I'm not sure what I was expecting at this point in country music history. A few more years of Zach Top neo-neo-trad, maybe? Bryce Leatherwood's fine 1990s-style Beers and Ballads is still in that vein, for example, and Top, among other post-bros, is going strong. Earlier this year, responding to Ella Langley's world domination, I declared us to be in a new golden age, which for me always means a (relatively brief) “renaissance,” a return to ancient fundamentals, another echo of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. But as we spin through the loop spiral of country music history, which echoes the structure of human history as a whole, we have together reached a weirdly-displaced 1976.
Whatever I may have expected for late-2026 country music, it wasn’t a sudden return of the Bee Gees. And even if I’d expected an influx of 70s-style disco, I wouldn't have expected it to be spearheaded by my heroine, the traditionalist bastion Miranda Lambert, who was one of the few real transcenders of the bro era, and one of its destroyers. She couldn't be more explicit about the turn. "Baby," she declares, "we've been cooking with Crisco./Ain't we mixing country and disco?" We are, and Crisco is a neo-crossover concept album.
One album is a concept, but two albums is a trend, and country-disco already has been taken up by the young singer Belles on her great new album Midwestern, the manifesto here being "Disco Rodeo." "Everybody knows," warbles Belles, possibly referring to the country/disco trend itself, "and now you know."
I see why Miranda didn't want to just turn in another excellent traditionalist country album in the vein of her last one, 2024's Postcards from Texas, which was the 10th. She's mentored Langley all the way to outselling Elvis and Michael Jackson. She's made up with Kacey Musgraves, who’s also working in a crossed-over style this year. She probably felt she needed new worlds to conquer, or new trends to establish, having established the last one. Here, she goes all the way. Each song is a little more crossed than the last, until she's covering Jim Croce ("I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song") and sucking fellow bastion Chris Stapleton (who was already doing Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight" on Sunday Night Football, unfortunately) into her crossed-over ambit.
From a quick collab with Langley on "Snakeskin Boots" and the delightful "Crisco," Lambert floats by the end all the way to yacht rock ("Sunset Marquis"), with hardly an audible hint of Nashville or Austin. The first time through, I struggled. The second time, I got annoyed, though I’ll acknowledge that if anyone has earned the right to have fun and experiment, it’s Miranda Lambert. Also, I think that Miranda's crossover moment, and this crossover moment as a whole, is fueled by the life and death of Dolly Parton and Dolly's look and persona and sound. That’s a legitimate source, though it may not shock you to hear that I like the trad Dolly of "Coat of Many Colors" and "Jolene" better than the easy-listening adult contemporary Dolly of "Islands in the Stream" or the disco Dolly of "I Wanna Fall in Love".
But whether she knew that Dolly was dying as she made this album, Lambert (again) couldn't be more explicit about the sources: "We're talkin' southern nights./We could be like islands in the stream, that's right." When she sings "it's a rhinestone world we're living in," one can, now, only picture one person. Also, there might, as in Dolly, be an affirmation of queer identities in these musical decisions, and that might constitute some kind of political critique of Trumpism. More power to her. But maybe I won't have this album in heavy rotation after this weekend, though I’ll also pluck out "Cowgirl Curtsy" for my vast "best of Miranda" list.
I'll keep listening to Belles' album in its entirety. She too has a Dolly influence, and again it couldn’t be more explicit. I don't know how Belles' people got Dolly to collaborate on the song "Son of Jolene," but it took Belles (Omaha's own Kelli Rachel Jones) from promising ingenue to nascent queen. It must’ve been one of the last things Dolly did, though her shade keeps showing up here and there. Her ghost will haunt and inform the neo-crossover era.
Anyway, "Disco Rodeo" is as catchy as "Crisco," but the rest of the album is more defensible than Miranda's. If the anointment by Dolly (and their beautiful intertwined sopranos on "Son of Jolene") wasn't enough to bring Belles home, the rest of this fine debut album (which follows a number of promising EPs and singles) is finished in beautiful and varied fashion. What's happening for Belles is summarized on the song "Halfway to the Opry," which gives the basic struggling-singer dilemma: should I stick here in Nashville, or give up and head back to Omaha? By the time the album came out last week, she needed to tack on a new line: "I just played the Opry."
Several of the songs on Midwestern ("Cowgirl Up" or "Hell I Won't") feature disco crossover, but others ("Plain and Simple" or "The Ballad of Buster B. Cheating") explore much more traditional territory. It's eclectic with traditional underpinnings, and it’s beautifully sung. I think it's informed by country history in a rich way throughout, and the cool guitar work on "Disco Rodeo," for example, echoes that on the obscure kitsch classic from 1981, Leon Everette's delightful and reprehensible "Midnight Rodeo".
Six months after declaring a new golden age, I'm declaring it to be over, as the disco era dawns. However, possibly the loop spiral of history is accelerating and the disco era will last only a few months, giving way to New New Wave or maybe the Princepop era of country music. Brace yourself.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell