Del Roscoe – Del Roscoe (2025)
Atlanta’s Del Roscoe arrives with a debut album steeped in shadows yet burning with life. Their self-titled record is a gothic indie-Americana statement that fuses atmosphere with urgency, intimacy with defiance. It’s a collection born of both artistic vision and human necessity, shaped, poignantly, in the wake of bassist Paul Abrelat’s terminal diagnosis. His basslines, recorded before his passing, anchor the record with a grounding resonance, turning the album into both a document of grief and a celebration of creative kinship.
The album’s centrepiece, ‘Black Hats’, embodies everything that makes Del Roscoe such a distinctive new voice. Where earlier singles ‘A Few More Miles’ and ‘Train Train’ revealed patient storytelling and elegiac reflection, ‘Black Hats’ strides forward with menace and conviction. A cautionary tale dressed as a gothic parable, it sketches a figure who haunts communities with deception and fear. Robert Lee delivers the refrain, “the man in the black hat is coming for your town”, not as mere chorus but as prophecy, each repetition deepening its eerie inevitability.
Throughout the album, the band builds a cinematic soundscape. Acoustic guitar beats like a pulse beneath taut rhythms, while mandolin shivers on the horizon like distant lightning. Electric guitar flickers in spectral accents, lap steel exhales a mournful sigh, and accordion threads through with dusky colour. It’s a sound at once steeped in tradition and sharpened with modern intensity, conjuring a ghostly landscape that feels lived-in rather than constructed.
The tension between roots and innovation runs throughout the album. ‘Bad Lovin’’ lurches with raw swagger, while ‘Westward’ gazes into open terrain with windswept melancholy. ‘Red Desert’ summons a scorched, cinematic expanse, and ‘Visions’ leans into dreamlike reverie, its textures both fragile and dense. The closing ‘One More Song’ is a bittersweet farewell, an understated but devastating coda that lingers long after silence.
What elevates Del Roscoe beyond mere pastiche is its lived authenticity. Lee’s songwriting is sharpened by allegory but grounded in human truth, and the arrangements resist polish in favour of grit, space, and resonance. These are songs built to breathe, to ache, to haunt. Even in their most political or mythic moments, they never feel detached; the band plays not as commentators but as participants, channelling personal loss and collective unrest into something timeless.
Del Roscoe’s debut is the rare record that feels both ancient and immediate, like a dispatch from the frontier of past and present. With it, they mark themselves not just as a band to watch, but as storytellers and mythmakers of uncommon weight. Del Roscoe doesn’t simply ask to be heard; it insists on being felt.
Find out more about Del Roscoe on their official website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Spotify.
