Noah Kahan Is Caught in the In-Between on ‘The Great Divide’

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

Supported by

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Album Review

Noah Kahan Is Caught in the In-Between on ‘The Great Divide’

The singer-songwriter’s “Stick Season” was an unexpected smash. On its follow-up he sings about fame, complex relationships and the future with a sharper perspective.

Listen

· 6:29 min

Share full article

Noah Kahan performing in February. His new album, “The Great Divide,” teems with the inner dialogues of an anxious mind.

Credit...

Mike Coppola/Getty Images for SiriusXM

By

Lindsay Zoladz

April 24, 2026,

11:01 a.m. ET

The Great Divide

See more of our coverage in your search results.

Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda.

Add The New York Times on Google

Agrega The New York Times en Google

The 29-year-old singer-songwriter Noah Kahan is at once a landscape artist and a self-portraitist, fixated on the connection between the place where he grew up and the person he has become.

“Stick Season,”

the chattery 2022 folk-pop hit that made him a star, used a barren, pre-winter period specific to New England’s climate as a metaphor for a dreary in-between time in his emotional life: “I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks,” he sang — a declaration of ambivalence written during a Covid-era move back to his childhood home that would soon be shouted back to him from arena stages.

On “Homesick,” a lilting ballad from the same album, Kahan put it even more plainly: “I’m mean because I grew up in New England.” The rest of Kahan’s music, though, exposes that line as a self-deprecating lie. Try as he might to sound prickly, Kahan’s voice as a songwriter is characterized by his nice-guy sensitivity. In “Noah Kahan: Out of Body,” a candid Netflix documentary released ahead of his new album, “The Great Divide,” a neighbor from his sleepy hometown, Strafford, Vt., considers that line with a laugh. “I’m not mean, I don’t think,” she says, and then scrunches up her nose. “Yeah, he’s not mean either.”

Kahan has certainly not made a full heel turn on “The Great Divide,” but his perspective has sharpened and matured. Like the “Stick Season” LP, he co-produced it with the musician Gabe Simon, but he also worked on some of the new album’s more atmospheric material with Aaron Dessner, the National multi-instrumentalist who has become the producer that pop stars like Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams call when they want to go contemplatively acoustic. As a vocalist, Kahan has grown a bit less coy, deepening a range that can leap from a low, brooding croon to a luminous, Bon Iver-ian falsetto.

The sprawling album takes as its central premise a topic that has led many a singer-songwriter down a path of unrelatable self-indulgence — grappling with sudden fame — but Kahan is unsparing enough to make it work. “We’ll see you again in six months when you need your next song,” he sings on the affecting acoustic number “Willing and Able,” in the voice of loved ones who feel their lives have been strip mined for material. The biting folk-rocker “Haircut” skewers his own savior complex (“You grew your hair out long, now you think you’re Jesus Christ”), while the agitated, mandolin-driven “Porch Light” considers whether it is worth continuing a career in which “whatever made you famous makes you sick.”

Kahan’s music teems with the verbose internal dialogues of an anxious mind, but his lyrics often evince a kind of therapized wisdom. (Of the most prominent American dude singer-songwriters currently walking in the shadow of Bruce Springsteen, Kahan sounds more convincingly tortured than Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff but less likely than Zach Bryan to get in a fistfight.)

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and

log into

your Times account, or

subscribe

for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?

Log in

.

Want all of The Times?

Subscribe

.

Related Content

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT