Brown Horse, featuring singer-guitarist Patrick Turner, guitarist Nyle Holihan, Emma Tovell on bass and lap steel and keyboardist Rowan Braham, along with Ben Rodwell on drums and Neve Cariad on backing vocals, drop their third album this month. Total Dive is a bigger, louder and harder alt-rock beast than its predecessor and, while the snarlier end of the Neil Young spectrum can still be heard, their influences, including Jason Molina and Uncle Tupelo, also surface, while the likes of Heavy (one of several seeing the world from a car – “dead fox on the roadside lit up its eyes as we passed by”) wouldn’t have been out of place on a Nirvana album.
With Phoebe Troup on banjo, the album opens with the twin scuzzy guitars of Tovell’s Sorrow Reigns, a track that sets both the musical and lyrical tone (“on the pavement/And in the tangle of stained hands/The stranger takes his life out on another man/Just because he can”) and imagery (“I saw two machines, tearing down a building/All the pipework was left dangling/All its insides/On the outside/”) that follows. There’s the sense of defiant fuck-you humour too as Turner sings “There’s a girl at the piercing place/She was laughing at me cos I shared a name/With a skate park in the town where she grew up…she said it was pretty tough/But it’s got a really sick bowl if you’re good enough”.
Taking a steady walking rhythm pace with pedal steel a mighty presence, one of many that deal with isolation – emotional, physical and psychological – Twisters again highlights Turners’ sand and gravel voice on a song that speaks of the titular weather phenomenon (“Rambling capillaries/A gaping hellmouth by the door /Takes all day for the tears to start falling”) but is more about being given the kiss-off (“Hear the sound of a closing door/Your back turned smoking a cigarette/Watching a pot that’ll never boil… I watch my face change in the mirror by the bar…I hope a whip of lightning cuts me right in two”).
Still fuzzy but in a more ruminative way, featuring Braham on accordion, Turner’s more Young meets The Band countrified Comeback Loading ups the reflective ante with wearied conversational regret over a lost connection (“I was wondering do you still play the Boss sometimes… do you still have that same t-shirt/the one that said “comeback loading”) as it asks “Do you find yourself thinking that there should’ve been more to a life that hadn’t started yet”.
The first of three hovering around the six-minute mark, written by Braham with rich resonator guitar and pensive bass, Hares is a brooding winter-set road song ballad about leaving and connection (“I don’t have the answers/maybe that’s why no-one asks me how long I’ll be gone …through the window I watch the ice slide off the branches/and wonder how much of a hold you can ever really have on someone”) that opens its soul to and finds meaning and contentment in knowing “that time on earth is worthwhile/and there’s nowhere else to go”.
Another slow brooding track, Heart Of The Country, again has accordion with Holihan on mandolin and deals with separation and change in a series of striking imagery: “Streaming words move across your tongue like migrating herds on a crowded plain”; I kept your poems in a biscuit tin with the bones of the mice that the cat dragged in some years before…but I don’t read them so much these days/they were always kind of beyond me anyway”,
Holihan’s title track hits its swaggery riff energy from the start with another lyric steeped in negativity (“laughter in the hall doesn’t bring me any joy… I won’t tell you how to feel cos I don’t wanna feel at all”), followed by the wearyingly, despondently slow echoing and fuzzed six-minute road song Wreck with its tumbling pedal steel and the emotional intensity invested as Turner sings, “I know you never liked leaving but it sure beats falling apart/I don’t believe you when you say nothing good could ever come of you asking me to stay”, summing up the weight in its final line “if you go sailing out after a broken heart/well, what do you expect”.
Coming to a close, Tovell’s Oblivion is another slow and steady churner, here with nihilistic but poetic themes of mortality (“They should build a grave way up in the sky, go there in a plane/open the door and let the urns fly with all the space junk now turned to dust”) with a glass half -full mindset (“Can’t see the trees move but I can feel the wind/how it’s pushing me behind the wheel and that’s something in the end”).
Shades of the Velvets, Braham’s six-minute guitar chiming, walking rhythm Watching Something Burn Up, an almost apocalyptic song that resists easy interpretation ends things on an existential note about unbidden memories (“Nobody knows when or why forgotten gods might decide to turn up”) with an image of a building succumbing to the flames and what it evokes (“It’s easy to get lost watching something burning up/Great falling away of a whole lot of things from my mind”), and of letting go of the past (“I don’t need to relive and relive/It’s just a series of places and buildings/Doesn’t matter if I don’t go back there again …I don’t care if some people just walk out of my life”).
In just three years and three albums, Brown Horse have reached a pinnacle many bands take a lifetime to achieve; you can’t help thinking they’ve only just begun.
Total Dive (April 10th, 2026) Loose
Bandcamp: https://brownhorse.bandcamp.com/album/total-dive