Each year, Saving Country Music publishes an “Essential Albums List,” which is basically a curation of all the album reviews published in a given year, minus the Album of the Year nominees that are highlighted separately. Along with focusing on the “Most Essential” albums that can be considered part of SCM’s Top 30 overall, other albums receiving positive grades are included.
This year, using the term “essential” has never felt more important. As AI threatens to upend the music industry in the new year, it’s critical we underscore just how essential music is to all of us, and how essential the human touch is to music. Each one of the albums below comes from an artist who poured their soul into their work, sacrificing and slaving over it, bearing vulnerable things about themselves to facilitate a human connection with the audience.
These aren’t just lists and links. They’re portals into deep human emotions.
A few ground rules:
1. As always, suggestions of additional albums, lists of your essential albums, and opinions about this list are encouraged, and can be shared in the comments section below. Just please no “Hey, this list is entirely bunk because so and so wasn’t included!” or because “so and so WAS included.”
2. This does NOT include the Album of the Year Nominees since they’ve already been featured through the nomination process.
2024 Saving Country Music Album of the Year Nominees:
• Turnpike Troubadours – The Price of Admission (WINNER) • Sam Stoane – Tales of the Dark West • Lance Roark – Bad Reputation • Colter Wall – Memories and Empties • Luke Bell – The King Is Back • Kelsey Waldon – Every Ghost • Olivia Ellen Lloyd – Do It Myself • Joe Stamm Band – Little Crosses • Sunny Sweeney – Rhinestone Requiem
3. There is no specific order to the list, aside from the first albums being considered the “Most Essential,” meaning albums that just missed the bubble of being considered Album of the Year nominees.
4. More albums will eventually end up on the Essential Albums List. More 2025 albums will be reviewed in the coming days into the first few weeks of January before 2026 releases start in earnest. Saving Country Music reviewed over 110 albums in 2025, which is a ton of material. But ultimately, there’s more albums than time to review them, so not everything can receive a review.
MOST ESSENTIAL ALBUMS
MOST ESSENTIAL – Jake Worthington – When I Write The Song
COUNTRY music ladies and gentlemen, and in such a concentrated form, significant density, and voluminous quantity, it could almost counterbalance the entirety of mainstream country’s Bro-era output, and sack the shocks on Post Malone’s F1-Trillion. Any and all conversations upon the death of country music are rendered moot from as much as a passing whiff of what Jake Worthington’s got cooking on When I Write The Song.
Jake Worthington is definitely one of the spearheads of the new modern neotraditionalist movement in country. But unlike some others, he doesn’t just rely on the nostalgia for ’90s country to carry the weight, leaving songwriting as some secondary concern to the sights and sounds of the presentation. He’s the full package, with this new album meeting or exceeding any and all expectations. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Waylon Jennings – Songbird
This was the stuff left over from recording sessions, and sometimes left unfinished for whatever reason. Shooter Jennings does a great job carefully curating the music, and adding tasteful and unobtrusive additions respectful to their original era to complete them as “songs,” even if he leaves loose ends at the beginning/ending of the recordings. Even when tempering expectations though, Songbird has a lot to offer.
Even bad Waylon is leagues better than most of what we hear today. But Waylon never really released bad songs. And even after his son cobbled together a bunch of stuff left on the cutting house floor, Waylon still hasn’t. It’s that voice, that distinctive sound, the Outlaw panache Waylon brought to everything he touched that makes the moments of Songbird valued and cherished, even if they’re second rate in the Waylon universe. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Brennen Leigh – Don’t You Ever Give Up On Love
Good luck finding a more pure and honest form of country music than what Brennen Leigh delivers as effortless as breath. Brennen doesn’t just sing country music. She IS country music. It emanates from her aura like a glow. She didn’t choose the preservation of country music as an occupation. It chose her—entering her like a vapor at some point after birth, and giving her no other option but to pursue it as a life’s purpose.
