Houndmouth strip their Americana-infused rock sound to its bruised, beating core on ‘Lordy,’ their first album in five years, as Matt Myers channels heartbreak, creative paralysis, and hard-won self-trust into the most vulnerable and assured record of the band’s career. Produced by Brad Cook and carried by soul, sun, sweat, and a circle of collaborators who helped Myers back to his feet, the record finds renewal not in returning untouched, but in moving forward while the scars are still tender.

Stream: ‘Lordy’ – Houndmouth

Houndmouth’s Lordy is the sound of a man dragging himself back into the light.

The Indiana band’s first album in five years aches and churns with soul, sun, and sweat – a painfully wrought, achingly raw collection of rock and Americana made for long summer nights and the mornings after, when the noise has died down and all that remains are the thoughts you could not outrun. Matt Myers has never sounded more vulnerable, but he has also never sounded more sure of himself, allowing each crack, rasp, and ragged edge to carry the weight of a life broken open and pieced together anew.

For two years, Myers could barely finish a song. A relationship ended, another began, and new love arrived with enough force to leave him overwhelmed rather than inspired. The breakthrough came after reconnecting with producer Brad Cook, whose encouragement helped Myers stop chasing perfection and follow instinct instead. Much of Lordy began at home in daylight, clear-headed, with Myers strumming his Martin guitar as sunshine crossed the kitchen – a far cry from the nighttime sessions and liquid courage of years past.

“I was all raw emotion,” Myers says. “I was feeling so much that I just couldn’t write anything.”

Lost track looking for a sign
Sprained my ankle
while rolling the dice, rolling the dice
Came up seven, down on my knees
I won’t break even but I wanna believe
I don’t really wanna talk about it
Don’t wanna say it out loud
I don’t really wanna talk about it
I’m scared of what’ll come out

– “Don’t Wanna Talk,” Houndmouth

Released July 10^th via Dualtone Records, Houndmouth’s fifth studio album arrives at the end of a long, restless evolution. The painstaking group construction of 2015’s Little Neon Limelight gave way to the electronic shimmer of 2018’s Golden Age, while 2021’s Good for You pulled the band back toward their American roots. A half decade later, Lordy finds Myers carrying more of the creative weight himself, facing the freedom and pressure that come with trusting his own decisions all the way through.

“I needed those albums to be collaborative projects because I was scared of being completely in charge,” Myers admits of past Houndmouth records. “Maybe that stunted me. This is the first time I’ve been able to write a record completely on my own, and there’s a pressure that comes with that. I had to relearn everything.”

The authority and exposure of Lordy rise from the same hard-won self-trust. Myers sounds assured as he finally allows himself to sound wounded, uncertain, funny, furious, and fully present without controlling every seam.

“I’ve always enjoyed writing one liners, fragments, and vague takes on things and seeing how it all eventually fits together,” Myers tells Atwood Magazine. “But this record was much more personal than anything I’ve done before; all coming from a similar place.”

That willingness to let feeling lead pours directly into “Hard Being Lovers,” whose bruised opening traces the wreckage two people leave inside each other: “The good, the clean, the spiteful things / We both did and didn’t mean.” Guitars simmer beneath Myers’ worn delivery as blood, coffee, poison, and honey mingle in the aftermath, every sweet memory edged by the harm that followed. It is an unguarded entrance into an album preoccupied with survival – not as triumph, but as the daily work of living alongside what still hurts.

It’s hard to say
where all the good things went
The poison spread and the honey drip
There was a moment, was a line,
was a knife we’d twist
Then kiss goodnight

– “Hard Being Lovers,” Houndmouth

The bruised restraint of “Hard Being Lovers” gives way almost immediately to the record’s most electrifying eruption. Previously featured in Atwood Magazine’s Editor’s Picks, “Tiger Blood” is the album’s feral center – a sweaty, ragged folk-rock release where Friday-night impulse, childhood recklessness, and buried pressure snap into motion. Its guitars bite, its drums charge, and Myers howls with his whole body as the song climbs toward its glorious, screaming finish. He calls it the record’s “I want to go out and be bad for a sec” moment, but within Lordy, that abandon carries deeper significance: It is the sound of an artist who spent years unable to move finally breaking into a run.

That urgency began with immediacy. Across recording sessions spread over a year, Myers captured one-take acoustic performances and built outward with Cook and a small circle of musicians, following the life inside each take rather than disappearing into minutia. Between sessions, Houndmouth worked the songs through in a gritty Louisville warehouse basement whose bare-bones atmosphere matched the material. Born in kitchen-window daylight and strengthened underground, Lordy carries both settings in its grain: open enough to let the words breathe, rough enough to keep the blood moving.

Come on let it out now
Turn a thought into a whisper
Push it come to shoving
The spit turn to vapor

I’ve been wondering where my mind went
I think it’s down between the earth
and the pavement
And the one who tastes the sweetness
Seems to be the one with
the sharpest of claws
Friday nights come
All we’re made of
Veins of ice and tiger blood

From there, Lordy moves through heat, humor, fatigue, and hard-won resolve without forcing them into a neat recovery arc.

“Never Gonna Die” sways with unruly optimism, its easy hooks and country-rock warmth making immortality sound less like a promise than a dare. “Rodeo” turns escape into a dusty daydream, while “Heavy Eyes” piles roadside characters, burnout, hot dogs, sunsets, and desperation into a cinematic portrait of people pushing onward despite running on empty. Its cluttered backseat world keeps accumulating until personal exhaustion begins to sound communal, every passing detail another mile logged by people too tired to stop. Yet for all its fatigue, “Heavy Eyes” glows with sweetness, its pickup-truck momentum and open-road warmth making it one of Lordy’s most heartfelt and smile-inducing highlights. Myers makes burnout sound almost tender here – a burden lightened by company and the beauty still passing outside the window.

