Boston-based Brendan Wright has been releasing music – first as Tiberius Wright and more recently just Tiberius – since 2015, when they were still a teenager. Recently, the Tiberius moniker has come to represent a full band rather than a solo project, and the music has shifted too, from dreamy, reverb-drenched slacker indie pop to a tighter, crisper sound that Wright calls ‘farm emo’. 2023 mini-album was a minor masterpiece of small-town catharsis and city alienation, where twangy guitars shared space with power chords and Patsy Cline sentimentalism traded blows with post-hardcore or shoegaze dynamics. It was a winning combination, and a highly original one.
Luckily for us, Wright has chosen to continue down that route with the new full-length Troubadour, their first album for Audio Antihero. Joined by bassist Kelven Polite, Pat King on pedal steel and banjo, and drummer Ben Curell, Wright has crafted ten new tracks that are resonant with emotion and expertly structured. Songs like Felt have a tone that veers between conversational and highly personal, and though Wright is still in their twenties, their songwriting is mature and complex, navigating failed relationships with candour and an eye for the most painful psychological details: ‘But as soon as driving home/It hit that I am still alone/I wouldn’t outgrow the pain of any single day.’ It Has to be True is a deceptively simple alt-country ditty that hides a real emotional punch, a blow barely softened by the melancholic sweep of pedal steel,
Wright’s unique trick is their ability to marry up the very specific sound of noughties emo and the much more general aesthetic of country music. The process is perhaps similar to bands like Pinegrove, but the results are more interesting, partly because Tiberius are not afraid to show their workings. They might be tighter than ever, but this is no slick and soulless machine. Lead single Sag’s knotty guitars and big drums soon give way to discursive verses, and the chorus is an acrobatic flight back into loudness backed by a squall of guitars. These switches are a feature of Wright’s songwriting: Tag’s choppy, stop-start verses are offset by a swooning, melodic chorus, and Redwood’s shoegaze squall holds Wright’s perceptive lyrics in exquisite tension.
Moab foregrounds Wright’s distinctive and heartfelt singing, the vocals rendered anthemic by a shimmering, propulsive country rock backdrop, and the slow-burning Painting of a Tree moves easily from whisper to spark. These songs all carry with them the sense of a journey, and none more so than closer Barn, which travels between pastoral daydream and cathartic outpouring in five widescreen minutes. It sums up Troubadour’s combination of broad scope and minute attention to detail, a blend that is extremely difficult to get right but which Brendan Wright has perfected with apparent ease.
Troubadour (November 14th, 2025) Audio Antihero
Bandcamp: https://tiberiuswright.bandcamp.com/album/troubadour-2