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Recently I realized with chagrin that for several years I've been missing a big boat on the river indie rock. Ryan Davis was a name I knew from online playlists and occasional show announcements here in Nashville — the Kentuckiana-based singer-songwriter and Roadhouse Band leader even employs one of my favorite local poets, Lou Turner, in his touring band — but I hadn't really dipped into his discography until his newest release, New Threats From The Soul, became the hottest thing in my social-media feed. The raves flowed in, from The New Yorker, Pitchfork, The Wall Street Journal — my favorite fellow critics declared Davis' new effort an apotheosis, the leap toward immortality that most hard-working artists only partially achieve.
"Ryan Davis Is Ready To Be The Best Songwriter On The Planet," declared the Uproxx headline adorning an effusive interview with that website's honcho, Stephen Hyden. In the Pitchfork review declaring it Best New Music, Sam Sodomsky effused that this "is the most overwhelming, singular display of Ryan's gifts to date." These happily hyperbolic endorsements sent me scurrying to listen to an artist whom, I suddenly realized, I should have been tracking for at least a decade, since the days when mentors like Will Oldham and the late David Berman were showering him with similar bouquets.
Sometimes you miss things. My bad! I need to get out more. Or stay in: Embarking on a frantic effort to catch up with Davis, at first with New Threats From The Soul and then by sampling a back catalog bulging with projects from the dive-barbecue rock of his former group State Champion to hardcore punk and instrumental experiments with Tropical Trash and Equipment Pointed Ankh, I soon realized that really absorbing Davis' music requires old-school commitment. This is not vibes-oriented stuff; leave it in the background and you'll miss the point. With the voice of Leonard Cohen returned to earth as a golden retriever and a songwriting style as intricate as the Ralph Steadman-meets-Daniel Johnston illustrations that adorn his album covers, Davis harkens back to what anyone who bought advance tickets to this summer's Pavement movie will call indie rock's golden era.
Moments into the new album's title track, I surrendered to the lyrics' blend of world-building and funny, punny wordplay, savoring his dexterity as he unfurled a stumbly lover's lament that somehow connected college football dreams to A Tribe Called Quest, Maya Angelou and rustic theology, all the while keeping the storyline touchingly personal. The dense wordplay that is Davis's calling card is matched by his band's confident adventurousness. Often labeled country-rock (more on that later), the Roadhouse band sounds to me like a quintessential American salmagundi. Like Dylan or P-Funk or Wilco or Wednesday, Davis and his pals throw in whatever catches their fancy and stir until it's appetizing. In a recent interview Davis cited both Sun Ra and George Jones among his influences, and as a guy who loves hip-hop and playing around with MIDI files, he's a master of homespun collage.
You might have noticed that my description of Davis's art relies on an endless stream of references. That's the kind of artist he is. I wasn't surprised to learn that when he's composing he pins fragments of lyrics to a wall, sifting through many notebooks and assembling wayward thoughts into spiraling narratives. One thing that makes listening attentively to his songs fun is finding all the entryways each offers.
After several days of living with it, I am sold on New Threats From The Soul, and on Davis as a rapidly ascending indie star. He's fleshed out his sound and shaped it more effectively; while many will hear those "punked-up country gunk" elements that connect him to especially to Berman, New Threats also makes me think about some of the most joyful experiments of classic rock, like Leon Russell's Will O' the Wisp and Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen. And as he said to The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich, Davis has fully located his narrative voice within a particular existential state — a variation on the tried-and-true "lovable loser" persona that welcomes deep emotions, including existential melancholy, while always finding joy in the imaginative leaps of Davis's shaggy and seemingly inexhaustible mind.
Adopting the stance of a charming antihero is a time-honored strategy in rock, of course, especially among scruffy but attractive men who can afford to both laugh and cry at themselves; Davis does so with none of the bitterness or vaguely scary edge-walking that many of his forebears, from Cohen himself to Elvis Costello the tragically depressive Berman, have occasionally cultivated. He's extremely relatable even at his weirdest — very much like the college-town lifers who have long nurtured and anchored so many indie rock scenes. That blend of outsiderness and warmth is key to Davis's appeal.
As I grew to love New Threats, I still wondered, why this guy right now? Some reasons are obvious: He's a "lyrics guy," as Sodomsky says (music critics can't resist that) and, I'm told, a compelling showman who converts fans with every tour stop. Also, he's been around for a while; his anointment at 40, after years of making music in relative obscurity, feels sweeter than the average new discovery.
Yet 2025 has already given us a bumper crop of excellent indie-spirited albums from singer-songwriters who obviously love books and ideas and have a great sense of humor, from across the spectrum of age, region, and genre allegiances. I'm thinking about Drive-By Truckers stalwart Patterson Hood, whose Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams marks a career high; of 2022's long-brewing overnight success Alex G, who just released his major-label debut; of cult favorite New Jersey expat B.C. Camplight and noirish Nahsville weirdo Ben de la Cour. And of Ben Kweller, whose album dedicated to the son he recently lost has the year's most compelling backstory, or veteran wordsmith Dan Bejar of Destroyer, whom some might presumptuously call the Ryan Davis of Canada. I'm just sticking to albums by guys who in another life could be in the Roadhouse band; were I to expand this list to include Americana-leaning newcomers like Ken Pomeroy or bookish rappers like Open Mike Eagle or troubadours with more of a Paul Simon echo, like Denison Witmer, I'd have a version of my best albums of 2025 list done in no time. I'm not meaning to take Davis down a notch — he's truly deserving. But even his own previous output has been greeted rhapsodically by some. State Champion almost got a Best New Music designation from Pitchfork in 2018.
