Hudson Freeman's new album, Doom Country

Hudson Freeman has released a new album, Doom Country, on Mom+Pop Records. Described as the soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic road trip, Doom Country was recorded in part at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Recording, founded by Tape Op interviewee Shahzad Ismaily [#151], with the project’s bassist, Aaron Holthus, engineering.

Throughout the album’s 39-minutes, Freeman works dissonance into, over, and around chorus and verse. On tracks like “I-40” and “Turning Green,” Freeman and company weave textures associated with noise rock into a folk setting, using atmospheric elements to emphasize the music’s dynamics without crowding the arrangements. This balance is one of the record’s most compelling characteristics. In the last minute of the title track, Freeman bends his way between chords while the band expands and contracts like a set of sonic bellows, propelling this road trip from stop to stop. The dissonance adds an unsettling quality, making Freeman’s post-apocalyptic premise something you feel in the music itself.

Doom Country follows Freeman’s 2025 record, is a Folk Artist. Freeman is credited as a producer alongside collaborator Ephraim McFarland, with Harper James serving as the album’s mixing engineer.

Freeman has cited Sufjan Stevens’ [#70] Illinois, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and Sun Kil Moon’s Ghosts of the Great Highway as points of reference. That last reference caught my attention; Tape Op’s Geoff Stanfield played bass and worked as an engineer on Ghosts of the Great Highway, Sun Kil Moon’s 2003 debut.

Check it out via the links below, and welcome to Doom Country.