The US country singer’s sixth album finds her maturing musically and philosophically, though veering towards the generic

Kacey Musgraves has turned over a new leaf. On the serene title track of her sixth album, Deeper Well , the Nashville-based country crossover star, known for singing about her love of smoking weed, admits that she has given it up. Within that admission, and the song’s delicate, pared-back pop-country arrangement, is the promise of a more clarified, mature iteration of Musgraves, and sometimes that’s what Deeper Well provides. On Lonely Millionaire, which samples a song by the rapper JID, she invokes the shallowness of fame and wealth with the earnest but acerbic sparkle that filled her previous album, jaded divorce record Star-Crossed .

At other times it seems as if this gesture towards maturity has instead resulted in a tilt into the generic: Heart of the Woods is the kind of community-minded ballad that sizzled on earlier Musgraves albums but here feels sapped of specificity. Elsewhere, songs such as Jade Green are so focused on the minutiae of her life as to feel tedious. She finds a delicate balance between the two, though, on Anime Eyes, a dizzying, almost comically lovestruck track that finds Musgraves eschewing the tasteful zen of the rest of the album in favour of all-out lyrical maximalism. It’s a flavour Deeper Well could have used more of.

(Polydor)
The country crossover star’s sixth album opens with a spectacular one-two of the most beautiful songs you’ll hear all year – but the loved-up mood and back-to-nature wonder becomes twee

K acey Musgraves has put the bong down. “I used to wake and bake,” croons the country crossover star on her sixth album’s transcendentally gorgeous title track. “Everything I did seemed better when I was high, I don’t know why.” The 35-year-old’s erstwhile weed habit won’t come as a huge surprise to fans: she claimed her 2018 album Golden Hour was partly written under the influence of LSD, while its follow-up Star-Crossed took shape after a guided psilocybin mushroom trip. Yet on Deeper Well – an album teeming with 60s folk energy and a sense of crunchy, tree-hugging wonder – Musgraves still sounds like she’s tripping. Her drug of choice this time round? Love: new, true and self.

Musgraves, as you may have surmised, is not your run-of-the-mill country singer, and hasn’t been for some time. A rare example of a Nashville stalwart who achieved recognition this side of the Atlantic, she became a breakout star in the 2010s, famous for her spiky portraits of small-town life and vocal support for the LGBTQ+ community. On Golden Hour, an extended love letter to her then husband, she incorporated electropop and disco into her palette, winning the Grammy for album of the year. Star-Crossed, inspired by her subsequent divorce, was a restrained and, for some, anticlimactic sequel, yet it cemented her standing as a mainstream artist able to thrive outside her original country context while retaining the genre’s sonic markers – a trajectory not dissimilar to pop overlord Taylor Swift’s.

She’s a muse to Beyoncé, a champion of Lego and raps about her imaginary friend – but behind the whimsy is a street-hardened MC confronting grief and depression

• This article contains discussion of suicide

There’s a video of Tierra Whack filmed when she was 15, dressed in dull pink knitwear on the corner of a Philadelphia street, surrounded by older guys smoking weed. “Rapping is my destiny / Especially for these hysterectomies who be testing me / You deaf to me / You’re not hearing what I’m sharing like an uncaring parent …” Words pour out of her in an a cappella freestyle to camera, more performance poetry than rap, voice morphing from one persona to another – one of those mic-drop, jaw-drop moments where you see a new star gather light in real time.

Twelve years later, and the knitwear is bright and expensive, she’s a muse to Beyoncé and has become one of the most singular rappers and singers in America. Her 2018 debut album, Whack World, felt like a piece of performance art with 15 multi-genre tracks each exactly one minute long; her feature film last year, Cypher, flipped the tired fly-on-the-wall music documentary format into a satirical horror movie about conspiracy theories and selling out. While many rappers align themselves with luxury brands, Whack did a campaign with Lego, and her brilliant second album, World Wide Whack, out this week, shows off that whimsy on songs about an imaginary friend, dates at the cinema and singing in the shower. But it is also devastatingly honest about her experience of depression. “I’m 28 now – I was supposed to kill myself when I was 27,” she tells me in the London offices of her record label. “But I decided to keep going.”

Singer last topped the UK singles chart in 2010 with Lady Gaga duet Telephone

Beyoncé has scored her first UK No 1 in 14 years with her new country single, Texas Hold ’Em.

The song, which features Beyoncé line dancing through life’s problems with a whiskey in hand, has jumped from No 9 in its second week of release, and is the first country song to reach UK No 1 since Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road in 2019. Beyoncé was last at No 1 in 2010 with her Lady Gaga duet Telephone, and her last solo No 1 was If I Were a Boy in 2008.

Beyoncé is also the first woman to top both the Hot Country Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hip Songs charts since the lists began in 1958

Beyoncé has become the first Black woman to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, after her track Texas Hold ‘Em debuted at No 1.

In a genre whose relationship to Black artists has often proved controversial , the track marked one of several historical achievements when weekly chart rankings refreshed on Tuesday.

Leeds Stylus
Touring her masterly new album, one of the best of this year, Irish country-pop auteur Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson brings unruly energy, wit and guitar heroics to her searing tales of heartbreak

CMAT – Irish country-pop singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – writes funny, bone-deep songs about love and other horrors. She also plays her white acoustic guitar like an axe hero. Not for Thompson the smiley, rhinestone strum of the classic Nashville artist. She kicks out, flings her hair, drops into deep lunges, exuding all the energy of a final encore. It’s only the first song.

The slinky California (which rhymes with “don’t say I didn’t warn you”) opens her latest album, Crazymad, for Me , released last month – a concept record about a woman wanting a time machine to stop herself having a disastrous relationship. Named for a Sheena Easton song lyric about infatuation and domesticity , it is among the finest released this year, a confection of Adele-level heartbreak cut with unruly energy and a hammy, everything-everywhere-all-at-once-ness. “I wanted to write Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell for the girls,” she told an interviewer.

In this week’s newsletter: Country tunes that talk of downtrodden folk and shadowy elites are making Billboard Top 100 history in the US. And songs about sausage rolls are to blame

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By now you probably will have heard, or at least heard about, Rich Men North of Richmond . Oliver Anthony’s howling country protest song has appeared seemingly from nowhere to top the charts in the US this week, and inspire almost as many comment pieces as YouTube streams in the process. Framed as a hymn for the downtrodden working man in the vein of Woody Guthrie, it also smuggles in some rightwing talking points about overweight welfare recipients and taxation, prompting criticism from the left and whoops of support from conservatives.

The success of Rich Men, the first song to top the Billboard Top 100 by an artist who has never charted before, is remarkable enough on its own. Even more striking is that it’s the third ostensibly rightwing cultural US hit of the summer. Earlier this month, country star Jason Aldean also topped the Billboard charts with Try That in a Small Town , a paean to vigilanteism accompanied by a racially loaded (and since re-edited) music video. And over in Hollywood, Sound of Freedom , a child sex-trafficking drama accused of laundering QAnon conspiracies, has ridden high in the box office ever since its release in early July. (Sound of Freedom’s film-makers deny that the film is left- or rightwing , arguing that the issue of sex trafficking “spans the political spectrum”. UK viewers can see for themselves when it arrives in cinemas next week.)