There is a moment near the end of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers when Rhiannon Giddens and her musicians tear into "Cluck Old Hen", an old Appalachian fiddle tune whose origins have long since disappeared into tradition. It begins loose and playful, with the feel of a late-night jam, then starts picking up speed. The fiddle digs in, the rhythm gets more insistent and the whole thing becomes frantic and hypnotic. By the end, you can practically feel the room moving. Live, this one should have people dancing and sweating.
That physical quality runs through an album deeply concerned with musical tradition. Giddens has spent much of her career investigating where American music came from, who carried it, who was written out of its history and how songs moved between people and communities. On Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, that history comes through the simple act of playing the music. These songs have survived because people sang them, danced to them, changed them and passed them along.
The album marks a fairly dramatic shift from 2023's You're the One. That record was surprisingly modern, occasionally brushing against contemporary pop and R&B and clearly comfortable speaking to a mature pop and rock audience. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers digs much further into folk, country, gospel, blues and old-time string music. Giddens works in forms whose age is plainly audible while finding emotions in them that remain completely current.
Her voice is central to that. Technically, it is a beautiful instrument, pure, controlled and capable of seemingly effortless shifts in register, but its real power comes from the emotion she can put into it. On "Step Away Blues", that pure tone floats over a slow, dirty, swampy groove. Then some steel enters her delivery and the words begin to sound aggressive, almost menacing. It's a small change with a huge effect. Goosebumps.
At the other end of the spectrum is "Wish in Vain", a ballad with some of the tenderness of "She Could Fly". Giddens and Dirk Powell sing of displacement, separation and leaving people behind, his earthier voice sitting beautifully alongside hers. Giddens is extraordinarily delicate here, at times sounding almost weightless. The emotional connection is immediate, which helps explain why old material sits so naturally beside songs written in the present. The feelings that kept these musical forms alive haven't gone anywhere.
Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train" gets right to the heart of it. Giddens has visited Cotten's songbook before, recording "Shake Sugaree" on Tomorrow Is My Turn, and here she needs little more than a guitar and her voice. Cotten wrote the song as a child in North Carolina during the early years of the twentieth century. More than a century later, another Black woman from North Carolina picks it up and carries it forward. The continuity speaks for itself.
The same thread runs through "High on a Mountain", written by North Carolina traditional musician Ola Belle Reed. Giddens begins with her voice dry and right up front before the musicians gather around her and the song turns into an old-time dance tune. "Walk with Me" pares things down even further, with Giddens, her sister Lalenja Harrington and a group of voices singing the traditional gospel tune without instruments. The harmonies are gorgeous, restrained at first and increasingly impassioned as the performance develops.
For all the scholarship surrounding Giddens and her work, this is music for bodies as much as minds. There are square dances here, slow dances, old-time reels and rhythms made for wooden floors. The album was recorded largely live at The Cypress House in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with Giddens and longtime collaborator Dirk Powell producing and very few overdubs used. Feet, voices and other incidental sounds from the sessions remain audible. You can hear musicians occupying the same room, listening and reacting to one another, and that communal energy runs through the record.
The newly written material grows naturally from those traditions. "Angel Fire Rise" starts with an earthy banjo figure and hypnotic vocal cadence before strings and layered voices gradually fill the space around it. The tune remains simple while the arrangement becomes surprisingly lush. The title track begins just as delicately, with picked guitar, overlapping Giddens vocals and a fiddle that seems to answer her. Instruments and harmonies accumulate as it unfolds, turning a mountain folk ballad into something rich and almost cinematic without losing its earthy core.
"Carolina Rain" goes bigger still. It has the sweep of an anthem and a melody direct enough to suggest that it could, and probably should, become a hit. Toward the end, Giddens starts roughing up that immaculate voice with some gritty soul phrasing. Folk slips into country elsewhere, country brushes against blues, gospel sits beside Appalachian string music. After the delirious final stretch of "Cluck Old Hen", "Going Home" drops into a slow blues, slide guitar winding through the arrangement while the musicians leave space for each other to respond. Giddens covers a tremendous amount of stylistic territory in 38 minutes, but it all belongs to the same musical conversation.
That is where the album's sense of tradition becomes most convincing. Giddens has always been an educator as well as a musician, especially when it comes to recovering the Black history buried inside American folk and country music. Here, much of that work happens simply through participation. Elizabeth Cotten's music lives every time somebody picks up a guitar and plays "Freight Train". "Cluck Old Hen" lives when a fiddler tears into it and people start moving. Tradition needs to be used.
There isn't a weak song on Hope Is the Thing with Feathers. More unusually, every one feels necessary. The arrangements are exquisitely considered without overwhelming the tunes, the recording captures the warmth and immediacy of musicians playing together, and the performances are committed throughout. Giddens' singing holds everything together. She can be delicate, gritty, mournful, joyful or genuinely intimidating, and always seems to find the emotional register a song requires.
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers reaches deep into American musical history and keeps the chain moving. Old songs mingle with new ones, genres bleed into one another, voices join in and feet hit the floor. Giddens understands that the best way to honor this music is to make people want to hear it, sing it and dance to it again.
GENRE: Folk/Americana
RELEASE DATE: September 18, 2026
PRODUCED BY: Rhiannon Giddens & Dirk Powell
LABEL: Nonesuch Records
RATING: 9/10