Talk about putting love into a record, that’s exactly what Brennen Leigh and Kevin Skrla do on this one quite literally, while communing with the ancestors of country music’s past from the ’50s and ’60s to make songs that would have been hits and standards in that era, and that impart a warm feeling of innocence and simplicity to the audiences of today. From the writing and singing style, to the instrumentation and tones, it is all authentic to the Golden Era of country in a way that immediately makes an old soul fulfilled. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Jesse Lovelock and the Velvet Voices – Self-Titled
For old school fans of classic country, the more boldly and thoroughly that you can embrace the past, the more potent and desirable the experience. It was Hank Williams III who once said that the older you sound, the more punk you’re being. If that’s the case, it doesn’t get more punk than Jesse Lovelock, because it’s perhaps impossible to sound any older than what is illustrated in these 14 songs.
It’s not just the songwriting style, the singing, and the instrumentation that constitute stellar reenactments of ’50s and ’60s country styles, yet in completely original compositions. It’s the distressed patina that Lovelock impresses upon these recordings that give you the experience of listening on an old 78 rpm or an AM radio back in the post War era. Though it might sound too old and hazy for ears accustomed to the pristine and saccharine sounds of the modern era, for those old soul classic country fans out there craving this stuff, the experience will be mesmerizing and immersive. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Nicholas Jamerson – The Narrow Way
In certain parts of eastern Kentucky where songwriting is highly revered, the name of Nicholas Jamerson isn’t just thought of as an equal to titans like Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers. It’s held in an even higher regard. Though Jamerson hasn’t achieved the same escape velocity of some of his other Kentucky kindred, he’s also never been tainted by the corrosive ooze of overwhelming success, or enticed to the dark commercial side of music that can be so corrupting.
Co-produced with revered instrumentalist Rachel Baiman, the music of The Narrow Way is rural, mostly acoustic, but still imaginative and expressive when it needs to be, and relevant-feeling. But this is one of those albums and artists where the audio accompaniment is secondary to the song. It’s how Jamerson weaves his life lessons into the writing that makes this album inviting and remarkable. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Juliet McConkey – Southern Front
It’s a thing of beauty how the gentle but powerful musings of Juliet McConkey overwhelm your emotional faculties in disarming waves, awakening feelings often left dormant in the passing of everyday life. The sound of her voice is spellbinding, both through it’s rich and inspiring tones, and how it leaves you stupefied of how it emanates from a woman that is not known more widely from the gifts she possesses.
Like that first warm breeze and burst of sun that breaks the frost of Winter, Southern Front confers womb-like comfort in a cold and impersonal world. So with such promise behind her music, why isn’t McConkey out there doing the music hustle? Why isn’t she filling up the calendar with live appearances, hiring publicists and pursuing labels to make a big push behind this project, and seeding the internet with endless Tik-Toks to spread the word? It’s all explained in the eight chapters of this album. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Margo Price – Hard Headed Woman
Margo’s back, reunited with original producer Matt Ross-Spang, and released perhaps the best album since her debut, maybe the best album of her entire career, and one of the best country albums in 2025—and in a year of kick ass country albums from kick ass country women. This really is a killer record.
It’s been said before, but making great country music really isn’t that complicated ladies and gentlemen. Pick up a pen and paper and spill your guts, get some hot shit pickers in the studio, find some good variety in mood and tempo, and don’t try to be too cute about it. Along with some quality songs, Hard Headed Woman is just a great listening record, fun and infectious at times, deeply sentimental in others, and strongly country to go along with ample variety to keep the listening experience interesting. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Lukas Nelson – American Romance
In what is his first official solo effort after moving on from his original band Promise of the Real, Lukas Nelson flexes his songwriting skills, shows off the latitude of his musical prowess, and perhaps once and for all establishes a legacy under his own name. American Romance is what the album is called, and like the title implies, it’s a journey through the seasons of relationships, from a future full of promise, to irreparable implosion and failure.
For some, what Lukas Nelson accomplished with American Romance was something few if anyone else topped in 2025. Even if it isn’t “traditional country,” after listening through, it’s hard to argue against it receiving a Grammy nomination for something. But it’s not just because his name or who his dad is. It’s because Lukas Nelson has well-established a name all his own, and perhaps never as strongly as through this solo effort. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Cole Chaney – In The Shadow of the Mountain
On paper, this combination of Appalachian folk and Seattle grunge might come across as quite the curiosity. But after fighting through the initial culture shock, the distinctive marriage of musical influences found on In The Shadow of the Mountain begins to make more sense, and starts turning a frosty reception more warm, with repeated listens resulting in a genuine appeal for what Cole Chaney is attempting to do here with it’s broody, heavy impact.
