Strays

Price breaks down any barriers left around her on this record to great appeal. In just 10 songs, she manages to tell a lifetime of stories that are captivating from start to finish.

Strays becomes a more consistently enjoyable experience as the album progresses. If there’s a sense in the album’s first four tracks that Price felt pressure to write an obvious radio hit, on the remainder of the album she tunes out outside pressures and luxuriates in the space she has carved out for herself; subverting sonic expectations, rewarding listener patience, and penning affecting character studies and vignettes.

A remarkable talent, this is an album to cherish.

Even if the record had been inevitable, it didn’t have to be so engaging; fortunately, it is.

From the empathetic lyrics to the innovative eclecticism, Margo Price has stitched a musical coat of many colours with Strays. And it's a perfect fit for this troubled age.

Muted, syncopated beats, ghostly pedal steel and icy Solina string machine conspire to create the effect of a slow-motion scene: unwanted debris blowing away in the wind, with our stronger and more resolved singer standing at the centre of the wreckage. Even amid the ashes of her past, it seems, Margo Price keeps burning ever more brightly. [Feb 2023, p.80]

It’s sonically brave and lyrically obstinate, a rare delight that stands out from its counterparts.

The result is familiar—it’s undeniably a Margo Price record—but a little extra fiery.

While she’s writing less about the details of her own experience, her music still speaks to life’s murky specifics.

Strays reveals Price’s strong talents as a musician and a human being.

Despite its scattershot title and the fact that it was recorded in five separate studios across Nashville and California, Strays feels like Price’s most cohesive collection yet guided by light West Coast shadings courtesy of Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Dawes). Price finds ways to effectively and subtly tease out different shades from her longtime versatile band, the Price Tags.

Strays continues in the classic rock-inspired direction of 2020’s That’s How Rumors Get Started, breaking from the neo-traditional country music that put Price on the map. The arrangements employ slide guitar and keyboards—even xylophone on “Time Machine”—with a punchy yet spacious mix, but the album flaunts its influences a bit too transparently.

Strays brilliantly rattles through country, psych and Patti Smith-style poetic rock’n’roll.

While her vocals ground her in a country vein, her sonic contexts borrow from and integrate blues-rock, classic-rock, and pop sounds. The result is her most freewheeling sequence to date.

Strays adds heady organ grooves and hypnotic southern rock to her band’s considerable chops. ... And throughout, her mountain stream of a voice retains its country authority, even when she’s writing a pop tune.

Price’s fantastic fourth album, Strays, advances boldly into terrain occupied by such exalted US rock craftsmen as Jackson Browne and Tom Petty, with soulful vocal swagger, a widescreen band sound and a poetic lyrical depth that should leave most of her Nashville peers prostrate at her feet.

With this devastatingly personal song cycle, Price completes her transformation from retro-country preservationist to anything-goes auteur. [Feb 2023, p.35]