Seven years is a long time between drinks, and Ride Lonesome, out on the 18th of September through Capitol, is Beck’s fifteenth studio album and the first since 2019’s Hyperspace — the longest gap of his career. The trail starts in London: two orchestral nights at the Royal Albert Hall in spring 2025, leaning heavily on Sea Change, an album he’d never performed with the full trimmings before — eighty-five musicians on stage. He came away saying the shows had made him want to work in a studio with an orchestra, though at the time he’d only describe it as an unnamed, undisclosed project. The truth is the record was nearly out years ago and he pulled it. “I was initially going to finish this record and have it come out in 2023, but I ended up shelving it for two years,” he told NME — he didn’t think the songs were strong enough, and wasn’t in the mood for what the album would demand of him. When he did go back, he went to Room B at United Studios in Hollywood with the players from Mutations, Sea Change and Morning Phase — Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Jason Falkner — produced it himself and handed the mix to Nigel Godrich. He calls that band his Wrecking Crew.
Twelve songs, forty-seven minutes, and it is unmistakably the third panel of the sad-Beck triptych. AllMusic hears it as an almost trilogistic continuation of the other two: ambling tempos across all twelve tracks, amber-hued acoustic instrumentation, only the most subtle ornamentation. The title track opens the album dusted with pedal steel, and there’s a new appetite for ambient texture — “Failed Words” buries its piano and strings in so much cavernous reverb you can’t pick the individual sounds apart, which is entirely the point. The singles have trickled out since April: the title song first, then a version with Sierra Ferrell in June, “In the Night” in July with a video starring Denis Lavant, and “Disappearing Act” in August. Lyrically he’s blunt about it — a heartbreak record, and obviously so, about reckoning with loss and letting go; romantic loss, the death of a good friend, and the business of one era of your life turning into another, much of it written while he was shut in the house alone during COVID. It’s also the first album since his divorce from Marissa Ribisi, finalised in late 2021 after nearly fifteen years of marriage.
What makes it more than a mood piece is how long he’s waited to be allowed to make it. These were the songs he wanted to write as a young man, he says, at a time when the climate wouldn’t have them — he remembers playing finger-picked acoustic material to hecklers, then bellowing the line about MTV and getting fists in the air. He was friends with Elliott Smith and Lou Barlow and felt nervous on their behalf, because sincerity in the mid-nineties was close to unbearable. Thirty years on he’s stopped flinching, and he’s done it the hard way: most of these songs were cut live in a room, five people, no punches, no fixes. Rolling Stone reckons it a sublime return to the sombre folk-rock of his high points, fragile and spare, closing on a post-breakup benediction in “Beyond the Light.” NME’s verdict was simply “drop-dead gorgeous.” One critic called it a rare glimpse into Beck’s inner life, the sort we’re allowed only about once a decade. Pour something, put it on properly, and let it take its time. Album of the Week.
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