Album Review: Noah Kahan, The Great Divide (Mercury Records)

★★★★½

The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs

Noah Kahan has spent the better part of three years trying to figure out what to do with a problem most songwriters would envy: he made an album so good it changed his life in ways he wasn’t prepared for. Stick Season, released in 2022, turned a Vermont folk-pop artist with a devoted regional following into a Grammy-nominated stadium headliner with a streaming footprint that most major label acts would kill for. The follow-up carried a particular kind of weight. The Great Divide is Kahan’s answer to that weight, and it is a remarkable one.

Across seventeen tracks, Kahan examines what fame actually feels like from inside the experience. The dislocation, the guilt, and the way success can widen the distance between a person and the people they love most. He described making the album as months of walking forward in complete darkness. You can hear that quality in the music, not as despair but as the particular seriousness of someone writing their way toward the light.

Kahan was born and raised in Strafford, Vermont, a town of just over 1,000 people, and his relationship to that place has been the gravitational center of his work since the beginning. The Great Divide leans into this idea harder, using home as the fixed point against which everything else is measured. The opening track, “End of August,” begins with crickets and a spare piano, as Kahan recites his hometown ZIP code over the top, a gesture so specific that it immediately sets the terms for what follows. This is still the same person. The world around him just got considerably louder.

The production, split between Gabe Simon and Aaron Dessner, is the best Kahan has worked with. Simon, who produced Stick Season, brings continuity and familiarity with Kahan’s instincts. Dessner, whose credits run from Taylor Swift to Bon Iver, contributes an atmospheric patience to his six co-productions that opens the arrangements up without losing the banjo-and-acoustic-guitar core that defines Kahan’s sound.

The songwriting is where The Great Divide earns its place. A recurring thread throughout the album imagines the perspective of a family member watching his ascent from a distance, and the lines that come from that angle are among the most penetrating he has written. The push and pull between Kahan’s public life and his private relationships gives the record genuine stakes, and he does not resolve the tension tidily. He writes it down and lets it breathe.

“Porch Light,” the second single, is the clearest example of what Kahan is capable of at his best. It opens on a wry image of the awkwardness of asking someone how they have been when their life is already all over the internet. What follows is a song about the specific pain of knowing you have cost the people closest to you something real, delivered with a falsetto chorus over a banjo that somehow makes the whole thing feel more open rather than more closed.

The title track, “The Great Divide,” had been performed live for two years before its official release, and the extra time did it good. It is the most formally ambitious song on the record, guitar-driven and rock-leaning in a way Kahan has not explored before, written about a childhood friend navigating religious guilt. It is also, arguably, his finest song to date. “Doors” and “American Cars” ride the tension between bleak content and danceable production with real skill, and “Downfall” has a rhythmic sophistication in its verses that feels like a genuine new direction.

The record’s final stretch is where it earns its extra half-star. “All Them Horses” carries the specific emotional weight of Stick Season without simply repeating it, and closer “Dan,” a song about Kahan’s longtime best friend, is the kind of ending that recontextualizes everything that came before. It is quiet and specific and deeply felt, reaching back to his debut album, Busyhead, while also sounding like an arrival rather than nostalgia. That has always been Kahan’s gift, making the particular feel universal, and on The Great Divide, he has refined it into something close to mastery.

The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs, a deluxe edition with four additional tracks folded into the original sequence, is available now.