Nashville-based alternative trio Judah & the Lion returned to new music platforms on May 3 with the release of Pep Talks, their third and deliberately “boldest” album.
Connor and Rachel Dwyer
The majority of its songs were written on the road over the last three years, while the band was promoting their 2016 LP, Folk Hop N’ Roll.
“We like to say that the road brings out the super high highs and the super low lows,” frontman Judah Akers says. “When we just play an epic show in Dallas, and then I get a call from my sister saying something dramatic happened at home, that’s a good platform for writing, those high emotional stakes.”
The record is intensely personal, remitting lyrics and sensibilities born out of Akers’ family struggles, but it’s also typically innovative—giving folk instruments new latitude through hip-hop-leaning beats and avant-pop accessibility. While the band, made up of Akers (vocals, guitar), Brian Macdonald (mandolin, vocals), and Nate Zuercher (banjo, vocals), has never limited its creative reach according to the standards of traditional folk music, Pep Talks boosts the distorted banjo and 808s heard on Folk Hop N’ Roll to new artistic heights.
As Akers says, the songs and sounds are steeped in the tension of his intractable home life, which began to suffer while he was on tour and culminated in his parents’ recent divorce after problems with alcoholism and extramarital affairs. While balancing stability in his adult life with success and his marriage to Lindsey Riley in 2015, he had to cope with the fracturing of his childhood home when his mother ultimately moved out of it. (Her phone call to Akers afterward inspired him to write the Kacey Musgraves-assisted ballad “Pictures.”)
Connor and Rachel Dwyer
“Each song is so different,” Akers says. “They were mostly written alone, just me and an acoustic in hand. We wanted to follow the attitude. With ‘Don’t Mess With My Mama,’ I had gotten in this pretty knock-down, drag-out fight with my dad in the middle of this rough season, and you know, it’s a pretty shameful moment for both he and I, but I wanted to make a track that would feel like I did in that moment, where you love somebody so much, but you’re so angry at the same time.”
“Don’t Mess With My Mama” is the band’s first sincere attempt at an EDM track, and it’s carried out with surefooted techno swagger, cleverly filling the spaces where DJs might normally place synth pads with ambient rhythm banjo. Other songs, like the Jon Bellion-assisted “Passion Fashion,” take cues from indietronica acts like Matt and Kim or Passion Pit by filling expansive sonic space with programmed drums and kinetic live instruments. Akers’ arena-ready, emphatic voice carols over banjo and synth lead alike, making even lyrics as dark as: “I don’t call you late at night, because I’m scared that you’re drinking, and that hurts like hell” (from “Queen Songs / Human”) sound ostensibly optimistic, either looking back at less complicated times or onward to a brighter future.
All of the bandmates are outspoken Christians, but chose before their first album to communicate their beliefs through themes of hope and love in their music, rather than straightforward evangelism. With its slick production and cross-genre stylings, Pep Talks accomplishes delivering these themes in a unique way—it’s not often that messages of love and hope, pure of any other artistic substance or ego, are spread through modern pop and EDM sounds.
“Hopefully, our faith has brought people together,” Akers says. “In this divided world we live in, naturally, at times we use it to shed some light and love, which we want to give back.”