Southall Announce ‘Kinfolk’ Album, Confront a Family’s Lost Farm on New Track

Three years separate Southall from their last release. The band, which dropped the “Read Southall Band” name before 2023’s self-titled LP, just announced Kinfolk. The nine-song project comes out via Thirty Tigers, with production by Wes Sharon at 115 Recording in Norman. Recording sessions embraced a rule frontman Read Southall set from the start: “Anything goes.”

The previous record marked a clean break from the group’s early country associations. Tracks were edited to favor room-filling rock. Elements that leaned too heavily on twang got scraped away. The effort achieved its purpose, drawing a new line for the renamed outfit, but it also narrowed the palette. For Kinfolk, Southall wanted to reopen the door that had been shut.

Sharon, known for his work with Turnpike Troubadours, helped the band capture a wider emotional and sonic range. The material moves without the guardrails that shaped the last album. One cut rearranges the stakes entirely. Read Southall wrote directly about the moment his family lost their farm, a collapse that forced a reckoning with what he’d inherit and what he’d have to build from scratch. Instead of lament, the song maps a redirection. He has said, in an interview with Rolling Stone, that confronting the loss in music ended up securing a future he might not have found otherwise.

Southall will tour through the fall in support of Kinfolk, with dates across the Plains and South. The album does not retreat to the band’s earlier identity. It just stops pretending that certain memories have no place in the sound.