68 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
W
hen the country singer Orville
Peck released “Pony,” his début
album, in 2019, biographical details were
kept purposely scant. He was born some-
where in the Southern Hemisphere, per-
haps to a show-business family. Maybe
he had played drums in a Canadian punk
band. Peck wore a series of leather masks
with strips of dangling bordello fringe,
which obscured most of his features, but
not his searching blue eyes. Amateur
gumshoes began sniffing around for
clues to Peck’s “real” identity and found
them—he has since admitted that he
was born and raised in Johannesburg,
South Africa—but his artfully cultivated
mystique was part of the point, and part
of the fun. His big, swooning baritone
could be menacing or magnetic, depend-
ing on the lyric. Even when he was being
campy or teasing, there was always real
anguish in his music.
Peck’s second full-length record,
“Bronco,” released this month, is gor-
geous, aching, and cinematic, performed
with precision and a kind of tender ur-
gency. The new songs are cleaner, catch-
ier, and several degrees more miserable.
Over spare, elegant instrumentation—
Peck is a student of Sam Phillips, Elvis
Presley’s first producer, who, in the nine-
teen-fifties, pioneered a way of delaying
and doubling echo to give recordings a
spooky, pinging depth—Peck grappleswith depression, heartache, and restless-
ness. “Darlin’ I can feel it coming every
time,” he sings on “The Curse of the
Blackened Eye,” a sweeping lament for
another failed love affair. Peck seems to
believe that this type of romantic dev-
astation is, to some degree, inevitable.
His voice is lilting, but his words are ag-
onized: “I sat around last year, wished
so many times that I would die.” He
presses on the last word and lets it land
with a wet thud, like a piece of overripe
fruit falling from its branch.
“Bronco” was recorded live to tape in
Nashville and features very few overdubs.
Peck’s music contains nods not just to
Presley but to Ennio Morricone, Chris
Isaak, and Johnny Cash, and he has con-
vincingly covered songs by Bobbie Gen-
try and Lady Gaga. His blend of pathos,
bombast, and dark glamour evokes var-
ious times and places—maybe the mid-fif-
ties, maybe the Deep South, maybe some-
place where people know something about
horses. Peck may not be from Missis-
sippi, but his voice contains both humid-
ity and blues. He’s a hard-travelling man
who can’t find a reason to stay in one
place, and he’s not sure he could do it
anyway. On “Daytona Sand,” he leans
into the apathy that comes quickly to the
unmoored and the brokenhearted:Long hair, slow eyes, I like your style
We both ain’t got a job
I haven’t seen my band in a while
At least nothing seems to last that long.T
hough Peck was first signed to Sub
Pop, an independent label best
known for nurturing unruly rock bands
such as Nirvana and Soundgarden, he
is chiefly a country singer, and he re-
leased “Bronco” with Columbia. It has
been a thrill to watch him further un-
settle that genre, which has been under-
going an overdue self-accounting in re-
cent years. Country music has always
felt somewhat insulated from the whims
of popular culture, headquartered, as it
is, outside of New York and Los Ange-
les. Yet in the past decade it, too, has
been affected by national calls for social
justice and a demand for more expan-
sive thinking regarding race and iden-
tity. Historically, Nashville’s presenta-
tion of gender has sometimes been so
exaggerated as to be almost funny: men
drove trucks and wore cowboy boots,
and thin, pretty women wiggled intoILLUSTRATION BY ARMANDO VEVEThe musician’s new album blends pathos, bombast, and dark glamour.
POPMUSICMYSTERY MAN
The lonesome sounds of Orville Peck.BYAMANDA PETRUSICH