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NEW WEST RECORDS

Jess Williamson

A Mile South Of Heaven

Jess Williamson has built one of the most distinctive voices in American music — crystalline, acrobatic, and unmistakably her own. The Texas-born, Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist has spent the better part of a decade carving out her own lane at the intersection of indie folk, alt-country, and a deeply personal confessional tradition. Now, on her seventh studio album, she steps into new creative territory.

Produced by Shooter Jennings, the album finds Williamson's artistry meeting its ideal counterpart. Jennings brings a deep-roots sensibility and studio instinct honed across decades, and together they've crafted twelve songs that honor the grit and sweep of classic country while remaining unmistakably contemporary. Williamson's voice remains the central instrument: front and center, emotionally unguarded, carrying the kind of weight that demands a room go quiet. But with Jennings at the helm, the sonic canvas is richer and more expansive than anything in her catalog to date — full of texture, warmth, and that ineffable Nashville-meets-Laurel-Canyon atmosphere that lives somewhere between Linda Ronstadt and Waylon Jennings.

TRACK LISTING

1. Goodbye to All That
2. High Heels and Blue Jeans
3. Country Mile
4. A Mile South of Heaven
5. Tracking the Tropics
6. Dark Day in Dallas
7. Hum of the City
8. Texas Time
9. Someone Else’s Horses
10. Legends Die
11. Battle Scar
12. The Gem and Mineral Show

Corb Lund

Dark Horses

Throughout 2025, New West Records released limited edition vinyl reissues of Corb Lund’s back catalog as part of the Corb Lund Dark Horses Club. Each installment featured bonus tracks, previously unreleased material, and an exclusive acoustic track available only digitally. Now, as the series reaches its culmination, New West Records and Corb Lund are releasing 'Dark Horses' on both vinyl and CD. 'Dark Horses' is a collection of songs hand-picked by Corb from across his catalog, presented in chronological order and rerecorded as solo acoustic performances. Stripped down and intimate, these new versions offer a fresh perspective on familiar material — and the result is an illuminating listening experience that showcases the depth and craft of Corb’s songwriting.

TRACK LISTING

1. Untitled Waltz
2. Guitar from the Wall
3. No Roads Here
4. The Rodeo’s Over
5. Especially A Paint
6. Talkin' Veterinarian Blues
7. Priceless Antique Pistol Shoots Startled Owner
8. Counterfeiter's Blues
9. Sadr City
10. Louis L'Amour
11. Out On a Win

Ratboys

Singin' To An Empty Chair

Despite its title, Ratboys’ new album 'Singin’ to an Empty Chair' is not defined by what’s missing. Rather, it’s the beginning of an important dialogue with a close loved one, vocalist Julia Steiner finds herself estranged from. The music on the band’s sixth studio album – its first for New West Records – fills the space that person left behind with 11 songs showcasing Ratboys at the peak of their powers — twangy, effervescent, as confident as they’ve ever been, and perhaps more emotionally interrogative than ever before. The four-piece Chicago band followed up 2023’s highly acclaimed 'The Window' by reconvening with co-producer Chris Walla to begin tracking at a rural Wisconsin cabin before taking the songs to Steve Albini’s famed Electrical Audio studios in Chicago and later to Rosebud Studio in Evanston, Illinois. The results veer from bubbly power-pop on 'Anywhere' to irresistible post-country on 'Penny in the Lake', along with heart-piercing ballads like 'Just Want You to Know the Truth' and an exhilarating detour into the extraterrestrial on 'Light Night Mountains All That', which Steiner dubs the band’s mammoth “wormhole jam". 'Singin’ to an Empty Chair' also marks the first Ratboys album written since Steiner began therapy, which the singer/lyricist credits for the clarity found across the album’s unflinching examinations of relationship and self. Fittingly, as the album begins by extending a hand into the void, it concludes with a scene of serenity – all while weaving candid honesty, humor, chaos, and whimsy along the way. “It's not all doom and gloom,” Steiner says. “The experience of making this record definitely gives me hope for whatever happens next.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Uplifting, poppy power punk that could easily have been one of the more bouncy acts on Fat Wreck Chords in the early 00's. Feel-good, melody rich punk.

