For more than a decade, River Shook fronted Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, a raucous but fitfully tender country-rock unit that, for most of its run, hit the bottle as hard as it hit the pavement. In that grandest of country music traditions, the Disarmers’ songs were honest reflections of the blackout-chasing lives the members were living, but that changed when Shook got sober in 2019. The albums that followed, especially 2024’s incisive Revelations, were more clear-eyed; they also exposed the fault lines that had begun to destabilize the Disarmers. In June 2025, Shook played their final show with their longtime band. By then, they’d already begun working on the nervy, forthright songs that would become their eponymous solo debut.
River Shook isn’t technically the first album Shook has made as a solo artist. In 2022, they released Cruel Liars, an electronics-tinged indie rock record, under the name Mightmare. Today that album scans as an interesting but uneven experiment; the music Shook is releasing under their own name hews much closer to the Lucinda-fronting-the-Replacements sound of the Disarmers. Crucially, though, it’s unburdened by that band’s history. River Shook opens with “Free at Last,” a slow-burning divorce ballad that could just as easily be about the demise of the Disarmers: “Today I am cutting all ties with my past… Come hell or high water, I will be free at last.” Over the next 37 minutes, Shook shows us what that freedom sounds like.
Continuing the arc of their post-sobriety records with the Disarmers, Shook places writing and voice at the center of their new solo material. The ramshackle cowpunk of breakthrough album Sidelong is a distant memory now, its rawness and distortion swapped for clarity and precision. The evolution suits Shook, who has turned themself into a much more nuanced vocalist over the years. There’s always been a conspiratorial smokiness in their singing, a crackle of long nights and bleary mornings penetrating their drawl. They’ve learned to augment that intuitive gruffness with subtler and sweeter melodies. On “Beater Car,” a heartbreaking tune about feeling like they’ve failed their son, Shook drops a lilting little trill into a chorus that channels early Sheryl Crow, then backs it up with the muscular rasp familiar from earlier Disarmers records. The quiet confidence of their delivery makes the song’s emotional vulnerability hit even harder.
Unusually for Shook, a lot of the other songs feel optimistic. The chorus of uptempo rocker “Country Angel” foreshadows the inevitable doom of the young love at its center, but its verses revel in the heady pleasures of the present. “Lost Without Your Love,” inspired by Shook’s small role in the indie crime flick Carolina Caroline, is a swirling Bonnie and Clyde update that quotes “Good as Gold,” one of the Disarmers’ signature songs. (That’s the album’s most explicit backward look, and it feels well earned.) “Blue Vervain” is perhaps the most conventional love song Shook has written, after a decade of singing about fucked-up relationships. It’s an ode to their partner and bandmate Blake Tallent that echoes Angel Olsen’s “Big Time” in its celebration of the romantic quotidian: “I die when you slide your hair back behind your ear/And it kills me when you smile when you’re reading/Some book that takes you far from here.”
Tallent, a former Disarmer, is Shook’s sole collaborator on River Shook, and their two-person chemistry defines its sound. In downsizing from a full band to a duo, Shook is better able to emphasize the intimacy and economy of their current songwriting approach. The arrangements tend to be simple and straightforward, and Tallent’s solos on electric guitar and pedal steel are tastefully deployed. They might be a little too tasteful at times. The frenetic ending of “Beater Car” is the closest Tallent gets to shredding here, and it’s one of the most thrilling moments on the record. Similarly, “Country Angel” stands out for its willingness to rock out. In cutting themself loose from the Disarmers, Shook has made a powerful statement of self-determination and recapitulated their case as one of our great alt-country songwriters. The music could stand to cut loose a bit, too.
