Sturgill Simpson’s landmark 2014 album, Metamodern Sounds In Country Music, will be reissued in celebration of its ten-year anniversary on May 10 (pre-order). Originally released May 13, 2014, the album marked a career breakthrough for Simpson personally and proved to be a seismic shift-maker within the larger country music genre.
The new special edition features a fully reimagined album cover and vinyl package, pressed on 180g Black Vinyl with an “Old-Style” Tip-On Jacket. Full details are available at sturgillsimpson.com.
Ushering in a new chapter within country music and setting the stage for countless other outsider artists to push the genre forward for years to come, NPR Music called it, “one of the few albums in 2014 that nearly everyone on the team agreed was pure genius,” while No Depression declared, “a breakthrough not only for the artist himself but also for country’s continuing horizons as a progressive yet rooted musical form…he’s reshaping country not by finding his place within the broad scope of its fringes, but by pushing outward from its very core,” while American Songwriter praised, “2014 was, undoubtedly, the year of Sturgill Simpson…he is the genre’s poet laureate, bringing nuance back to a form that, especially recently, so desperately needs it.”
Recorded live-to-tape in four dates, the album features Simpson alongside his original band—bassist Kevin Black, guitarist Laur Joamets and drummer Miles Miller. Of the album, Simpson shared in 2014, “Myriad worldly offerings—religion, drugs, and more—all claim to be the omnipotent universal truth, but in my experience, love is the only certainty. That’s what this record is about.”
Named one of Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Country Albums of All Time” in 2022, The New York Times called it, “one of the most jolting country albums in recent memory, and one that achieves majesty with just the barest of parts,” while Stereogum asserted, “will endure as one of this young century’s best traditionalist country records” and The Faderaffirmed, “a take on the genre that seemed totally renegade to where country sits in popular culture now, and wholly in line with its original principles.” The album landed on best-of the year lists at numerous publications including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop, NPR Music, American Songwriter, Stereogum, the Los Angeles, Times, Pitchfork, Paste, KCRW, The Washington Post, the Nashville Scene and many more. In the year following its release, Simpson performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Conan” and the “Late Show with David Letterman” and was featured on the BBC’s “Later Live with Jools Holland,” “Later…with Jools Holland” and NPR Music’s “Tiny Desk Concert.”