What Cole Chaney does through In The Shadow of the Mountain and its grunge influence is carve out a niche all his own, outside of the shadow of the mountainous careers of his fellow Kentuckians like Sturgill, Childers, and Stapleton. This album demands patience from the audience, but that demand is rewarded with songs that breed that next level immersion and appeal that even many Childers and Sturgill songs struggle to achieve. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – James McMurtry – The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy
It’s not just the way he can awaken character and setting in the mind’s eye, and in a much greater efficiency than some long-winded novel. It’s the clever little references he drops in each song, like trying to rip the door handle off your vehicle whenever you’ve locked the keys inside—something we’ve all experienced. Or maybe it’s the reference to a Weird Al Yankovic parody—something that’s probably a little more obscure.
But it’s through all of these lyrical mechanisms that McMurtry explores the complexities of human life, and the dilemmas it often creates for itself. Boy the timing couldn’t be better to unveil a song about post 9/11 hysteria and the lessons we didn’t learn from it like McMurtry does with “Annie.” Unafraid to get political, but uninterested in doing so in a simple way that misunderstands the nuance of an issue, McMurtry makes you think, even if you might not agree. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Jess Jocoy – Cul-de-Sac Kid
Can a kid from the suburbs of the Pacific Northwest make country music and still have it be considered true and vital? This is the question singer and songwriter Jess Jocoy asks on her third album Cul-de-Sac Kid, and answers in the resounding affirmative through crafting compelling and deeply personal stories, swelling emotions in the audience just as good if not better than anything else released to the country market, and imparting a level of depth that the country genre should outright crave and look to incorporate into its fold.
Musically, Cul-de-Sac Kid is more a heavy version of country-inspired Americana as opposed to straight ahead boot scootin’ country. But moreover, it’s the songwriting and Jess Jocoy’s siren voice that draws you in, inspiring the patience and intrigue it takes to listen further and more intently as the album explores avenues in your brain uncommonly traversed, unlocks emotions rarely tapped, and confers a level of perspective that is shades more gratifying than just another generic honky tonk song. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Charley Crockett – Dollar a Day
With Dollar A Day, the grandiose promises Crockett is prone to slipping into are fulfilled. With 15 tracks, more variety in sound, and a more grand scope, this is everything what you want an album to be, from Charley Crockett or anyone else. It’s country. At times, it’s funky. It takes you places and tells interesting stories. And though it comes with many bold flavors of varying origins, this feels like a Charley Crockett Western overall.
You’re fair to wonder if co-producer Shooter Jennings has the same acumen for channeling the classic country and R&B sounds that previous producer Billy Horton did. But what is brought to Dollar A Day is plenty of imagination that takes the album beyond the mundane, infusing it with the thematic scope, while also keeping it just enough familiar and grounded to give it immediately infectious moments. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Marcus King – Darling Blue
If you wanted to be all buzzy and clickbaity about it, you could proclaim “Marcus King goes country!” or “Marcus King releases a country album!” But that’s not really what’s going on here. It is the moment where the sounds and collaborations from this modern guitar god veer more country than any other time in his past, which is welcome news to many discerning country fans. In truth though, this really is an album about home. And whenever you sing about home, country sounds and sentiments are never too far behind.
Darling Blue is a love letter to Marcus King’s hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, and the woman he’s chosen to spend the rest of his life with. Commitment, gratefulness, adulation, and maturation through his sobriety is the story this soulful, Southern rock album tells, while utilizing country music influences to give it that inviting down home feel. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Tami Neilson – Neon Cowgirl
It doesn’t even feel apt to characterize Tami Neilson as a “musician” in the conventional sense. She’s a force of nature, a Category 5 Typhoon blowing in from the archipelago, a volcanic eruption of power and talent barely constrained by the rules and tenets of music and performance. After performances at the Grand Ole Opry and on Willie Nelson’s Outlaw tour, folks are waking up to Tami Neilson. And how could you snooze through the Tami Neilson experience?
