Brown Horse : Total Dive
Brown Horse‘s music carries a sound that weighs heavy with regrets and lonely nights and countless nights playing in towns whose names they can’t remember. The best country music—alt- or otherwise—tends to feel lived in and worn out, stripped down to the barest of feelings with just enough pedal steel to bring them back up to the surface again. In truth, the Norwich, UK group are still relatively new, having released their excellent debut album Reservoir in 2024 and quickly followed it up with the even better All the Right Weaknesses in 2025. But there’s a weariness to their songs, a feeling of being weathered down to the nerve that makes them feel not just older but more ageless than they are.
Their third album in as many years, Total Dive is not just the band’s best to date, but likewise their most affecting, its 10 songs capturing the band at their most beautifully melancholy, even when revved up and cloaked in dustclouds of distortion. Its first single “Twisters” captures that duality brilliantly, brash and ragged but with a streak of mesmerizing pedal steel in its chorus to underscore Patrick Turner’s wish, “I hope a whip of lightning cuts me in two“—just like John Henry did to Jason Molina’s heart, no doubt.
Most of the songs on Total Dive maintain a similar balance at varying ratios, with openers “Sorrow Reigns” finding the band pushing as far into raucous grunge-twang as they get. A dense, fuzz-drenched introduction that echoes Dinosaur Jr.’s ideal of “ear bleeding country,” juxtaposed against Turner’s poetic meditations on demolition: “I saw two machines tearing down a building/all the pipework was left dangling/all its insides on the outside/It was pretty like nothing’s pretty.” “Comeback Loading” is all Crazy Horse grit and turbulence, while Turner invokes not Neil Young but Bruce Springsteen, intentionally twisting up Boss references in an address to an estranged friend (“I was wondering, do you still play the Boss sometimes?/ Thunder out over the edge of town”). And “Heart of the Country” would be a little too on the nose as a title if it wasn’t such a goddamn great song, an accordion wheezing against its depiction of busted conveniences and broken hearts: “Was that a muffled scream/Or just the death-rattle of the vending machine?”
It takes only a slight easing of the intensity for Brown Horse to cut significantly deeper, the juxtaposition of Hammond organ and pedal steel punctuating Turner’s repetitions of “Take whatever you want whenever you leave/He’d want you to have whatever you need,” bringing both the grief and the sweetness in both statements to the surface on “Heavy.” The musicianship and, as influences like Mascis and Young would attest, the riffs on display on Total Dive leave an immediate impression. But it’s the indelible ache that lingers.
Label: Loose
Year: 2026
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