Noah Kahan’s new album, The Great Divide, opens in a hush: a lambent piano figure, misty ambience and a title track that settles quickly into the same close-pressed emotional weather that carried Stick Season to the center of pop three years ago. Released on Mercury, the fourth album from the 29-year-old singer arrives with the sense of an artist refusing to widen the frame even after the frame has been blown open.
That choice matters because Kahan no longer writes from the edge of a breakout. Stick Season sold 10m copies and produced eight huge hits in 2022, turning a singer who once introduced himself on stage as “the Jewish Ed Sheeran” into a national fixation. The Great Divide does not chase a harder pivot. It sticks close to the musical blueprint he established on that record, with Aaron Dessner of The National again co-producing, and the result is less a reset than a continuation: the same bracing candor, the same pull toward small-town self-scrutiny, the same sense that the songs are being written from inside a lived-in map.
The album’s opening stretch makes that plain. It begins with End of August, then keeps returning to the weathered details of home, with the sleeve crowded by bare trees and the songs weighted toward the same northern landscape Kahan has long preferred over Nashville, his newer base. On Paid Time Off, he sings, “someone said there’s a world out there, but we don’t care to drive that far,” while Dashboard bites with the line “crossing state lines” can change someone completely and the sharper jab “you’re an asshole after all.” Those lines are not just confessions; they are borders, and Kahan keeps drawing them between movement and belonging, ambition and retreat.
The tension is that his fame has not made him sound any broader, even if it has made him far more visible. Last week, Netflix released the feature-length documentary Out of Body about him, and The Great Divide arrives in the middle of that larger attention cycle, with reviewing the record as Kahan’s rise over the last three years has become vertiginous. Yet the songs suggest he is still resisting the easy migration from regional writer to polished national brand. “Some small fame ain’t made me someone else,” he says on the record, and later adds, “I’m betting on the north to drag my ass back down to earth.”
That is the album’s answer in plain terms. The Great Divide is not Kahan’s bid to outrun the identity that made him matter; it is an argument that the identity still holds, even at 29 and even after a runaway hit era. In a pop moment crowded with dressed-down introspection, he is not just part of the wave. He is still trying to make sure the shoreline remains Vermont.