Perseverance over adversity is the ultimate lesson and inspiration one can take from Tami Neilson, and Neon Cowgirl specifically. Against all odds and as a perennially overlooked underdog, she’s determinedly soldiered forward, earning champions along the way. And like a 20-foot neon cowgirl, beats back the darkness to glow as a beacon of strength and determination. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Daniel Donato – Horizons
This isn’t just mere “entertainment.” Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country is the bold exploration of the vast outer regions of what is possible in country music, while still lovingly delivering all the twang you could ever want, and remarkably staying tethered to the true traditional country modes … until it’s time to take a step further into the great unknown.
Whether it’s a country instrumental, or an extended acid jam, you just can’t help but be mesmerized by the instrumental prowess, and the compositional imagination Daniel Donato and his accomplices evidence on Horizon. It reminds you why you’re a music lover, and how blessed you are to be one with the knowledge of Daniel Donato. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Myron Elkins – Nostalgia For Sale
Myron Elkins opens his mouth, and a wormhole appears to a smoky nightclub in blue collar Detroit in the 1970s, or a Muscle Shoals recording session pre air conditioning installation. It’s borderline unbelievable what you’re hearing coming out of your speakers. But boy do you love every ounce of it.
Myron Elkins might be the most distinctive singer of our era, and in any genre. It truly is incredible. But as Elkins likes to underscore, he considers himself a songwriter first, and that comes through in Nostalgia for Sale. Even if he was a squeaker with imperfect pitch singing through his nose, the songs would still make this record remarkable. It’s how Elkins has the instincts to write to his vocal strengths, and then match mood and era to the sentiments to be shared. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Cam Pierce – A Thousand Lonely Horses
Like all great Western music, it’s not just the imagery the lyricism evokes of open spaces and wild landscapes. It’s the little nuggets of wisdom embedded in the verses that feel so prophetic when set to music, no matter how plainspoken they might be delivered. Cam Pierce has a pleasing voice that avoids affectation, and is more focused on being a proper steward of the songs.
If you’re looking for an album not just to hear, but listen to, that will take you on a journey out West and to the unfamiliar, but with tones and textures that still rest comfortably in your mind and spirit, let A Thousand Lonely Horses spirit you away from the mundane, leaving your imagination stoked, and your soul filled. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Jesse Daniel – Son of the San Lorenzo
Each song represents a season of Jesse Daniel’s life, or a significant aspect to his story, from the opening song “Child is Born,” to the concluding track “The End.” In between he chronicles his embrace of sobriety, his appreciation for his partner/bandmate/frequent co-writer Jodi Lyford, and makes ample references to the Santa Cruz Mountains of California where he was raised. In the middle, the album’s songs don’t always follow a linear storyline. But they are always personal.
The best country music isn’t always just about the here and now. Sometimes it takes months, years, or even generations for the most important aspects of country music to reveal their strength and genius. Just as Jesse Daniel used country music to save his life and get him on the right path, he now uses the songs of Son of the San Lorenzo to project who he wants to be, and where he wants to go in the future. (read review)
MOST ESSENTIAL – Chandler Dozier – Bakersfield East
It might feel like these fresh-faced young neotraditionalists are popping up all over the place with promising sounds and curious popularity after decades of such performers toiling in obscurity. But that doesn’t make what the 23-year-old Troy, North Carolina-native Chandler Dozier is doing any less unique, exciting, or entertaining. Many can capture the sound. Few can deliver it so effortlessly like it’s what they were born to do.
Bakersfield East is a great way to describe this album that captures Chandler mixing the Bakersfield Sound with his bluegrass and traditional country roots, and displaying his studious understanding of numerous disciplines of the country genre. Lead single “It’s Not Me It’s You” will give you serious Dwight Yoakam vibes down to the tiny little vocal inflections that you can’t fake. But this is just where this young man’s music mastery begins. (read review)
ESSENTIAL ALBUMS LIST
*Remember, Album of the Year nominees are not included on this list.
