You'll Find No Trucks or Cold Ones On The 10 Best Country Albums of 2018

Devin Dawson may favor himself an underdog, but take one listen to his razor-sharp debut and you'll cry bullshit. The California native—raised near the country music hallowed grounds of Folsom Prison—first gained buzz last year with his easy-listening “All On Me." And in a twist far too rare, when Dark Horse arrived in January, the set did more than just make good on the hit’s promise. With a confident swirl of pop, rock, and R&B, it signaled the arrival of a young, heavily-tatted and quick-witted future heavyweight.

Ashley McBryde opens her major label debut with a whispered anthem about perseverance. “And where they said I’d never be is exactly where I am,” she remarks from her mic stand on the title track, her Texas-sized alto barely raised. At 35, McBryde’s no ingenue, and that serves her well across the album's 11 tracks, all of which bear her name in the writing credits. She sings with a worldliness and remarkable control, even when she lets her rock bonafides roll on cuts like “Radioland” and “Livin’ Next to Leroy.” They might have called her “girl going nowhere,” but we think we’ll stick with boss.

John Prine made his name many decades ago writing sad songs. Have you ever emerged from a listening of “Sam Stone” with dry eyes? Doubt it! But at 71 and with his first batch of new tunes in more than a decade, the songwriter seems to have found a modicum of peace. (Cue “When I Get to Heaven,” which delights in his plans for the afterlife: “I’m gonna get a cocktail: vodka and ginger ale,” he confides over a kazoo and a playful barroom piano. “Yeah, I’m gonna smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long.”) Two bouts with cancer, plus his formerly enthusiastic nicotine habit, have weathered Prine’s tenor mightily, but the wear feels appropriate, here, as he extols the value of community (“Knockin’ on Your Screen Door”) and invites a perhaps wayward soul to “come on home” (“Summer’s End”). Produced by Dave Cobb and lifted with backing vocals from disciples like Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, and Brandi Carlile, The Tree of Forgiveness is a straightforward, honest album that releases into a world in desperate need for the truth.

T.J. and John Osborne first introduced themselves in 2015 with their swaggering, Jay Joyce-produced collection Pawn Shop. That set landed them coveted opening slots on tours like Dierks Bentley’s and spawned several Top 40 country airplay hits. But their follow-up blows the door right off that barn. A blistering mix of Southern rock, outlaw, and traditional country, it doesn’t just rock, Port Saint Joe flat out cooks. Case in point: the frenetic “Shoot Me Straight,” which begs a love interest to “lay my six-foot four-inch ass out on the ground.” The lyrics drop out halfway through the song's six-plus minute runtime making room for a funky, beard-burning guitar solo. Look out.

Well into the sixth decade of his remarkable career, the Red Headed Stranger proves he’s still got a few surprises nestled under the fold of that bandana. Across Last Man Standing's 11 songs, Nelson offers a master class in frank storytelling as he considers dementia (“Don’t Tell Noah”), aging (“Bad Breath”), and all the friends he’s lost along the way (“Last Man Standing”) over a delightful blend of Western swing, honky tonk, and roadhouse blues. His reedy tenor may have lost some of its bluster, but none of its charm. “It’s not something you get over,” he practically exhales halfway through the set, considering a life that’s witnessed plenty of loss, “But it’s something you get through.” How lucky we’ve been to have his catalog as we’ve all done the same.

“I’m a little bit steady, but still little bit rollin’ stone,” Dierks Bentley admits on the opening track of his expansive ninth LP, The Mountain. “I’m a little bit heaven, but still a little bit flesh and bone.” It’s that embrace of duality that has led the Arizona native to rarely-charted lands in country music: the top of the charts (a place Bentley finds frequently) with artistic vision firmly intact. Credit goes to the 41-year-old’s heady mix of earnestness and confidence, both of which are on display all across the 2018 set. While most of his industry peers are still dropping lines about hot young things in cutoff shorts, Bentley digs into the importance of family (“My Religion”), the transformative powers of love and monogamy (“Woman, Amen”), and the hard-won perspective found in his forties (“Travelin’ Light”). Amen is right.

With sequined boots and a side-eyed glance at her surroundings, Kacey Musgraves announced herself as a preternaturally deft scribe on 2013's Same Trailer Different Park. Cut to 2018 and you’ll find a remarkable shift in focus: On Golden Hour, her brilliant third LP, which just took home a CMA Album of the Year award, the Texas renegade casts her gaze inward. She enchants with effervescent meditations on love (“Butterflies,” “Love Is a Wild Thing”) and provokes with reverb-heavy meditations on the curves and edges of her personality (“Slow Burn,” “Lonely Weekend,” “Happy & Sad”). But she’s at her best when she dares to get weird, be that on stream-of-consciousness-style “Mother,” which the 30-year-old wrote while tripping on LSD, or the disco bear hug “High Horse,” one of the most profoundly irresistible cuts to release this year.

For the filigree songsmith’s sixth album, the masterfully titled By The Way, I Forgive You, Brandi Carlile also enlisted Music City producer du jour Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton) as well as his frequent cohort Shooter Jennings for production. The result is the most punched-up, visceral set of her career. In the lead-up to the record's release, Carlile posted a note on social media reflecting on a particularly painful moment in her youth: The pastor at her community's Baptist church refused to baptize her as a teenager on the account of her sexuality. He announced his decision in front of all her gathered friends and family. Those scars inform the brilliant, “The Joke,” undeniably a career-song for Carlile, that served as the set’s first single. “I have been to the movies,” she sings, voice breaking. “I’ve seen how it ends/And the joke’s on them.” Ain’t that the truth.

When Eric Church returned with October’s excellent Desperate Man, he came with a heck of a lot of soul and two middle fingers pointed way up at expectation and convention. He spat at the American Dream (“Drowning Man”), cursed at the corrupt government lot (“The Snake”), and brazenly declared himself a “don’t-push-me grown-ass man” (“Desperate Man”). He folded swamp rock, psych, and funk into his unique brand of heartland rock and even landed one of the most lovesick songs of his career (“Heart Like a Wheel”). Six albums in, The Chief is in full command of his talents. Don’t miss out.

In recent interviews, Miranda Lambert has made quips about the stats of her trio, which goes by Pistol Annies and includes Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley: "We have two ex-husbands," she's said, "two husbands, two kids, one on the way, and 25 animals." Referring to the very real lives of its members, her answer is funny, cutting, and true—much like the music the three scribes create together. Splitting up appears a number of times on Interstate Gospel, the best country record to release in 2018 and one of the finest collections of the decade. Their treatment can be heartbreaking, like on the woeful laments "When I Was His Wife" and "Masterpiece." At other moments, it's laugh out loud funny, as it is on the spunky "Got My Name Changed Back." Occasionally and impressively, like on "Best Years of My Life," it's both. You'll be hard-pressed not to chuckle as your eyes water. Humorous writing has a long and storied tradition in country music—just peep the back catalogs of Loretta, Dolly, and Willie, amongst others—and the Annies carry the mantle more mightily than just about anyone else working today. Along with those visits to the courthouse to restore their pre-marital identities, they spin the "stop, drop, and roll" method of putting out a fire into their recommended coping mechanism for digesting a world up in flames: "stop drop and roll one," they sing, recommending a joint, on a song of the same name. On the shimmying "Sugar Daddy" they spool a redneck fantasy of a man with deep pockets and "a rifle in the rack of his Cadillac." And on the title track they land the line "even old Moses was a basket case." But elsewhere, the album tackles prescription pills, mid-life crises, and life as willful women in "10 cent towns." It's a celebration of the female experience, scars and all, and a phenomenal ode to the ties that bind us.