{"id":553048,"date":"2026-04-27T09:50:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T09:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/553048\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T09:50:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T09:50:24","slug":"the-great-divide-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/553048\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Divide Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Great Divide opens with a question Noah Kahan doesn\u2019t answer for another 17 tracks. In \u2018End of August\u2019, two friends drive through a New England town whose future consists of having kids who grow up to build homes for the rich. <\/p>\n

A piano opens softly, Aaron Dessner\u2019s synths arrive slowly underneath, and over five minutes the track builds to something close to an epiphany. It\u2019s the best thing Kahan has recorded. It also sets a bar the album, at 70 minutes, can\u2019t consistently clear.<\/p>\n

The terrain is familiar: Kahan left Vermont, became famous faster than he\u2019d planned, and now feels guilty about both things simultaneously. What separates The Great Divide from Stick Season is that he\u2019s willing to let other people say so. <\/p>\n

\u2018Porch Light\u2019 gives his mother\u2019s perspective room to breathe, a family voice arriving in a song that had been his alone until it wasn\u2019t. \u2018Haircut\u2019 records exactly what a resentful friend says when you come home changed: \u201cWe were fine without you, baby.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2018Dan\u2019, the closing track, sits two old friends beside a lake talking around what they can\u2019t say to each other, and lands the album\u2019s most precise and most devastating line: \u201cLoon calls pierce through the violent sky \/ Think I stood right here back when Carlo died.\u201d These are the moments where Kahan\u2019s lyricism lands with the weight it\u2019s reaching for.<\/p>\n

Dessner\u2019s production on those tracks is the real upgrade from Stick Season. He brings Mellotron, layered synths, Justin Vernon<\/a> on banjo in \u2018Downfall\u2019, a wider sonic palette than Gabe Simon\u2019s drier, fingerpicked approach. The two production styles sit alongside each other across the record\u2019s 17 tracks, and the split is audible: the Dessner tracks tend to be the album\u2019s peaks, the Simon tracks its dependable spine.<\/p>\n

The problem is the length. At 70 minutes, The Great Divide runs past its own best arguments. The mid-album run of \u2018Spoiled\u2019, \u2018Headed North\u2019 and \u2018We Go Way Back\u2019 is emotionally sincere but sonically indistinct \u2013 the same fingerpicked guitar, the same patient build, the same chorus arriving on schedule. By the time \u2018Dan\u2019 closes the record it has the force of a statement the album has been working toward for an hour. A tighter version of this record, twelve tracks and an hour at most, would be among the best things Kahan has made. The version we have is still very good, and occasionally extraordinary.<\/p>\n

I find it hard to be sceptical of an artist who documents body dysmorphia and OCD in a Netflix documentary and then backs it up with this degree of specificity in the songs. That\u2019s not nothing. It might be the whole thing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Editors\u2019 Picks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Great Divide opens with a question Noah Kahan doesn\u2019t answer for another 17 tracks. In \u2018End of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[190172,36639,96,36374,190173,190174,128,149550,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-553048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-aaron-dessner","tag-americana","tag-entertainment","tag-folk-rock","tag-gabe-simon","tag-indie-folk","tag-music","tag-noah-kahan","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}