Kacey Musgraves’ third album goes down so smoothly that it might not even scan as a total reinvention. Throughout the songs on Golden Hour, the East Texas singer-songwriter is radiant, awestruck, taking the scenic route to the bar just for the hell of it. After Musgraves’ previous two albums, which felt like they were cut from the same home-sewn flannel cloth, she now ventures beyond the front-porch hum of country music. The new Kacey Musgraves needs strings, vocoders, disco beats. And if this sounds like a left turn for the lovable cynic who once characterized the world as an absurd beauty contest, a vicious cycle, a bad party, and a toxic boys’ club, well, that’s kinda the point.
Since her last proper album, 2015’s Pageant Material, the now 29-year-old singer-songwriter has changed her perspective. There was a spirited Christmas record, a creatively charged acid trip, and a rustic country wedding. It’s like Musgraves’ life was given the season-finale treatment: a series of climactic turns that left her standing misty-eyed on a cliffside, bellowing “I get it!” at the sunrise. She’s updated her music accordingly. On Golden Hour, everything sprawls and swells and gushes, a gaping sky that makes the sonic landscapes of her previous albums feel like mere set dressing. For these songs of hope and wonder, she nods to meticulous folk epics like Beck’s Sea Change, or Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans if it was re-cut for an IMAX screen. She’s settled on enlightenment as a new resting state.
The result is Musgraves’ most accessible record and her most ambitious, a magnetic, comfortable culmination of her pop and country instincts. While dynamic enough to house both the stirring, alone-at-the-piano fragment “Mother” and a full-on country-disco kiss-off in “High Horse,” Golden Hour is alluringly cohesive, both lyrically and musically. In “Wonder Woman,” she confronts a partner’s unrealistic expectations and gives a simple counter: “All I need’s a place to land.” Throughout these songs, she finds one.
Despite the grandeur of its music, Golden Hour offers Musgraves’ most understated songwriting, a refreshing evolution as stars like Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga accidentally turn Americana-pop into grim satire. In the stunning single “Space Cowboy,” she weaves in at least a dozen genre tropes without drawing any attention to them. Instead, you’re left dazzled by the way her bold, drawling voice can cut through simple ideas—“Sunsets fade/And love does too”—like she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling.
Sometimes, that familiarity belies the complexity of these songs. Tracks like “Love Is a Wild Thing” and “Oh, What a World” swirl around the positive messages in their titles in a state of euphoria. Musgraves includes precious few of the subtle details that made her 2013 breakthrough, Same Trailer Different Park, feel so instantly familiar. On a previous record, she might have provided a tour of the neighborhood that landlocks the star-crossed home-bodies in “Lonely Weekend,” or cracked a stoner joke about the “plants that grow and open your mind” in “Oh, What a World.” In the places where you’d expect Musgraves to land her punches, she sometimes offers just a wistful sigh.
But if the tension in her earlier work came from her sharp observations and underdog spirit, there’s something more complicated at play here. “Is there a word for the way that I’m feeling tonight,” she asks in “Happy & Sad,” attempting to pinpoint the creeping melancholy undercutting an otherwise blissful evening. Golden Hour is an album-length ode to not having the right words, to being overcome by the moment and surrendering to it.
Musgraves’ songwriting melts seamlessly between celebration—in heart-eyed-emoji anthems like “Butterflies” and “Velvet Elvis”—and elegies for when those feelings start to dim. The cinematic arrangements rarely distinguish between those two modes, coating the album in a pristine, sepia glow that makes tales of solitude like “Lonely Weekend” seem downright inviting. There’s a subtle awareness throughout these songs of what happens as soon as the golden hour ends, how quickly that burst of light can fade without a trace. In the title track, Musgraves compares her contentment to a temporary trick of the light: “All that I know,” she admits, “Is you caught me at the right time.”
Less concerned with outside forces than internal balance, Golden Hour stands as an assured, artful snapshot of a particular rush of feelings, but its wisdom speaks volumes to Musgraves’ ongoing evolution. “If you’re ever gonna find a silver lining,” she sang in the first track on her major label debut, “It’s gotta be a cloudy day.” Even then, she suspected that ecstasy is most rewarding when it’s hard-won. On Golden Hour, she wears the sunlight well.
