Noah Kahan crosses ‘The Great Divide’

OK, I’ll say it. I miss millennial music. There is a gaping, “stomp-clap-hey” shaped void left by the road-tripping, skinny-jean-wearing, indie rock of yesteryear. The new records from the old guard — think The Lumineers’ uninspired Automatic — just don’t sound the same as they did in 2016. 

Lately, it’s looking like the closest we can get to a millennial revival is Noah Kahan. 

Like his predecessors, Kahan’s appeal is in his everydayness. He’s wearing a flannel. You can grab a beer with him. He’ll probably offer you a zyn. He feels strongly about his rural hometown, and he’s going to tell you about it. His lyrics are earnest and folkish, but he’s never offensive.

On his third studio album, Stick Season, Kahan embodied the radio-friendly side of the emerging alt-country scene. His writing was smart and overly personal, but he rarely strayed from pop progressions and structured most of his tracks like worship music; using suspended chords to build predictable emotional peaks and repeating choruses maybe one too many times. But they were catchy, and fill the stomp-clap niche that we’re too embarrassedto miss. 

And now he’s back. 

Following two re-releases of Stick Season, Kahan dropped The Great Divide and its accompanying deluxe version, subtitled The Last Of The Bugs. He works from the same palette of ordinary themes — hometowns, relationships, growing up — yet he’s audibly older. While bloated at times (each of the record’s 14 tracks stretch close to the five-minute mark), Kahan has finally begun to develop a sound that is truly his own.   

This growth is definitely aided by signature melodramatic production from The National’s Aaron Dessner, who was absent on Stick Season. You’ve heard Dessner’s work on the best track of Taylor Swift’s Folklore (“exile,” duh), the new Laufey album and more. Like an indie Jack Antonoff, everything Dessner touches becomes full-bodied and warm, but at times his style is too polished for Kahan’s messy, personal writing. It is only when gritty textures overcome perfectly calculated crescendos that Kahan’s sound fully matures.

This isn’t to say that Dessner’s production is always sanitizing Kahan. The record’s opening track, “End of August,” is a carefully crafted ballad only made robust by Dessner’s expert understanding of creating a soundscape. In the beginning of the track, we’re thrown into a forest in rural Vermont, where Dessner manages to make both synths and cicadas sound equally from nature. Under the forest hum, violins and trumpets are barely audible, seemingly tuning up to create the most well-earned build of Kahan’s discography thus far. This is probably the only track on the album whose five-minute runtime is fully utilized and welcomed. It ends with a classic Kahan line: He murmurs “05072,” the ZIP code for his hometown in Strafford, Vermont. This track makes it clear that this is a new era wherein Kahan is not afraid to experiment. 

On the other hand, a track like “Doors” is largely unremarkable until the last minute. It starts with an acoustic, muted chug and kick-drum, Kahan gently sings a line about his childhood, and by the second verse guitars are fully strummed and he’s wailing. Of course, the classic Kahan formula sounds good, until a heavy twang electric-guitar riff breaks through the perfectly constructed melodrama, and suddenly it sounds great. We hear the faint buzz of the amp, there’s gain and a violin, it feels like Kahan is backed by musicians with a vision instead of a Mumford & Sons cover band.

In the following tracks, we see that Kahan’s range has expanded since Stick Season— pop ballads like the syncopated “Staying Still” or rock drives like “Deny Deny Deny” sound equally mature through the atmosphere Dessner creates. Even tracks like “The Great Divide,” “Willing and Able” or “23,” whose repetition begins to feel boring after minute three, are kept afloat by Dessner’s intricate production. 

Yet at other times, Dessner holds back. The subtle banjo and violins on “American Cars” and “Haircut” are particularly smart but not present enough. They lend even more earnestness to Kahan’s vocals, which at times are too clean. He’s singing songs about alcoholism while sounding like he should be harmonizing in a boy band. 

The best vocal-instrumental balance is reached on “Paid Time Off,” the most charming song on the record. With a wonderful twist midway through, Kahan diverts from the usual set-up to a typical acoustic ballad and breaks into a banjo-centric ditty about the simplicity of a hometown lifestyle. It’s in these moments, when Kahan breaks the mold with a more Appalachian, string-forward sound, that he’s at his most exciting. 

Overall, The Great Divide is a step in the right direction for Kahan. While the album jockeys between predictability and novelty, Kahan leverages the base of his warm-indie sound and leans further into an Americana influence that makes him feel older and wiser. He’s still a regular guy, his lyrics still have the millennial era feel of sitting down at a campfire, but now he’s backed by an industry titan who’s expanding his range.

Senior Arts Editor Siena Beres can be reached at sberes@umich.edu.

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