Will Johnson - Hatteras Night, A Good Luck Charm (2017)

Will Johnson, founder of the now-defunct Centro-matic, among numerous other musical projects, is showing no signs of slowing down his musical output. He’s set to release his sixth solo album this spring, and has now given us a taste of where his musical path has lead him. “Every Single Day Of Late” combines deep, disorienting guitar textures, off-kilter drums and percussion, and mournful sounding vocals, with harmonies that call to mind Band of Horses. The result is a song that’s at once powerful, beautiful and downright sinister.

According to a press release, the album, titled Hatteras Night, A Good Luck Charm began with plans to make “a really subdued, largely acoustic, pedal steel-type of record,” with just Johnson and Ricky Ray Jackson, who has previously worked with Phosphorescent. It soon transformed into something else entirely, though, after his plans to record at his usual studio were disrupted by a fire and he ended up at a studio offered to him in his hometown of Austin by friend and musician Britton Beisenherz. Along with the studio came an unexpected crop of collaborators which included Beisenherz and Jackson, who worked on his 2015 album Swan City Vampires, but also famed country musician Steve Earle and former Centro-matic bandmate Matt Pence.

Recorded in just five days, Hatteras Night, A Good Luck Charm ended up a “more involved and layered affair” than Johnson had set out to make, and if “Every Single Day Of Late” is an example of what’s to come, then it’s pretty clear that was the right move.