Pink Williams is actually one of those people for those who dont know. His style is very anti capitalist country music. "The Devil is Real" is all about how the real devil is the capitalists who take advantage of the common folk. And "Thank God For Gay Cowboys" is as the title suggests about gay cowboys and rednecks.

What style is that?

Queer Appalachian country sounds awesome. I normally go for folk punk, but I do kinda miss living surrounded by queer Appalachians like some of the places I've lived

I was driving through western Washington near Idaho recently, scrolling through the radio to see what they had going on out there, and the song literally went "find you a girl who loves her daddy, and talkin bout babies makes her happy" likeeee cmon this is straight up Christian white nationalism dog-whistle, let us be honest with ourselves.

I love Lucinda Williams

If you like country, you need Euro Country. Ciara and the gang have plenty of soul, they're feckin' class.

If you gave me modern country music and the AI slop version, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

You can definitely hear its blues roots. I suppose you are right about the religious origins, but the songs they later copied were not about the same subject matter

Zandi Holup is a pretty "new" artist who sings a lot about "struggles or over coming demons". My favorite song of hers is "Gas Station Flowers", the official video for that song is intense. She releases pretty much nothing but bangers, IMO (not a fan of "Mary Jane" personally, she kinda missed the mark on that one). "Go Find Less" is another great one, straight up feminist anthem. "Dirty Wings" is a good song as well.

May I introduce you to countrycore

Bilmuri https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW2JD0tj1jQ

I never knew I needed this in my life, and they are amazing live too.

Try Iron & Wine.

It seems like the interesting parts of country music got kicked out by gate-keeping corporate assholes. Americana seems to have collected a lot of the exiles, i.e. Brandi Carlile, John Prine, Emmylou Harris, Jason Isbell, Allison Russell, Gillian Welch, Maren Morris, etc.

I guess Chris Stapleton hasn't been kicked out of country yet, and he's pretty good. I thought "White Horse" was an absolute jam.

https://youtu.be/-YD5p-WoR7E

https://youtu.be/UWnE9sCJEgw

https://youtu.be/tpUdq8MLZ5k

https://youtu.be/N4xHLixBF1k

https://youtu.be/6Jd-iQW8cQ8

https://youtu.be/KkLhJsHxYxM

https://youtu.be/vW4H9zmP_-c

https://youtu.be/sD72LbIk02M

Maybe one of these will do.

Check out Red Sparowes, it's instrumental progressive metal (I guess it's metal) that heavily features steel guitar. Very big sound, it's like listening to a landscape or dramatic weather.

Charlie Crockett, he has a real old school sound and southern twang. He cranks out music like crazy, too!

Crucified Son Kentucky Too Long

Both of those songs are my favorite from him.

https://youtu.be/nBL91tjrLto

In the Orchard by Tiger Army

It's really good and has steel slide guitar.

I've seen this band described as ambient Americana, very spacey but it's a vibe and there is a good amount of steel guitar - https://suss.bandcamp.com/album/counting-sunsets

I will wax a little poetic, then. ;-)

Nashville has had a machine since at least the late 60s for harvesting songs basically provided for free by writers desperate for a break, and routing them them through overproduced studios full of controllable singers even more desperate than the songwriters. Now, to be fair, the occasional gem slips through, more when the model was less refined, and then there's folks like Dolly Parton who infiltrated it like a virus and then took it over to explode with decent music.

Still, other than what Steve Earle called "The Great Credibility Scare of the 80s" when he, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, KD Lang, and Melissa Etheridge (among others) were allowed to bubble to the top of the scene, there's always been a grifter business mindset that's somehow worse in country because, as a direct outgrowth and expansion of certain varieties of folk music, audiences ask for authenticity when all they really want is cultural validation (hint: for country-adjacent music, authenticity usually looks a lot like it does in other genres). Bubblegum country therefore somehow feels dirtier than bubblegum pop, and it gets even worse as product categories ossify and Nashville country gets targeted to a more and more specific segment of the public.

I'm fully aware that even the stuff I like, the "Rockabilly [and] other various fusion efforts" broadly called "Americana," is subject to its own tropes and business pressures, but being smaller and targeting a different niche, there's at least room in the conversation for artistry and risk, and thankfully good music isn't as hard to get made as some other forms of entertainment, so there's a lot of it out there waiting to be found.

Also, nothing wrong with some nasal vocals in the right context, LOL. I do grow weary of "High and Lonesome" bluegrass vocals after about two songs, though.

Kinda depends on how far you go back/what genre of country you are talking about. But John Hartford has some of my favorite lyrics that still carry weight today. I probably think about the song In Tall Buildings everyday on my drive to work.

The thing I hate the most about modern country is that there's nothing that really connects it to country/bluegrass other than the poor use of steel string guitar and fake accents. I live in Oklahoma.... Nobody talks like that, and even if they did you would usually lose it when you're singing.

Someone like reba mcentire has a fairly common Oklahoman accent if you talk to older people in the boonies, but she doesn't really sing with a heavy accent. It's all performative affectations from rich kids from suburbs pretending like they're from the country side.

Psychobilly is even better imo. Tiger Army is the shit and Nick13's solo stuff is great too.

(great username BTW, with no less than two references!)

Won't you lend your lungs to me, mine are collapsing..

They are all narrative based, with bluegrass having quicker tempo and more harmony, folk mostly being acoustic, and country being more commercialized and featuring electrical instruments. However, largely what separates country from folk and bluegrass is mostly time. What we call bluegrass and folk nowadays were at one point mostly marketed as country music.

That's around the time the swap was happening, heart felt ballads about the trials of life vs upbeat I'm the greatest and I don't take crap.

It's not that there's no new country that's good, but most of what people call country is just twangy pop. I blame twangy pop for a lot of the nationalism we see now.

The Gunfighter Ballards by Marty Robbins were great

I saw Orville Peck in concert a couple of years ago, what a great show.

Ian Noe is also great

Booyah

Yes, that is the official filmclip

And it's a damn shame what his music is because he also wrote the best love song to a motorcycle ever written.