TRACK LISTING

1. Open Up
2. Know You Then
3. Light Night Mountains All That
4. Anywhere
5. Penny In The Lake
6. Strange Love
7. The World, So Madly
8. Just Want You To Know The Truth
9. What’s Right?
10. Burn It Down
11. At Peace In The Hundred Acre Wood

Joe Pernice

Sunny, I Was Wrong

“When a song comes, I make sure I don’t let it go by,” says Joe Pernice. 'Sunny, I Was Wrong', his first studio album of new material under his own name, was born during a period of concentrated inspiration and productivity. Songs were coming almost more quickly than he could get them down on tape, as though they’d been waiting to pounce at just the right time. With a little help from his friends, Pernice fashioned a handful of them into a beautiful refinement of all the qualities that have distinguished him as a songwriter over the years: his facility for aching melodies, his penchant for arrangements that nod to pop’s past without getting mired in nostalgia, and a deep empathy for the characters who inhabit his verses. Pernice has been catching songs for thirty years now, first with the alt-country legends Scud Mountain Boys and then with the indie-pop mainstays Pernice Brothers. In both of those groups he etched bittersweet stories out of songs that echo Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach, and Paul Williams. He’s the rare artist who can record a Barry Manilow covers album that doesn’t drip with condescension or irony. With Sunny, the album gradually came into focus—or at least an idea of an album. “I knew I wanted to make a studio record, and I knew I wanted to make a record. I didn’t want just a hodgepodge of tunes. I didn’t want to make a concept record, but I wanted something that needs to be heard from start to finish. I wanted it to be a destination. An event.” Sunny, I Was Wrong tallies up all of those things that do get away from us: friends and lovers we haven’t seen in decades, old promises broken, cherished dreams forgotten, best-laid plans unrealized.

TRACK LISTING

1. Peace In Our Home
2. Deep Into The Dawn (ft. Aimee Mann)
3. If You Go Back To California
4. Force Feed The Fire
5. The Black And The Blue
6. It Won’t Be Me (ft. Rodney Crowell)
7. I’d Rather Look Away (ft. Norman Blake)
8. Sunny, I Was Wrong
9. Is It Serious
10. Twenty-Thousand Times
11. It Got Away Rrom Me (ft. Jimmy Webb)

Esther Rose

Want

Esther Rose was on a long solo drive when she started writing the opening title track of 'Want', her stunning fifth album. At first, the words seemed almost like a joke, something to keep herself amused as the miles passed. “I want a puppy, but I don't want a mess. I want to know where I’m going without GPS,” she sang from behind the wheel. Soon, the idea snowballed into a list of desires that spanned existential, spiritual, and mundane; romantic to platonic to familial; at once wildly ambitious yet piercingly relatable; all set to a catchy melody that blends her pop instincts with country storytelling and the raw immediacy of a basement punk show. In other words, she was on her way to another classic Esther Rose song. This precise blend has made the Santa Fe-based artist one of her generation’s most beloved songwriters: someone whose live shows are known to conclude in mass tears and group hugs. Still, something was different this time. “For me, these songs felt like revelations,” she explains, comparing the 11-song record to a memoir, alive with kinetic storytelling and personal insight. In its newly direct and stirringly nuanced writing, you’ll hear about rock bottom encounters, shifting relationships with substances, evolving perspectives on adult partnership, and, as evidenced by those early lines in “Want,” a few jokes along the way. Vivid and bracing, Want places you in the passenger seat while each of these feelings arrive.

TRACK LISTING

1. Want
2. Tailspin (ft. Video Age)
3. Had To
4. Ketamine
5. Rescue You
6. Scars (ft. Dean Johnson)
7. Messenger
8. New Bad
9. The Clown
10. Color Wheel
11. Want Pt. 2


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