Kacey Musgraves: Middle of Nowhere review – tired, depressed and frustrated, it’s her heaviest album since Golden Hour | Kacey Musgraves

KAcey Musgraves’ seventh album sounds like a breather. From 2018 prismatic country-pop wonder The Golden Hourthe Texan struggled to maintain a pop record: 2021’s Star Crossed marrying the most disturbing music to the most obscure music; 2024’s Deeper Well was a weak system of coffee shops and inhuman support. Middle of Nowhere takes all the show off. Cleverly arranged, decorated with western music and traditional Mexican music, the low noise returns to the rural areas of Musgraves and creates the most tired songs of calculation and deception: in the title of the song, Musgraves sounds better than Aimee Mann, the master of the subject.

But his hooks would hit. The warm, glossy I Believe in Ghosts feels like it was made for tired stoics to kick together on a dusty dancefloor; femcel song Dry Spell includes an unwavering canter looking a thousand yards as Musgraves rues “I’m so lonely with a capital H” – she means horn, a line that doesn’t work until you think about it: maybe it’s been so long she can’t remember the words. And the spartan setting allows much of Musgraves’s expressiveness and side-eye to shine through. The hopeful romance of Back on the Wagon, where a woman swears her rapist husband has changed, and the steely breeze of Loneliest Girl, where someone insists she’s happy alone, are two sides of a coin that bends gracefully: how many paths do we find ourselves walking through? Horses and Divorce is a country girl, the most disturbing: a conciliatory – but brutal – duet with old enemy Miranda Lambert who sounds light and quit.