Rae Spoon announced their new album Assigned Country Singer At Birth, out April 10 via Coax Records, and it’s a straight-up return to country music, not a genre drive-by or a concept piece dressed up in rhinestones.
It’s Spoon’s 13th solo record, and it arrives in a scene that still makes life difficult for trans artists, especially in a genre that loves talking about “realness” while policing who gets to embody it. Spoon doesn’t waste time arguing with gatekeepers in the lyrics. They just write from inside the form, and they sound completely at home there, which is harder to dismiss than any statement could be.
The subject matter doesn’t tiptoe around what country radio traditionally prefers to ignore. Spoon gets into trans life, harm reduction, disability, religious trauma, solidarity, and opposition to colonial land occupation, alongside the everyday emotional weather the genre has always traded in. None of it is presented as “political messaging” bolted onto the songs after the fact. It’s closer to diary-level clarity, the stuff that actually shapes a person’s days, and it sits right next to the heartbreak and humour.
Musically, Assigned Country Singer At Birth pulls from traditional country, pop, gospel and bluegrass, with electronic and experimental textures threaded through rather than dropped in for shock value. Alaska B, the producer and drummer known for work with Yamantaka Sonic Titan and Pantayo, anchors the record, with contributions from Robyn Grey, Evelyn Charlotte Joe, Laurie Torres, Thanya Iyer, Christine Bougie and Gambletron. It’s a dense list, but the point is feel, not name-checking; the arrangements keep moving, and they don’t smother the songs.
A large vocal cast also turns up across the album, including Lydia Persaud, Kimmortal, Cassia Hardy, Theodore Walker, Louis Sanchez, Rosina Kazi, Kue Varo, Lianne Hall and Stewart Legere. It plays like a roomful of people singing with someone rather than behind them, the kind of support you can hear even when you don’t know who’s on which line.
ASSIGNED COUNTRY SINGER AT BIRTH
1 Country Music Breaks My Heart
2 Assigned Country Singer At Birth
3 Pray
4 Last Cigarette
5 Can’t Stop Lightening (feat Kimmortal, Louis Sanchez)
6 All Drugs Safe Legal And Free
7 Ostomy Cowboy
8 Not Too Sick To Love
9 Can’t Fail Me (feat Cassia Hardy)
10 Hyper Country (feat Theodore Walker Robinson)
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