Esther Rose "Want"

Esther Rose was on a long solo drive when she started writing the opening title track of Want, her stunning fifth album. At first, the words seemed almost like a joke, something to keep herself amused as the miles passed. “I want a puppy, but I don't want a mess. I want to know where I’m going without GPS,” she sang from behind the wheel. Soon, the idea snowballed into a list of desires that spanned existential, spiritual, and mundane; romantic to platonic to familial; at once wildly ambitious yet piercingly relatable; all set to a catchy melody that blends her pop instincts with country storytelling and the raw immediacy of a basement punk show. In other words, she was on her way to another classic Esther Rose song.

This precise blend has made the Santa Fe-based artist one of her generation’s most beloved songwriters: someone whose live shows are known to conclude in mass tears and group hugs. Still, something was different this time. “For me, these songs felt like revelations,” she explains, comparing the 11-song record to a memoir, alive with kinetic storytelling and personal insight. In its newly direct and stirringly nuanced writing, you’ll hear about rock bottom encounters, shifting relationships with substances, evolving perspectives on adult partnership, and, as evidenced by those early lines in “Want,” a few jokes along the way. Vivid and bracing, Want places you in the passenger seat while each of these feelings arrive.

To match the multi-dimensional tone of the writing, Rose has made the most adventurous, hardest-hitting record of her career. Working with producer Ross Farbe and recording live-to-tape in Nashville’s Bomb Shelter, she travels as far as she’s been from the stripped-down classic country of celebrated early work like 2017’s This Time Last Night and 2019’s You Made It This Far. Following the wide-open serenity of 2023’s momentous Safe to Run, she now leans toward confrontational arrangements full of distortion and full-band spontaneity, never sacrificing a classicist’s gift for melody that makes each song instantly memorable.