Wilco Announces New Album ‘Cruel Country’ & Shares Single

Wilco detailed a new album, Cruel Country, due out on May 27 via dBpm Records. The Chicago-based rockers also shared the single “Falling Apart (Right Now).”

Cruel Country is Wilco’s first studio album since 2019’s Ode To Joy. The band — Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Mikael Jorgensen, Pat Sansone and Nels Cline — recorded the 21-track, double-disc album at their The Loft recording facility in Chicago. Wilco cut the album almost completely live with minimal overdubs and no baffles separating the players.

As the name suggests, Cruel Country sees Wilco returning to their country roots as a band that emerged from the ashes of alt-country group Uncle Tupelo in the mid-1990s, “there have been elements of Country music in everything we’ve ever done,” frontman and guitarist Jeff Tweedy said. “We’ve never been particularly comfortable with accepting that definition, the idea that I was making Country music. But now, having been around the block a few times, we’re finding it exhilarating to free ourselves within the form, and embrace the simple limitation of calling the music we’re making Country.”

Tweedy also commented on the live approach to recording. “It’s a style of recording that forces a band to surrender control and learn to trust each other, along with each others’ imperfections, musical and otherwise,” he said. “But when it’s working the way it’s supposed to, it feels like gathering around some wild collective instrument, one that requires six sets of hands to play.”

The title Cruel Country works on so many levels and the album as a whole serves as “a loose conceptual narrative on the history of the United States,” press materials for the LP noted. “It isn’t always direct and easy to spot, but there are flashes of clarity,” Tweedy continued. “It’s all mixed up and mixed in, the way my personal feelings about America are often woven with all of our deep collective myths. Simply put, people come and problems emerge. Worlds collide. It’s beautiful. And cruel. The specifics of an American identity begin to blur for me as the record moves toward the light and opens itself up to more cosmic solutions—coping with fear, without belonging to any nation or group other than humanity itself.”

For Jeff, country music is a good vehicle for him to navigate the problems facing the country, as he explained:

More than any other genre, Country music, to me, a white kid from middle-class middle America, has always been the ideal place to comment on what most troubles my mind—which for more than a little while now has been the country where I was born, these United States. And because it is the country I love, and because it’s Country music that I love, I feel a responsibility to investigate their mirrored problematic natures. I believe it’s important to challenge our affections for things that are flawed.

Country music is simply designed to aim squarely at the low-hanging fruit of the truth. If someone can sing it, and it’s given a voice… well, then it becomes very hard not to see. We’re looking at it. It’s a cruel country, and it’s also beautiful. Love it or leave it. Or if you can’t love it, maybe you’ve already left.

Fresh on the heels of performing their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to celebrate the landmark 2002 album’s 20th anniversary, Wilco will perform Cruel Country at their Solid Sound festival over Memorial Day Weekend just after the new record comes out. Listen to the first taste of the album, “Falling Apart (Right Now)” below, which arrived with an in-studio video:

Cruel Country Tracklist:

1. I Am My Mother
2. Cruel Country
3. Hints
4. Ambulance
5. The Empty Condor
6. Tonight’s The Day
7. All Across The World
8. Darkness Is Cheap
9. Bird Without A Tail / Base Of My Skull
10. Tired Of Taking It Out On You
11. The Universe
12. Many Worlds
13. Hearts Hard To Find
14. Falling Apart (Right Now)
15. Please Be Wrong
16. Story To Tell
17. A Lifetime To Find
18. Country Song Upside-down
19. Mystery Binds
20. Sad Kind Of Way
21. The Plains