In this week’s crop of new tunes, Jelly Roll releases a new song that ties into his recent acting debut. Meanwhile, Turnpike Troubadours and Muscadine Bloodline both issue new albums, while Avery Anna goes deep into fan connections on her latest track.
Check out all of these and more in Billboard‘s roundup of the best country, Americana and bluegrass songs of the week below.
Jelly Roll, “Dreams Don’t Die”
Tied to Jelly Roll’s acting debut on CBS’s Fire Country, the Billboard 200 chart-topping artist released this moody, anthemic track, which he wrote with Chris Tompkins, Daniel Ross and Jessie Jo Dillon. Here, Jelly Roll pleads with a lover for real, unconditional love and support on lines such as “I know how to hurt, been doing it all my life/ Please don’t bring me down/ I just wanna fly.” Sonically, the polished, soulful and rock-infused track fits right in Jelly’s wheelhouse and he wrings out every nuance of anguish and far-flung hope.
Turnpike Troubadours, “Heaven Passing Through”
One of Red Dirt country’s most revered groups just digitally released the new album The Price of Admission, via Bossier City Records/Thirty Tigers. The group also just launched a four-concert run at Stillwater, Oklahoma’s Boone Pickens Stadium, marking the group’s largest shows yet.
Among the standout tracks on the new project is the Evan Felker-written “Heaven Passing Through.” Shimmering guitar work backs this pensive musing on soaking in good moments as they come. The song’s lyrics depict the swift changes life brings, from the wide-eyed perspective of a young child gazing at nighttime stars and wishing to grow up, to party-seeking teenage impulses, and finally to the wisened viewpoint of an adult looking at those same stars and trying to recapture that childhood perspective again. Gentle fiddle and guitar put Felker’s warm voice and timeless message forward, culminating in the feel of a new, timeless fan favorite song.
Avery Anna, “Danny Don’t”
Anna has a sterling, gripping vocal that she wraps around this response to a letter from a fan who was battling internal struggles and contemplating giving up on life. “Can I just talk you through it?” she entreats as she traces the man’s journey from growing up in an abusive home to now, as an adult, struggling to change the habits he’s learned. “You don’t wanna talk and you don’t wanna listen/ Don’t know why you’re broken, so how could you fix it?” she sings. The song is the first from her upcoming Warner Music Nashville album, Let Go Letters, out May 16. The project is built upon letters Anna received from fans, and serves as her response to the struggles, heartaches and trauma that her fans shared with her through those letters.
Brett Young, “Drink With You”
A mesh of acoustic guitar and twangy pedal steel elevates Young’s newest release, which marks a bit of a departure for the soulful country singer. He’s known for loved-up songs such as “In Case You Didn’t Know” and “Here Tonight,” but on his latest, his lends his simmering, honeyed vocal to a tale of two ex-lovers who tend to make poor decisions when alcohol flows. The song is an early glimpse from his upcoming album 2.0, marking Young’s first project since 2023’s Across the Sheets.
Muscadine Bloodline, “Borrowing a Broken Heart”
On their new album …And What Was Left Behind, the ACM Award-nominated duo offers a varied palette of sounds, from the bluegrass-dipped “The High Horse vs. The White Horse” to the bluesy grit of “Ain’t For Sale.” “She won’t ever be mine/ Am I just wasting my time?” they ponder on the rustic, self-reflective “Borrowing a Broken Heart” — a particularly stellar track, one that adds to Muscadine’s potent canon of top-shelf heartbreak anthems.
The SteelDrivers, “The River Knows”
Bluegrass group The SteelDrivers, known for songs such as “If It Hadn’t Been for Love,” offers up another entry in bluegrass music’s legacy of murder ballads, this one written by SteelDrivers fiddler and singer Tammy Rogers along with songwriter Tom Douglas (“The House That Built Me”) and artist-writer Daniel Ethridge. The group’s signature blues-bluegrass mesh works particularly well on this haunting track, filled with fiery fiddle and jaunty mandolin scaffolding the song, along with the group’s coolly intertwined harmonies, as the lyrics spill out a mystery of small-town denizens pondering how the death of a known scoundrel came to be. “The River Knows” will be featured on their new album Outrun, which releases May 23 on Sun Records.
