The thing is,” Nate Amos says between drags of a Marlboro and sips from a zero-sugar Monster Energy, “I’m, like, the perfect age to be a Slipknot kid. But I never got into metal until I was in my late 20s.”
On this stiflingly humid late-July afternoon, Amos — the 35-year-old singer-songwriter and mastermind of This Is Lorelei — is perched on a bench in the backyard of a bar in Manhattan’s East Village, draped in a baggy black Slipknot T-shirt, headphones coiled around his neck. Add in his shaggy brown mane and tattooed knuckles, and he looks the part of a Slipknot kid. Yet, in conversation, Amos has a deep reverence for a range of genres: In his formative years, he fell in love with the experimental electronic music genre IDM (intelligent dance music) of Flying Lotus (“I really ate that shit up”), Radiohead (“I still look at Kid A and Amnesiac as the Bible”) and The Beach Boys (“there are moments on [Pet Sounds] that remain some of the most beautiful moments in pop music”).
Fresh off an appearance at Newport Folk Festival, he also cites Americana favorites like Lucinda Williams and Mary Chapin Carpenter — artists who are more indicative of the music that has made This Is Lorelei one of the most acclaimed acts in the ever-expanding subgenre broadly considered “alt-country.” His new album, The Singer in My Band, out Sept. 11 on Matador, doesn’t just mark a new compositional peak for the musician who has been covered by the likes of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and Geese’s Cameron Winter, but also a refinement of the disarming Americana-inflected indie-rock that earned him a following with his 2024 breakout, Box for Buddy, Box for Star. Even so, the creatively restless Amos is already eyeing his next musical move.
Growing up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Amos and his sister, Sarah, would jam with their father, the bluegrass musician Bob Amos. “My dad had Pro Tools,” Amos recalls. “I would essentially be his studio assistant. He would show me how to do stuff; even when I was really little, he had me pushing faders and shit.”
While studying “audio stuff” at Chicago’s Columbia College in the early 2010s, Amos eagerly got a job at a studio and continued to learn the ropes — and when visiting Vermont on breaks, he began using the downtime to do his own home recording projects, which he dubbed This Is Lorelei. He posted his first, self-titled release on Bandcamp on New Year’s Day 2014, and soon, he couldn’t confine his experimentation to the Northeast; in Chicago, he and his roommates engaged in “friendly competition” to make as much music as they possibly could. “There was this mad dash that really forced Lorelei into my day-to-day structure as a writer,” he says. But “it was never something that was designed to be a real project.”
Amos used Lorelei as a “sandbox-like laboratory” for other musical pursuits, including Water From Your Eyes, the art-rock band he formed with Rachel Brown in Chicago in 2016. Success didn’t come immediately, but 2021 album Structure led the eminent indie Matador to sign the group, and its following two albums, 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed and 2025’s It’s a Beautiful Place, established Amos and Brown among indie-rock’s hottest rising voices.
All the while, Amos continued to play in his Lorelei sandbox, releasing nearly 30 mixtapes and EPs on Bandcamp between 2014 and 2023. Then Lorelei’s proper debut album, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, catapulted the project to fame in its own right. While his self-released Lorelei output traversed a number of genres, and Water From Your Eyes comfortably occupied a psychedelic, shoegaze-meets-dance-punk zone, Box for Buddy’s direct, twangy indie-pop immediately connected with fans.
“Lorelei is about doing my best to embrace traditions and music, and Water is doing my best to ignore them,” he says. “Water is more about creating a puzzle, and Lorelei is about removing as much prerequisite as possible from the situation to make that immediate emotional contact. They’re opposite things that are interests that I hold equally. It’s a symbiosis between the two.”
As word-of-mouth spread around Lorelei, Amos found himself part of two rapidly ascending acts, scoring opening slots for Interpol and Hayley Williams (with Water From Your Eyes) and Grizzly Bear and Bleachers (as This Is Lorelei). An expanded version of Box for Buddy released earlier this year included covers of its songs by MJ Lenderman and Williams. “That’s kind of what you hope for as a writer, is for a song to have strong enough legs that it doesn’t need you anymore,” Amos says.
In late 2025, Amos released Holo Boy, a compilation of rerecorded material from his Bandcamp back catalog that also served as a “trial recording process” for The Singer in My Band (a nod to how, in Water From Your Eyes, Amos doesn’t sing). The new album was still a largely insular undertaking: The only other instrumentalist is Amos’ father, who plays banjo on the title track, while Amos’ sister and his fiancée (Al Nardo, a touring member of both Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes) contribute vocals. But whereas Amos previously wrote mostly at home, these songs came together across six months on the road spent “internally gathering ideas and daydreaming.” To change things up — Amos emphasizes that he didn’t want to make Box for Buddy “part two” — he worked to cut down on his prior album’s wordiness (“when you have less words, they’re more expensive”), peppering in evocative details to “get the listener’s subconscious working on building a narrative around the rest of the song without ever actually spelling out what the narrative is.”
He also leaned into his bluegrass roots. While “alt-country” has become the indie-rock flavor du jour this decade — and tends to simply be shorthand for “features a steel guitar” — The Singer in My Band expands the subgenre and goes beyond it: Spry instrumental showcase “Nitro” is true roots music, the sound of the sun rising over the Blue Ridge Mountains, while jangle-pop single “Billy Came Back” hits like a lost ’80s R.E.M. song. Throughout, including on real-deal bluegrass tunes like “Watching Heaven Fall” and the title track, Amos deploys a lyrical sensibility in keeping with Americana’s most revered troubadours.
Still, as much as Amos may now be in the zone with This Is Lorelei, don’t expect the guy who can just as easily expound on Aphex Twin as he can Brian Wilson to stay in this specific lane for long. “I know myself well enough to know that I go in and out of different phases,” he says, “and I think this album is the central point of a phase — and it’ll probably begin to move somewhere else after this one.”
This story originally appeared in the Aug. 22, 2026 issue of Billboard.
