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“American Weekend,” the bracing first album the songwriter Katie Crutchfield released as Waxahatchee, was “a result of a snowstorm, a visceral stupor, and a personal breakthrough,” she wrote in the liner notes. Stranded for a week in her parents’ home near Alabama’s Waxahatchee Creek, she found out in winter 2011 what so many of us are learning right now: that self-isolation can lead to heightened emotions, antic spurts of creativity and relentless self-scrutiny.
“I don’t care, I’ll embrace all of my vices,” Crutchfield wailed on “Grass Stain,” a muddy and urgent late-night confession. Seven years and three increasingly polished Waxahatchee records later, Crutchfield realized in summer 2018 that she was never going to drink herself happy. “It’s not a very dramatic story,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview. “I had gone back and forth a lot about my substance issues, and I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done with this forever.’” And so on her confident and accomplished fifth album, “Saint Cloud,” Crutchfield takes the same hard look in the mirror that she did nearly a decade ago, only this time without the murky filter of those vices.
Though Crutchfield was raised on a steady diet of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, discovering punk’s sound and ethos cemented her as a musician. She and her twin sister, Allison, formed the pop-punk band the Ackleys while still in high school, and they later found a cult audience with their scrappy, lyrical D.I.Y. trio P.S. Eliot. Back then, the twins found plenty to bemoan about their hometown: Birmingham, Ala., was politically conservative and even its seemingly utopian underground music scene was woefully sexist, leading her to reject her Southern identity.
On “Saint Cloud,” Crutchfield, now 31, embraces the homegrown twang she once rebelled against. (The album’s title, like the moody closing number, is a nod to her father’s Florida hometown.) “Saint Cloud” is a departure from the hoarse holler and blustery distortion of Waxahatchee’s previous record, “Out in the Storm” from 2017; instead it finds her adopting a cleaner sound. She sounds at ease with herself: The lead single “Can’t Do Much” has a gentle, breezy energy and guitar licks as delicately intricate as handkerchief embroidery. “I love you ’til the day I die,” she sings. “I guess it don’t matter why.”