Sister Sadie – All Will Be Well (review)
Blaine Bailey – Indian Country (review)
William Beckmann – Whiskey Lies & Alibis (review)
Carter Faith – Cherry Valley (review)
Zach Top – Ain’t In It For My Health (review)
Colby Acuff – Enjoy The Ride (review)
Dee White – Heart Talkin’ (review)
Drake Milligan – Tumbleweed (review)
Joshua Ray Walker – Tropicana (review)
Cody Jinks – In My Blood (review)
Weldon Henson – Stone Cold Country Gold (review)
Dan Lepien – The Honky Tonk Traditional (review)
Kat Hasty – Time of Your Life (review)
Pug Johnson – El Cabron (review)
Mason Via – Self-Titled (review)
Hayes Carll – We’re Only Human (review)
Hailey Whitters – Corn Queen (review)
Tony Logue – Dark Horse (review)
Ken Pomeroy – Cruel Joke (review)
Willie Nelson – Workin’ Man: Willie Sings Merle (review)
Willie Nelson – Oh What A Beautiful World (review)
Matt Daniel – The Poet (review)
Caitlin Cannon – Love Addict (review)
Country Honk – Bad Decision (review)
The Wilder Blue – Still in the Runnin’ (review)
Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives – Space Junk (review)
The Moran Tripp Band – Jumper’s Hole (review)
Kathryn Legendre – Here’s Your Honky Tonk (review)
Nick Shoulders – Refugia Blues (review)
Joshua Hedley – All Hat (review)
Leon Majcen – Making A Livin’ (Not A Killin’) (review)
Brad Paisley – Snow Globe Town (review)
The Castellows – Homecoming (review)
Alison Krauss & Union Station – Arcadia (review)
Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow (review)
The Devil Makes Three – Spirits (review)
Justin Wells – Cynthiana (review)
Kristina Murray – Little Blue (review)
Charles Wesley Godwin – Lonely Mountain Town (review)
The Doohickeys – All Hat No Cattle (review)
Christoper Seymore – King of Nothing (review)
Lola Kirke – Trailblazer (review)
Waylon Hanel – When Waylon Came To Nashville (review)
The Soda Crackers – Self-Titled (review)
Jake Owen – Dreams To Dream (review)
Josh Ward – Sam Ol’ Cowboy, Different Rodeo (review)
Miss Tess – Cher Rêve (review)
Jesse Welles – Middle (review)
The War and Treaty – Plus One (review)
Hayden Baker – Alive & Well (review)
Bleu Edmonson – To The End (review)
Shinglers – Hit The Head (review)
Charley Crockett – Lonesome Drifter (review)
Ty Myers – The Select (review)
Chaparelle – Western Pleasure (review)
Big City Brian Wright – Sky Trucker (review)
Tennessee Jet – Ranchero (review)
Vince Gill – 50 Years From Home (review)
Wesley Hanna – Magnolia (review)
Tyler Childers – Snipe Hunter (review)
Jack Blocker – The Land On Most High (review)
Pitney Meyer – Cherokee Pioneer (review)
Jason Boland & The Stragglers – The Last Kings of Babylon (review)
The AMs – Here Comes That Broken Heart (review)
Bryce Leatherwood – Self-Titled (review)
Chasen Wayne – CORPUS (review)
Trisha Yearwood – The Mirror (review)
Whitey Morgan and the 78’s – Live from Bandit Town USA (review)
Whiskey Myers – Whomp Whack Thunder (review)
Melissa Carper – A Very Carper Christmas (review)
Parker McCollum – Self-Titled (review)
Tyler Hatley, Justin Clyde Williams – The Dick and Tammy Show (review)
Brent Cobb – Ain’t Rocked in a While (review)
Wynn Williams – Country Therapy
Mackenzie Rae & Buckshot Moon – Lonesome and Free
Various Artists – It’s All Her Fault: A Tribute to Cindy Walker (review)
Those Poor Bastards – Songs of Desperation(20th Anniversary Edition) (review)
more to come…
OTHER ALBUMS RECEIVING POSITIVE REVIEWS:
Molly Tuttle – So Long Little Miss Sunshine (review)
Jon Pardi – Honkytonk Hollywood (review)
Ringo Starr – Look Up (review)
Other Reviewed Albums:
Gavin Adcock – Own Worst Enemy (review)
Eric Church – Evangeline vs. The Machine (review)
Morgan Wallen – I’m The Problem (review)
Treaty Oak Revival – West Texas Degenerate (review)
BigXthaPlug – I Hope You’re Happy (review)
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