Margo Price, Strays
★★★★½

Now four albums deep, Margo Price’s career already feels mythical. At 39, the singer-songwriter’s life – with its tragedy and hardscrabble Americana – reads like a classic country song. In fact, it already was one: Hands of Time, the opening track on her debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter (released in 2016 on Jack White’s Third Man Records) was a blistering introduction, detailing her working-class roots, her bohemian struggle towards making art her life, the loss of one of her newborn twin boys in 2010, the tailspin into alcoholism that followed, and her resilience to keep going.

US country singer Margo Price is at her most ambitious on Strays.Credit:Alysse Gafkjen

At this point, she occupies an intriguing space in the country-verse, a couple of toes in Nashville’s traditional establishment (where she stills feels a perennial outsider) and the rest in the eclectic sphere that is alt-country. Last year she released her memoir Maybe We’ll Make It (featuring a front cover blurb from Willie Nelson himself), which further delved into her story: moving to Nashville with $57 and pawning her engagement ring to pay for recording sessions, years of routine record label rejection, and her lingering union with her husband and musical partner, Jeremy Ivey.

Her story’s so full of hard-won feeling, there’s a tendency to read each new song in its shadow. On Strays, Anytime You Call – a beautifully big love ballad, co-penned by Ivey, decrying how grief overtakes any sweet moment (“People stare at bullet holes in the back of your head, making you feel much worse than dead”) – seems to predict the sensation with a bitter edge. Light Me Up, an emotional suite featuring driving guitar-work from Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, also fights the instinct to wallow.

Throughout the album – Price’s most sonically enterprising to date, produced by Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen) – Price is wide-eyed and engaged, outward-looking and empathic. And often, righteously furious.

Strays is Price’s fourth album since her 2016 debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter.

The biblical Been to the Mountain is a roaring opener: it’s psychedelic, slightly unhinged, drug-fuelled cosmic country, with Price’s vocals rising to an evangelical screech. “As I stare in the void of the black mountain vacuum, I know the scent of death like a perfume/ And no, this ain’t the end!” Price sings. If that’s not the right way to start 2023, I don’t know what is.

As ever, Price brings a natural “voice of the people” energy to her work. The epic piano-driven County Road, with its evocative lap steel and dramatic production, feels like a Springsteen fable by way of Stevie Nicks, all about small-town escape but an affinity with those left behind. Lydia, a gothic character piece about a young woman waiting in an abortion clinic, feels prescient knowing the post-Roe v Wade realities around women’s bodily autonomy in Middle America.

The closer Landfill is another of Price’s best yet: soaring, romantic melodies fed by Price’s wrenching, emotional vocals. “I could build a landfill with dreams I’ve deserted, swallowed up like muscadine wine,” she sings. If I had a porch, I’d be sitting there with the song on repeat, drowning in the blackest coffee I could make. In all, a masterful album from an artist at her most ambitious, freewheeling best.

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