Nick Shoulders

Refugia Blues, the fifth album from Nick Shoulders, is a record of big ideas and small, intimate moments.

These nine songs are rooted in the stylings of Southern traditional music. Sparse, timeless, and unamplified, they're older than the sounds Shoulders saluted on albums like 2023's All Bad. Here, Shoulders isn't shouting over a band; he steps up to a ribbon microphone as a solo performer, delivering each song with acoustic instruments and a voice that's equal parts country croon, Appalachian yodel, and high-lonesome field holler.

"Refugia Blues isn't just a call to action; it's a call to rest, too." "This is my Nebraska," he says, nodding to Bruce Springsteen's lo-fi acoustic record from 1982. "Some people listen to Bruce for the E Street Band and the big radio hits, but I like the intimacy and rawness of Nebraska instead. I'd like to think of Refugia Blues as a little window into the heart, as opposed to the drumbeat of a revolution."

Shoulders' interpretation of American roots music has always been more progressive and punky than the trucks-and-beers conservatism that passes for modern-day country, and he isn't checking his activism at the door. Refugia Blues balances personal songs like "Bored Fightin'" and the love song "Tatum Spring" with broader topics: climate collapse, radical anthropology, generative disruption, and southern identity. As he puts it, he wants his music to be "a Trojan Horse that can be accepted by people who don’t hear anything to challenge their sense of comfort and superiority. That's always been the goal — to say what needs to be said, but to intersperse it with joy, humor, and melody."

The opening track, "Apocalypse Never," is an a cappella ballad he wrote in the front seat of his band's shuttle bus, taking a hard look at passing towns and the "individualized apocalypses" unfolding outside the windshield. "Our world has been through countless apocalypses," he says. "The refusal to give in to the direness of our circumstances, while still acknowledging it, is key to surviving this moment in our history."

Born to a musical family with deep roots in Arkansas, Appalachia, and Louisiana, Shoulders grew up on old-world folk music and black gospel. "My vocal style is rooted as much in growing up in mountainous Arkansas and having to shout across vast distances to greet my neighbors as it is in my family's very old way of singing," he says. "The way I sing is older than capitalism. Being part of this tradition isn't meant to be regressive; it's meant to be liberating."

Refugia Blues was recorded in a home studio outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Tracked to analog tape in two inspired days and laced with light touches of guitar, banjo, and fiddle, the album explores the slower, softer textures of Shoulders' music without pulling any punches.

Highlights include a bare-boned cover of Randy Travis' "Diggin' Up Bones" slowed to a warbling waltz; the wordplay of "Deux Hurry"; the sympathetic "Hill Folk," which nods to southerners who've seen their culture commodified; and the brave, bold "Dixie Be Damned," which sings about "manifest destitution" and the sickness of contemporary American consciousness.

By bridging past and present, Shoulders speaks pointedly and poetically about today's problems while nodding to styles that predate the 21st century. "When you listen to the origins of country music in the '20s and '30s, you're hearing the voice of southern rural dissent against coal companies, repression, and depression," he says. "The old ballad singers of the Ozarks were conduits for current events, documenting not only their own lives, but also dispossession and economic strife on a much bigger scale. Being part of that great stream of rural protest music is something I'm trying to tap into."

At once academic and accessible, Refugia Blues isn't just a deep dive into southernness, but also into Shoulders himself. Released during an era of big-budget country-pop smashes, it stands as a raw, resolute version of American country music, punctuated with humor and heavy insights — songs that go down easy but linger in the minds of those willing to invest the time.