![]() ![]() It’s a quieter album, recorded mostly with a stripped-down trio-with occasional splashes of keys and steel added here and there. Hayes Carll: Lovers and Leavers (2016) Lovers and Leavers is the finest work of Hayes Carll’s career, even if it’s very different from what came before. Think of Life on Earth as a guide for staying alive and going to ground even when it seems like there’s no ground to go to: From the very first song, “Wolves,” Segarra appears to be giving their listeners tools for evading danger and death. With Segarra’s newfound sense of self and a new outlook on life and the world comes a new sound, and a new mission, both related to the old but attuned to the moment. It’s rare for a record so deep in a band’s discography to function as a fresh start after establishing a style, not to mention a personality, over so many years. Hurray for the Riff Raff: Life on Earth (2022) Life on Earth, the seventh album by New Orleans-via-New York folk-blues-punk project Hurray for the Riff Raff, is reinvention with a caveat: Singer/songwriter and frontperson Alynda Segarra has taken such leaps over the last decade and a half as a human being, as well as a musician, that their efforts on Life on Earth express reinvention less than they do rebirth. Here are the 70 Best Alt-Country Albums of All Time:ħ0. ![]() We’ve limited our selections to two per band, otherwise the entire Uncle Tupelo catalog would be here. The following 70 albums span nearly four decades of alt-country and stretch the limits of “whatever that is.” We easily could have picked 100, and we’d love to hear your favorites that we missed. And the genre shows no signs of letting up, with last year’s album of the year and this year’s album of the year so far both making this list. The ’90s kicked off with the first album from Uncle Tupelo, No Depression (released 33 years ago today), which became synonymous with “alt-country” thanks to the magazine of the same name. But 1985 was really a watershed moment for the genre with Green on Red, Jason & The Scorchers and Mekons all exploring traditional country through the lens of punk rock. The alt-country movement had plenty of pre-cursors in the folk-rock of Gram Parsons and the renegade country of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. There are a lot of albums we love that fit somewhere just outside of that. As we update this list that we first created in 2016, we try to continue to thread the needle between indie folk and straight-up country with Big Thief and Angel Olson framing one edge and Kasey Musgraves and The Highwomen framing the other. Alt-country is such a hard genre to define that the wonderful music magazine devoted to it proclaimed itself the “alternative-country (whatever that is) bi-monthly.” For our best alt-country albums list, we’ve chosen to focus on albums with significant country elements operating outside of the mainstream country music industry. ![]()
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