New Threats From the Soul is earning Davis the red-carpet treatment because it's delightful and rich, but also because Davis embodies values worth defending, in 2025 more than ever. First, let's talk about how this guy worked to get to where he is. His songwriting process has evolved over many years of experimentation and collaborations; as he describes it, it's a far cry from the "I wrote a track and threw it up on the internet" explanations often tendered by young artists in the influencer age. He's forthcoming in interviews about the serious labor and time spent alone that gets him to the point where has enough to record. He told Hyden that he almost abandoned New Threats several times, but he worked through his doldrums, and after many years in relative obscurity, he's happy getting incrementally better. He loves playing with his friends, who help him flesh out ideas that exceed his skill set. And when he's blocked or struggling he just turns to his drawing, which comes easily and sustains him in a different way.
As someone who defined himself along the stretch of I-65 that connects Louisville to Chicago, Davis shows that these old models can produce new fruit. As a college kid up north, he interned at Drag City Records, where Louisville scions like Oldham (as Bonnie "Prince" Billy) and David Grubbs found a home. Returning south, he got busy as an entrepreneur, founding his own record label, Sophomore Lounge, and a festival, Cropped Out, that featured free jazz next to hardcore punk and freak folk. He also maintains an online mail-order record store called Technique Street. To fully grasp how Davis anchored himself within Louisville's inspiring arts world, I recommend this interview with fellow artist-shopkeeper Hillary Harrison of Kin Ship Goods, which shows how diligent devotion to a local scene can pay a creative person back tenfold. The story of Davis the entrepreneur is a welcome antidote to the absorption of that term within the rapacious tech and social media world, where it's come to signify people whose main goal is to be absorbed into the corporate mainstream.
Another stream was there to feed Davis, connected to his life of community building: legacy. It's not unusual for emerging stars to get a leg up from elders who recognize some of themselves in their protegés, but Davis' connections are very direct and, beneficially, go in two directions. Berman, a genuine legend whose mark on indie music has not faded since he died in 2019, tossed off a phrase in 2018 that Davis made into a sticker for State Champion's album Send Flowers: "[Davis is] the best lyricist who's not a rapper going." That quote has widely resurfaced in current coverage, and while Davis gratefully apologizes for amplifying it ("I've always ripped him off," he's said of Berman), the comparison will never cease to resonate.
Beyond Berman, the connection between Davis and the Oldham family — Will, who sings on New Threats' "The Simple Joy," and his brother Paul, who produced State Champion's first album — further cemented his Louisville cred, and he's toured with the Drag City artist Bill Callahan, another major figure in the shaggy-dog singer-songwriter pantheon. As important in 2025, though, is Davis's bond with MJ Lenderman, the North Carolina rocker whose album Manning Fireworks was the New Threats of 2024. Unfailingly generous with his elders, Lenderman has not hesitated to say that Davis' work strongly influenced his breakthrough album; he took the Roadhouse Band on tour with his own group, the Wind, last year. YouTube videos of the two outfits sharing the stage to cover everything from Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" to Berman's Silver Jews song "The Wild Kindness" embodies the intergenerational connections that have kept indie rock alive long after the corporate music industry mostly lost interest in it.
Thinking about legacy led me to consider one more reason that Davis's visibility may be increasing. It's that "punked-up country gunk" thing that James Toth of Wooden Wand identified back when State Champion was still going. Indie rock's been taking one of its semi-regular heartland turns recently, with the most attention-grabbing albums either coming from scenes connected to smaller cities that aren't music-industry hubs: Lenderman and Wednesday, the band that launched him, rep for Asheville, while Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield and Kevin Morby have made Kansas City a romantic destination; Vermont is getting its share of interest, too, with artists like Lily Seabird and the recently-relocated Philly band Florry on the rise. Nashville-connected country as a concept or affect — a neon Nudie suit chemtrail, as Ryan Davis might say — has always played a role in American indie; its best songwriters find much to admire in the craft of traditional country and the scuffed-up spirit of its outlaws. (Davis's favorite is Gary Stewart, who armed his honky-tonk hits with an inextinguishable wild hair.)
I wonder if finding a path into country or at least some approachable ideal of a non-coastal, smaller-town America feels more urgent for many indie fans right now because the dominant images and sounds emanating from those spaces have come to seem so corporate and conservative. Morgan Wallen and artists like him have made the genre more commercially viable than ever as cities like Nashville and Austin become tech hubs and meccas for bachelorettes and NASCAR fans. Underground artists and the communities that support them are struggling to maintain a foothold in towns that once held the promise of a relatively quiet but sustainable creative life. In this perilous moment, the comforting sounds of gunked-up country offer an idyll, though one with plenty of cracks. Ryan Davis is exactly the kind of lovable loser whose wins offer hope in tough times.
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