Ride Lonesome: Beck returns to Room B

Ride Lonesome is the record Beck has been circling for two decades, and this time he stayed in the room long enough to finish it. Twelve songs, 47 minutes, one temperature. His fifteenth studio album and his first since Hyperspace in 2019, cut with the band that played on Mutations, Sea Change and Morning Phase. He is 56, he is writing about heartache, and nothing here is in a hurry.

Beck has built a career on not being the same man twice. Mellow Gold and Odelay in the mid-nineties were collages of folk, funk, hip-hop and whatever else was within reach. Mutations (1998) took the country turn, Midnite Vultures (1999) the funk one, and Sea Change (2002) was the soft acoustic record that made the rest look like armor. Guero, The Information, Modern Guilt and Colors kept moving. Morning Phase (2014) went back to the Sea Change mode and won Album of the Year at the Grammys. Hyperspace followed in 2019, then the longest gap of his career, broken by a 2025 mention of an orchestral album and, this January, Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime, a compilation of covers and rarities.

The new one was made in Room B at United Studios in Hollywood, produced by Beck and mixed by Nigel Godrich, with the players who have been on these records all along: Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Jason Falkner. Beck has said the decades together are the point, that a sound came together over them and that the band can still find new textures inside it. Out September 18 on Iliad Records and Capitol.

The palette is country and Americana, '70s singer-songwriter folk and the power ballad, delivered gently. The mood is melancholy, the arrangements simple and unassuming. The band keeps that from reading as retreat. These are the same hands that have carried his quiet records since 1998, and this album leans on them instead of production.

The title track opens it and drifts from the first bar. It was the lead single, out April 20 with a video and the announcement of a tour of the United States and Canada through September and October; a version with Sierra Ferrell followed in June. 'In the Night', the second single, is among the shortest things here, and it arrived in July with a video starring Denis Lavant. 'Disappearing Act' was the third single in August, the other brief one. Around them, 'Run Away', 'Failed Words' and 'Bleed' hold the middle without raising their voices, and 'For Your Love' and 'Slow Canyon' keep the lights low. 'It Ends Right Here' is the hinge of the back half, a climax that arrives at the volume of everything around it. The record closes with its two longest tracks, 'If You Don't Know What Love Is' and 'Beyond The Light', and neither one treats the ending as something to get to quickly.

This is for the people who wore out Sea Change and Morning Phase, and for anyone who found Hyperspace too tidy. It sits beside those two, and beside Mutations, more comfortably than anything he has released since 2014. If what you want from Beck is Odelay or Midnite Vultures, this is not that and it is not trying to be.

One temperature is still one temperature. Twelve songs of heartache delivered gently means the stretch after 'Disappearing Act' can blur; the sequencing offers the middle no change of pressure, and the record asks for a certain kind of evening rather than any kind.

It is a 4.5. The quiet record is where Beck keeps the things he means, and Ride Lonesome is the most patient and most complete version of it he has made.

The tracklist

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