulder, dusty, dented, and staring straight at the long way home. Today, the singer-songwriter known as Josiah and the Bonnevilles steps into a new chapter with a fitting partner: Rounder Records. Alongside the signing announcement comes news of his forthcoming album As Is, due May 8, and the release of a bruising first single that wastes no time setting the tone.
The track is called “Hell Without The Flames,” and it arrives like a confession scrawled in the margins, raw, restless, and uncomfortably honest.
Co-produced by Leming and Konrad Snyder, As Is marks his first full-length album since his 2023 breakthrough, Endurance, the record that turned longtime believers into a growing, vocal following. Where that project introduced many listeners to his grit and gravity, this new chapter sounds poised to sharpen both.
“Hell Without The Flames,” co-written with Joel Little, leans into Leming’s most powerful instrument, a weathered, lived-in vocal that sounds like it learned its lessons the hard way. The song doesn’t chase hooks so much as it locks into a mood: existential fatigue wrapped in melody. Its chorus reads like a mission statement for the beautifully burned out:
But I’ll be coming back again
To play this game I’ll never win
Promised paradise
More than waitin’ round to die
Friends ask how you been I say you know how it is
Waiting for the world to end
Well, it’s just another day
In hell without the flames
It’s not polished escapism. It’s emotional realism, the kind that has become Leming’s signature lane, where Americana, country, and folk don’t just blend, they bruise together.
The newly released official video matches the song’s tension, leaning into stark imagery and performance-driven storytelling rather than distraction. Like the track itself, it trusts the weight of the lyric and the voice delivering it.
As Is spans ten tracks and, by title alone, signals intent. No disguise. No gloss. Just the songs as they stand. Early track names like “One Day at a Time,” “Youth and Dreams,” and “Redline” suggest a thematic throughline of motion, memory, and survival, recurring pillars in Leming’s writing.
As Is Track List:
Good Boy
Carolina Heart
Hell Without the Flames
Going Gone
One Day at a Time
Youth and Dreams
Where It Starts
Mountain Girl
Redline
As Is
To carry the new material straight to the people, Leming will launch The Redline North American Tour, a 31-date headline run kicking off May 14 in Dallas. The route cuts through Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, and more, a wide sweep that mirrors the growing reach of an artist who has long operated as a word-of-mouth favorite. The kind of “if you know, you know” songwriter whose songs get passed between friends like secrets worth keeping.
Only now, the secret’s getting harder to keep.
With Rounder Records behind him and a record that promises unfiltered truth front and center, Josiah and the Bonnevilles may finally be stepping out of the shadows, not by changing who he is, but by doubling down on it. As Is, indeed.
ALL COUNTRY NEWS
Country Music News & Entertainment