Kacey Musgraves has turned over a new leaf. On the serene title track of her sixth album, Deeper Well, the Nashville-based country crossover star, known for singing about her love of smoking weed, admits that she has given it up. Within that admission, and the song’s delicate, pared-back pop-country arrangement, is the promise of a more clarified, mature iteration of Musgraves, and sometimes that’s what Deeper Well provides. On Lonely Millionaire, which samples a song by the rapper JID, she invokes the shallowness of fame and wealth with the earnest but acerbic sparkle that filled her previous album, jaded divorce record Star-Crossed.
At other times it seems as if this gesture towards maturity has instead resulted in a tilt into the generic: Heart of the Woods is the kind of community-minded ballad that sizzled on earlier Musgraves albums but here feels sapped of specificity. Elsewhere, songs such as Jade Green are so focused on the minutiae of her life as to feel tedious. She finds a delicate balance between the two, though, on Anime Eyes, a dizzying, almost comically lovestruck track that finds Musgraves eschewing the tasteful zen of the rest of the album in favour of all-out lyrical maximalism. It’s a flavour Deeper Well could have used more of.
