Founded in 2011, The Milk Carton Kids—Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale—swiftly emerged as a major force in the American folk tradition, blending ethereal harmonies and intricate musicianship with a uniquely powerful brand of contemporary songcraft. Their 2013 debut The Ash & Clay marked their national breakthrough, earning them their first Grammy Award nomination for Best Folk Album.

Another Grammy nomination followed in 2015 for Best American Roots Performance with “The City of Our Lady” from their acclaimed third studio album, Monterey, and their 2018 album All The Things That I Did and All The Things That I Didn’t Do received a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Their 2019 album, The Only Ones, garnered extensive praise, with Rolling Stone highlighting that “Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan get back to the beautiful basics with The Only Ones,” while NPR’s World Café noted that “even though Joey and Kenneth are not related, their voices together create a sibling-like harmony…the duo has a strong sense of respect and reverence for the musical traditions that they’ve grown from.

Critically acclaimed duo The Milk Carton Kids were nominated for “Best Folk Album” for their new record I Only See The Moon at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards.This marked the group’s fourth Grammy nomination.

I Only See The Moon is out now to critical acclaim on Far Cry Records in partnership with Thirty Tigers. Order/stream the album here.

“Both of us have now lived enough life to understand that maybe one of the purposes we were put on Earth for is to sing together, to write songs together, to make music together,” notes guitarist/vocalist Kenneth Pattengale. “It has truly provided a direction for our lives.” Ryan adds, “It’s like a successful marriage in that there’s always been enough there between us collaboratively in the way that we work together, sing together, play together. It’s a very special thing. And I don’t think we ever took that for granted.”

On his second album, The Fatalist, Carl “Buffalo” Nichols does things with the blues that might catch you off guard. There’s 808 programming, chopped up Charley Patton samples, washes of synth. There’s a consideration of the fullness of the sonic stage and the atmospherics of the music that can only come with a long engagement with electronic music.

Nichols’ vision for the blues is of a form of music that’s intimately tied to everyday life, something that’s reflected not only in the choice of instrumentation, but in the complexities of thesongwriting and the gray areas his lyrics explore.

This is music that comes straight from the present, and as such, it’s a reminder that the same shit that drove the first blues singers to pick up a guitar is still present behind the throbs of deep bass hits today.

Of course, Nichols’ songwriting has always been firmly rooted in the present. He proved he could succeed on the music industry’s own blues terms on his self-titled 2021 debut, whose songs, Bandcamp Daily said, “seem to flow from some great repository of emotion and insight.”

The Fatalist finds him digging deeper in search of answers to ever-more-complicated questions around responsibility and self-definition, his plainspoken lyrics both cutting and refreshing in their sincerity and refusal to accept pat solutions.

Still, Nichols rarely sounds like a blues singer. Like Leonard Cohen, he dominates these songs with his voice. His low, guttural baritone is high in the mix, and he sounds coiled, clenched tight.

Nichols is singing about his life in the first person, and about his desire to forge his own individuality in a world and a music industry that make it nearly impossible to do so.

By playing his music the way he wants to play it, by refusing to give up his creative control or accept anyone else’s definition of the blues or indeed his own life, Carl Nichols has tried to forge an answer. Does he have any say in how things are going to go?

Let’s find out.

Nate Walls is the founder of  Second Helping NWA, a non-profit organization committed to providing food for local people in the community with the support of businesses and private citizens.