On their seventh studio album, These Are The Days That Turn Into Years (out today, June 12th, 2026 on Lula Records), Pharis & Jason Romero, following 2022’s Tell ‘Em You Were Gold, channel four years of living, touring, parenting, and banjo-building into their most open-hearted set yet. Tracked in their riverside Horsefly barn, the album feels lived-in and luminous, rich with the stories and small revelations that define their world. This time around, the music launches with a thick bass spine that is impossible not to tap your foot to, as Big Time World dances the album into life with an amiable fiddle swing for decorative delight, giving the sense of song being sung with skips, sways and carefree abandonment. Last Call is bedded into a swampy, muddy banjo texture; in fact, it is as thick and warm as I have ever heard this instrument sound. That bass and fiddle are essential once more on a song that is grasping for something that feels like it is gathering momentum in a downhill tumble, falling ever more out of reach. Pharis’ vocals are a masterclass in exuberance and longing as she tackles that “last call for old times, last call for you, last call for company I know you feel it too” refrain. Hey Babe is a drop in pace, which is just as well because it launches straight into a serious grilling with the question “aren’t you tired of never being wrong?” As events unfold, though, it feels less like a song of remonstration and more like an act of showing love through stepping away and giving someone space to be.
Always Losing Track has such a solid honky-tonkin, mid-paced hillbilly foundation of fine vintage patina that it could almost have a preservation order slapped on it. And if that were not enough, the chorus line is approached with something close to a yodel, although as we reach the end, it is those rinky-tinking piano thrills that bury themselves in your head. The sense of bad news, or a darker turn of events, on the horizon is all over the pensive Last Night, but it is on songs like this, more reflective than show-stopping, that the beautifully caressing textures in Pharis Romero’s voice seize the moment with conviction. Left My Home reprises that soupy banjo tone heard earlier, that phat sound really is a masterstroke, somehow lending the instrument a trebly essence that you do not normally get from such a sharp stringed axe. Despite the title, Cannonball is actually one of the quieter moments on the album, creating a bit of sonic space for some guitar plucking that threads across the track like intricate stitch work; when the song rises to a rousing close with the line “dreams can be so good,” only the most wax-eared of listeners will fail to be elevated too.
I Got Away From Myself finds our narrator in a funk, unsure where some wrong turns were taken but aware of a need to make connections, retrace some steps and get to a place where they can identify with themselves again. As always with the music of the Romeros, you sense they will make their way eventually. You feel this because their style is as pure as spring water. Like on Everybody Wants, which starts out as an acoustic ballad, as things progress, it is heavy-hearted and a little mournful, but even now that voice and the pair’s natural essence make you feel reassured; these songs are never a tough listen, even when they are dealing with a heavier topic. The boat being rowed in Georgie is summoned by a yo-yoing fiddle pulling the song back home, whilst the title track is blessed with ear candy in the shape of an octave spanning chorus and the good time, laid back playing exclusively the domain of musicians who are celebratorily at home in each other’s company. It is such an affirmation that it really does feel like the perfect place to end the album on a high, as such, the closing banjo-led instrumental Lost Lula fulfils something of a closing credits function, but by now Pharis and Jason Romero have already driven us through such a pure rootsy joyride that you need the time to catch your breath. Ending in this way has given us the kind of flourish a great album deserves, the kind that sends you straight back to the opening track just to feel the whole ride again.
These Are The Days That Turn In To Years (June 12th, 2026) Lula Records
Bandcamp: https://pharisjasonromero.bandcamp.com/album/these-are-the-days-that-turn-in-to-years