On the beautiful return of Lambchop

I only learned to drive in the last few years. Before doing so, I'd become a keen and sometimes even useful co-passenger, buildings playlists or burning CD-Rs for specific trips, curating accompaniments through aux leads and mp3 players. I loved finding music that fit the nature of the drive, the weather outside the windscreen. Sometimes I'd get annoyed if the conversation drowned out a subtle shift I'd painstakingly programmed, from one song to the next.

Driving alone to music is different. I remember at some point in my early thirties being really sad that I'd never learned to drive at 18, never got the chance to hit the open road at the same time my musical world was growing rapidly, like there was a sacred bond between a teenage heart and your first car's cassette deck that I'd missed out on, had let slip away.

Since passing my test, and finally being able to jump behind the wheel and drive alone for hours at a time, up into the mountains, out to the coast, I've found that artists/records/songs I already had an affinity with have shifted in tone, taking on a new kind of resonance because of this forward motion, the evolving scenery they provide the soundtrack to.

One such discovery was Lambchop, the ever-evolving project of Kurt Wagner. Not all of his richly varied back-catalogue, so much of which I've dug into over the years, but just a couple of records that became precious driving companions as I ventured further afield, mostly around Scotland and its wide open spaces. Subsequently, both the soulful Nixon (2000) and the oddly-shaped Flotus (2016) have become two of my favourite records, taking on whole new importance for no other reason than they were right there alongside me as the world opened up a little more than it had done before, as I watched great scenery shift among the seasons.

It's been nearly four years since the last Lambchop album, but Wagner returns today with news of a brand new collection, announced today for a late-August release. Shifting the timber of his work once more, the excellently-titled Punching The Clown LP is informed by an unknown song he heard on his own car radio back in 2014. Taking that as inspiration, Wagner wrote songs based on the fabric of that mystery song, which featured a form of gospel singing that originated in Scotland in the early 1800s. "It migrated to Appalachia and became an obscure root of American gospel, country," Wagner says in his written introduction to the album, "a spontaneous call and response type of acapella singing, led by a clerk with a chorus of singers revealing the raw beauty and power of the human voice with its unique varieties."

To bring the project to life, Wagner worked alongside guitarist Andrew Broder, a full choir and, interestingly, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon who plays banjo across the record. Punching The Clown was recorded in just three days but its roots burrow far longer. The finished collection of songs was pulled from hours and days of personal and collective journeying, both inwards and outwards, with Wagner declaring that he "needed to become a better writer" to do justice to his vision for the new project.

Lead single 'Weakened' is also unveiled today, and it feels immediately distinctive, immediately weighty. Wagner's voice is loose and blemished, weathered by the passing of time, and it wanders above a backdrop of those simple aforementioned instruments mentioned, while occasionally showing a flash of something else; odd eccentricities that burst through the clouds, disappearing no sooner than they arrive.

It's beautiful – really beautiful. What the rest of the album holds we'll have to wait and see, but there's enough here, so much hidden among the reeds, to hint at something that goes beyond; a special kind of landscape conjured and evolving right in front of your eyes, as the wheels turn and hum beneath you.

"I’m conflicted not offering a more detailed accountings for these songs," Wagner says of the album. "Let’s just say I tried for simple, restrained vocabulary to get closer to a modest amount of truth, through a guise of hyper-naturalism, grief, love and humor."

Listen to the new song below.

Punching The Clown is released August 21st, via Merge Records / City Slang

Lambchop also play UK/EU live dates in November 2026 and early 2027.

Full info here