The life of a music critic is one of perpetual bombardment, so much so that scouring my inbox for new artists to check out can sometimes feel like a crapshoot. PR firms try to maximize that eye-catching potential in their subject headings, but the whims of a critic are unpredictable, fickle, and most importantly, self-centered. Case(y) in point: I discovered Chicago alt-country outfit Case Oats primarily because I saw the band was led by another female Casey (there are very few of us, and even fewer who spell our name correctly—looking at you, Kacey Musgraves). At the time, nothing in my weekly new music sweep was really standing out; the songs all seemed to be drenched in fuzz and haze, their vocals airy, gauzy, and heavily produced, their soundscapes built from synth and distortion. To be clear: this sound, dream-pop and diet shoegaze fit with a bit of Auto-Tune, isn’t bad, per se, but it can start to feel increasingly uniform. And then I clicked on “Nora” by Case Oats—again, largely because I felt a moral obligation to support a fellow Casey—and found it was the breath of air I had been looking for.
Case Oats’ debut record, Last Missouri Exit, does not reinvent the wheel. But it isn’t trying to, nor does it need to. Frontwoman Casey Gomez Walker’s voice undoubtedly calls on the earnest plaintiveness of Mo Tucker, her songwriting brings to mind David Berman’s interpolation of lived-in specifics and heart-rendingly blunt self-analysis, and the instrumentation takes after Wilco (unsurprising, considering Spencer Tweedy is Gomez Walker’s fiancé and the band’s drummer). The record is squarely set in alt-country territory, yet it still feels fresher than a host of recent albums straining to claim some “lush” sound as invention. Case Oats aren’t forcing originality or fleeing lineage—they’re simply writing what they know, and in doing so, carve out something novel.
It helps, too, that the band—Gomez Walker and Tweedy alongside Max Subar (guitar, pedal steel), Jason Ashworth (bass), Scott Daniel (fiddle), and Nolan Chin (piano, organ)—evidently view the Case Oats “sound” as malleable and ever-changing; not some static standard to meet. The album might not venture out of alt-country territory often, but that doesn’t mean there’s no exploration; it just goes for depth rather than breadth. Rather than spanning myriad genres, Case Oats instead takes listeners on a veritable road-trip through the entirety of alt-country and all its nooks and crannies. “Seventeen” is pure Kimya Dawson with its up-tempo melody and deadpan talk-singing. On the other hand, the twang and rhythm of “Bitter Root Lake,” a Dateline-inspired homage to the age-old folk tradition of the murder ballad, calls The Old 97s to mind.
While “Tennessee” is sonically the most straightforward country song on the record, the wry melancholy in self-effacing lines like “We could’ve been on old porch swings / But I’m back in the city, figuring out ways to drink more” is all Berman (as is album closer, “Bluff”). And both the hauntingly bare-bones delivery of “I never wanted you to die in that Kentucky cave” (“Kentucky Cave”) and the sharp, cutting edge of Gomez Walker’s higher register in “Hallelujah” scratched the same otherwise-unscratchable itch that only Wet Nose Hero’s Congratulations, Ha Ha has previously sated (shoutout to the band’s 26 other Spotify listeners; we are small but we are mighty).
Form is best used as an extension of content, and Last Missouri Exit delivers that in spades—both in the sense that the warm, intimate coziness of the instrumentation feels right for an album so much about the concept of home, and in the sense that the band’s refusal to be precious with their music or identity feels right for an album so keen on exploring how the concept of home changes, ebbs, flows, expands, and contracts over time. The record is a largely autobiographical collection of songs that, put together, build into something of a bildungsroman—but the arduous task and eventual relief of growing up is not a linear one. Rather than spinning a yarn that guides listeners from point A (childhood) to point B (adulthood), Gomez Walker dips in and out of the past, interweaving it with her present. The album is, in many ways, a time capsule: capturing not only how it feels to be a child, but how it feels to think back on childhood from your twenties, and then how it feels to revisit that memory from adulthood proper. The timeline loops and folds back on itself, recursive and layered. Yet despite all this potential for brooding, the record’s defining tone is warmth rather than regret.
Time is, by nature, amorphous and life, by nature, finite. But on Last Missouri Exit, neither of those truths are greeted with fear. Even when facing down the barrel of life’s most notoriously terrifying constants, Gomez Walker barely flinches, instead embracing fate with open arms. The whole thing reeks of a kind of radical acceptance that, ironically, the ages the album reminisces on are defined by categorically refusing. When you’re 17, everything is alien and terrifying. But when you’re 30 singing a song you wrote in your twenties about how you felt at seventeen, the sharpness softens, deepens into something more layered. Like wine, some things just need to age.
That’s not to say the record traffics in a kind of simplistic optimism, or waves away those very real fears in favor of some vague feel-good notion of positivity. There’s no denial of pain or loss or dread, no sugar-coating of past, present, or future. Put simply, everything is seen for what it is, and then accepted anyways. As Gomez Walker sings on “Tennessee:” “It hurts, but that’s how it goes.” Sometimes you miss your friends, and that’s fine. Sometimes you miss people you shouldn’t, and that’s fine too. Sometimes you long to be a child again, if only to remind yourself how it feels to feel. Sometimes you fall out of love, sometimes someone falls out of love with you, and sometimes, as on “Bitter Root Lake,” you and your lover fall from the sky in a crashing plane and only one of you makes it out alive, the other left to bloat with water in the bottom of a lake. It hurts, but—to quote the utterly devastating refrain on “Seventeen,” the hope in its words undercut by a bone-deep numbness, and vice versa—”Aren’t you glad you didn’t kill yourself?”
