Nick Shoulders
Fri 18 Jul 2025 (note: this event has already taken place)
7pm
€17.50
All Bad, the latest album from Nick Shoulders, released via Gar Hole Records (a label founded and co-owned by Shoulders), ultimately encapsulates everything that makes Shoulders’ inimitable form of country music so vital: a heady balance of dazzling musicianship and punk defiance, coupled with gritty eccentricity and a generational connection to the roots of the genre. The album emerged from the chaos of the post-pandemic world, and manages to be a plea for patience as much as a call to action.
With a singing style deeply rooted in his family’s musical lineage and a heartfelt reverence for his lifelong home of mountainous Arkansas, the incisive yet wildly jubilant All Bad vocally objects to the reckless destruction of the natural landscape and ever-eroding line between church and state, while still offering plenty of joy and dance-ready rhythms. Having recently experienced their first years of rapid growth and relentless touring, Nick and his longtime band, the Okay Crawdad, wrote and recorded All Bad while confronting a nation profoundly changed by development and industrialization run rampant. Spanning a
variety of early country styles, the album’s infectious rallying cry “Won’t Fence Us In” shines alongside everything from jangling cajun waltzes to surf-rock infused bluesy ballads–all tied together by a voice seemingly out of place in this century, yet ever ready to speak up about its problems.
With his live experience including touring with the likes of Sierra Ferrell and performing at major festivals like Stagecoach, Shoulders makes a point of bringing an educational component to his exultant and deeply communal show. “As much as we’re throwing a party, it’s also a priority to be the teacher I never had, and share this vital information that’s done wonders to improve my understanding of history, and the present we’re left with,” he says. Both live and on record, Shoulders’ music achieves the rare feat of imparting difficult truths while inciting a certain joyful abandon. To that end, the dance-ready rhythms and heavenly melodies of All Bad stir up a potent contrast to the album’s thorny lyrical themes. The result: a body of work at turns sublimely freewheeling and profoundly illuminating, primed to permanently warp the listener’s perspective to glorious effect.
