The mythology is already pleasingly worn-in: two old collaborators reuniting, honing their craft in taverns and dives strung along Highway 61, that great American artery of blues mythology, the road that runs through Robert Johnson’s soul and Bob Dylan’s reinventions alike. From such soil, Sawtooth Witch have conjured something that feels simultaneously rooted and genuinely restless \u2014 hill-country blues braided with cosmic country and, most surprisingly, whispers of house music that surface like an undertow beneath the more rootsy passages. It shouldn’t hold together. It holds together magnificently.<\/p>
Open with “The Hustle” \u2014 the lead single that earned them Best New Music plaudits from MSP Magazine, RACKET, and 89.3 The Current \u2014 and you understand immediately why the fuss was justified. It is a track that moves the way a really good blues always moves: with intention, with mischief, with the absolute confidence of musicians who know exactly where the one is and when to ignore it. Dougherty’s guitar work throughout the album is a study in restraint as expression; he is a player who has learned that the space between notes can carry as much weight as the notes themselves, a lesson the electric guitar has too often forgotten.<\/p>
Fleming, meanwhile, is the album’s true wild card. The fiddle, in lesser hands, sits politely at the back of a country record and adds colour. Here it leads charges, mourns properly, dances with something close to abandon. “Leave the Light On” is the piece that crystallises what she brings: a melody that spirals upward with the particular ache of something left unresolved, the music holding open a door that the lyric can’t quite decide to close. It is one of the most affecting performances on any album released this year.<\/p>
Holly Hansen’s recording at Salon Sonics in Minneapolis deserves its own commendation. The room sounds real \u2014 instruments placed in actual space, breath and resonance preserved, none of the clinical compression that flattens so many ostensibly ‘organic’ records into thin replicas of themselves. Nat Harvie’s mix is equally sympathetic, and Huntley Miller’s mastering keeps the dynamics honest. *The Chariot*, pressed to vinyl, must be something else altogether.<\/span><\/p> The album’s eight tracks form a considered arc. “Stories We Tell” operates as quiet confession, the kind of song that sounds personal without ever becoming precious. “The Weight” \u2014 a title that invites obvious comparisons and then politely sidesteps them \u2014 grounds the record’s middle stretch with a gravity that keeps the more adventurous passages earthed. “Coming to America” is the most structurally unexpected piece here, the house-music undertow rising closer to the surface, the fiddle threading through it with a kind of giddy disbelief that it all works. It does. “The Dream” carries the record toward its close with a hushed intensity that feels earned rather than engineered.<\/span><\/p> Sawtooth Witch are a duo in the old sense: two instruments, two voices, one vision. Dougherty writes all the songs, but Fleming shapes them equally in performance \u2014 this is a genuine collaboration, the kind where the result is neither person’s work alone. The American songbook, as they call their source material, is vast and often plundered badly. Here it is navigated with discernment and, more rarely, with love.<\/span><\/p> The Chariot is not interested in nostalgia. It is interested in truth, which is rather more difficult and rather more durable. These are songs built to travel \u2014 and given the roads that made them, that seems exactly right.<\/span><\/p> **Released 24 April 2026 on vinyl and streaming.**<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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