All Bad, the latest album from Nick Shoulders—released via Gar Hole Records (a label he co-founded and co-owns)—encapsulates everything that makes his inimitable form of country music so vital: a heady balance of dazzling musicianship and punk defiance, coupled with gritty eccentricity and a generational connection to the roots of the genre. With a singing style inherited from his family’s vocal lineage, Nick’s songs achieve the rare feat of imparting difficult truths while inciting a joyful abandon. His sound balances the edge forged by years of hard travel with a deep reverence for the origins of country music. In the spirit of Hazel Dickens and Jimmy Driftwood, the incisive yet wildly jubilant All Bad vocally objects to the reckless destruction of the natural landscape and runaway development, while still offering plenty of joy and dance-ready rhythms. Spanning a variety of early country styles, the album’s infectious harmonies shine alongside everything from jangling Cajun waltzes to surf-rock-infused, bluesy ballads—all tied together by a voice seemingly out of place in this century, yet deeply in tune with its challenges. Surrounded by a singing tradition passed down from a time before microphones, Nick’s childhood of bird-call whistles and heavy exposure to Southern gospel music eventually led him to drumming for metal and punk bands in adolescence. He spent years as an active illustrator and a member of Arkansas’s heavy music scene. After a string of personal calamities and a growing obsession with the rural musical traditions of his lifelong home, Shoulders left the Ozarks and began living out of his van—singing on street corners across the West. He was eventually drawn to the vibrant dance and busking culture of New Orleans. Following the release of Rather Low on the YouTube channel Western AF, which introduced Nick’s songs to a much wider audience just as COVID-19 lockdowns hit, his career saw rapid ascent. Since then, he’s toured extensively, sharing stages with the likes of Sierra Ferrell and appearing at major festivals such as Stagecoach. With the hard rhythms and heavenly melodies of All Bad, Nick Shoulders delivers a body of work that is both sublimely freewheeling and profoundly illuminating—an album primed to permanently shift the listener’s perspective, to glorious effect.