“Nora,” for instance, is a song about your boyfriend leaving you for his ex, but it doesn’t go the scorched-earth route the premise suggests: “Nora, Nora, Nora / I’m glad you are here now / I can see now,” Gomez Walker sings, clear-eyed and genuine, above bouncy guitar twang, pedal steel, and fiddle. As she’s elaborated elsewhere: “If they’re meant to be together there’s no use in being mad. I’m genuinely thanking her for releasing me from that situation and celebrating her love.” Later, “Hallelujah” addresses a friend’s breakup without platitudes: “Hallelujah / You’re not his saving grace / Hallelujah / You didn’t save face.” The refrain—“And you should feel bad / If it makes you feel better”—lands not as cruelty, but as honesty. Pain isn’t avoided or explained away; it’s witnessed and sat beside. In both cases, the sting comes less from the circumstances themselves than from how plainly they’re laid bare. No flourishes, no cushioning, just the stark phrasing dropped in your lap like it weighs exactly what it does.
Contrary to popular opinion, there is a chasm of difference between waxing poetic and writing a good poem; the former is achieved by purple prose and flowery metaphor, the latter by… Well, simply reading a lot of actual poetry. And Gomez Walker, who went to school for creative writing, has evidently read a lot of poetry. (As another Casey with two last names who went to school for creative writing, I am uniquely qualified to make this assessment. Game recognize game and whatnot). That background is visible in her lyricism, ripe as it is with subtle wordplay (“On a hotel room bed, you cowered and came too”) and pithy verses that paint entire histories in a tercet (from “Bluff,” the first song she ever wrote: “You imagined using again / I lost touch with my best friend / Your foot in your mouth and mine out the door”).
Similarly, poets, authors, and songwriters alike blur the lines between lived experience and imagined narrative, bending facts until they serve the feeling. Capturing the real emotion is valued above preserving “reality” and its supposed sanctity. Case Oats work in that same register. The album’s press bio calls Last Missouri Exit “a collection of sharply drawn character studies,” though Gomez Walker calls the songs autobiographical. That might sound contradictory, but in practice they illuminate what the record does best. Even the characters feel lived in, refracted through memory and experience. Autobiography doesn’t exclude others—it subsumes them, folds them into the author’s sense of self. In that sense, the album isn’t just about Casey Gomez Walker; it’s about the way a self is shaped by the places and people it carries.
Case in point: the record’s Midwestern geography isn’t backdrop but the soil those autobiographical threads are planted in. Even the album title points to it: Last Missouri Exit refers to the actual road sign Gomez Walker passes driving from her hometown in Missouri to her current home in Chicago, a marker that once felt like a point of no return, the moment childhood would be left behind for good. The record exists in that same liminal space, suspended between then and now, past and future, home and away. It may be timeless (in that it’s a little like a Russian nesting doll of memory, so it’s hard to say it’s locked to any one time), but it is never placeless. Instead, it’s rooted in that stretch of highway, in view of the border and the green sign announcing it, and from there the songs radiate outward: to lakes and caves, towns and cities. When Casey Gomez Walker sings about Tennessee or Kentucky, it isn’t the romance of distant states; it’s the gravitational pull of the borders she grew up beside and the whispered stories that passed through them. The Midwest, in other words, doesn’t just appear in these songs—it structures them, a landscape that doubles as both origin and horizon.
It’s in the atmosphere, too; the production evokes that kind of Midwest summer heat that hangs in the air like a breath. The record sounds warm and lived-in, with crisp mixes that foreground intimacy without sanding off rough edges. The sonic palette isn’t glossy or experimental—it’s faithful, clean, and generous, the kind of production that lets the imagery breathe without fuss. And breathe they do: the golden-hour porches, the smell of horsetail in the yard, the blare of a marching band, the chaos of a barn party. From the piano bridge in “Wishing Stone” to the aching pedal steel in “Buick Door,” the languid porch-swing twang of “In a Bungalow” to the bloom of strings in “Bluff,” the instruments all bleed into each other just enough to feel communal, echoing the record’s themes of shared memory and home.
Last Missouri Exit, then, is something of a new home in itself. (Cheesy, I know, but there’s no way around it). You hear it in the interplay of instrumentation: Subar’s pedal steel bends around Daniel’s fiddle, Chin’s piano fills the pockets that Ashworth’s bass leaves open, Tweedy’s voice intermingles with Gomez Walker’s in a mid-song harmony. Nothing about the palette is new, but the way they use it is theirs alone. They’ve been playing these same songs together for about seven years now, and the familiarity and comfort is audible. They’re not trying to innovate in the abstract or chase a style; they’re trying to capture the shape of a life, innovation be damned. It just so happens that the results of that approach are always going to be singular, reliant as they are on the specifics of a single life. Originality, Case Oats argues, isn’t about novelty at all. It’s about adding fidelity to the texture of one’s own experience.
Read our Best of What’s Next feature on Case Oats here.
Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