“Battery,” meanwhile, reduces denial to one devastating refrain – “Even then, if I wasn’t, I’d say I was / But I’m alright” – until reassurance begins to sound like a survival mechanism. Myers repeats the claim while declining invitations, staring at the wall, getting too high, and waving goodbye, exposing the distance between staying functional and truly being okay.

“I let unfiltered emotion inform the words,” Myers explains. “With several songs, I learned to be okay with just letting some syllables line up, and letting the emotion behind it all do the talking.”

Had a way with the family
Speaking royally with blue jeans on
I’ve been driving
since the cows come home
So shut up and roll the windows
Kill ‘em all, kill ‘em all
Kill ‘em all with kindness

Rest stops and hot dogs
Sunsets and OCD
Pile in the truck now
And we’re all drowning

I’m burning out
See ya later
I’m burning out
We got heavy eyes

That loosened grip serves him well. “Carbondale” is all lived-in charm and understated devotion, its crooked humor giving way to the plainspoken confession, “If I hadn’t met you / then I’d probably cease to be.” “Varmints” turns guilt into a wiry, restless rocker haunted by bad timing and roads not taken, while “Don’t Wanna Talk” bounces between scaled-back verses and shimmering singalong release. One of the album’s sleeper hits, the track is cozy and bruised at once, its soft-edged groove carrying a low, steady ache. The song never needs to raise its voice; warmth and forward motion make its guarded confession all the more earnestly disarming. Its refusal to dwell is less emotional avoidance than self-preservation – the recognition that the past can only dominate the future if we keep feeding it.

The title track sits near the album’s end like a crooked grin after the storm. Written quickly while Myers walked around with a guitar, “Lordy” pairs conversational ease with simmering social critique, taking aim at judgment, inherited wealth, and people who mistake cruelty for conviction. “You act like you’re poor / kid sitting on fortunes / and all that your grand mommy mined,” he sings, letting exasperation, humor, and contempt share the same breath.

I’ve seen the roses grow up
They’ve got more answers than not
Laugh at the trashman,
too scared to be one
Your thorns they grow so far and wide
Ooo Lordy, Lordy, Lord
there’ll be crying and that’s a fact

“Nothing about writing this song felt unnatural,” Myers shares. “It wasn’t overthought. I was just kind of pissed off and walking around with a guitar saying stuff. I usually don’t write songs that fast. Like 5/10 minutes.” The title grew from that same gut response, a phrase broad enough to hold disbelief, exhaustion, and the laughter that slips out when language reaches its limit. “I just thought about the most natural thing that came out during the process and went with that,” he adds. “Plus, it’s been a crazy past few years and ‘Lordy Lordy’ is really all I can or want to say to convey that!”

The closing “Holy Moses” then lowers the temperature without diminishing the stakes, reckoning with mortality, aging, love, and the hope that tenderness might survive whatever pulverizes the rest of us. Its placement completes an arc that begins with “Sometimes it’s hard being lovers, ain’t it?” and ends with a gentler wish: “If it don’t work out / and we all get pulverized / I’d like to keep things sweet between you and I.” The album travels from the harm lovers carry into one another toward the difficult grace of preserving affection while everything hangs in the balance. Resolution remains out of reach; tenderness becomes the choice that matters.

Most of the seasons now
are only hours away
It’s hard to grasp
we’re all just blips in the wind,
a crease in the page
Maybe I’m older now,
but maybe just the same
You’ll keep my T-shirts
’til the cotton seams wither away
Priced out of my range,
priced out of my mind
Got so much baggage,
bags for days, and bags in my eyes
If it don’t work out
and we all get pulverized
I’d like to keep things sweet
between you and I

Hang on ’til the help comes back
‘Cause you don’t want it from me
Cut my hand ’til I saw blood
Then you cut yours

Hanging in the balance trying to look alive
Always embarrassed out in the light

– “Holy Moses,” Houndmouth

At once a lifeline and a triumph, Lordy captures Houndmouth at their most exposed and fully alive.

Produced by Cook and strengthened by a circle that included Caleb Hickman, Phil Cook, Sam Beam, and MJ Lenderman, Lordy treats collaboration as an act of care – capturing what happens when the right people help an artist back to his feet. The musicians preserve the strain in Myers’ voice and the songs’ frayed ends, adding weight where it helps and space where the material needs air. “I was surrounded by people who were literally trying to pick me up and help me out,” Myers says. “They pushed me to do the work.” Their generosity runs through an album built from one-take acoustic foundations and expanded only as far as each moment demanded.

What makes Lordy so compelling is not simply the unfiltered hardship behind it, but the vivid, unruly music Houndmouth have made from that upheaval. As ragged as it is radiant, the album moves through grief, humor, exhaustion, desire, resentment, tenderness, and hard-won hope without sanding down the contradictions between them. Myers does not polish those tensions into a cleaner story; he lets swagger sit beside uncertainty, sweetness beside damage, and release beside the pain that made it necessary. The result is one of Houndmouth’s richest and most fully realized records – an album whose looseness feels purposeful, whose imperfections deepen its humanity, and whose songs keep revealing new emotional contours long after their hooks have settled in.

Lordy is not a comeback to an earlier version of Houndmouth. It is the arrival of a band older, clearer-eyed, and more alive to the value of imperfection. These songs smolder and sway, roar and retreat, carrying the dust of back roads and the heat of kitchen-window sunlight in equal measure. Houndmouth have made a record for anyone learning that rebuilding does not mean returning untouched – it means finding enough nerve, humor, and heart to keep going while the scars are still tender.

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Stream: “Never Gonna Die” – Houndmouth

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 © Tommy Moore

Lordy

an album by Houndmouth