Brody Price Confronts Alcoholism and Recovery on Leaf Miner’s Daughter

Brody Price’s second album is louder than his first. Leaf Miner’s Daughter follows 2022’s Win a Trip to Palm Springs!, a debut that sat between singer-songwriter writing and classic country tropes. The earlier track “Dying When I Met You” already pointed toward harsher territory, its distorted guitars suggesting where Price was headed. The new record goes further, with searing electric guitars stacked against each other.

The subject is Price’s own struggle with severe alcoholism and his path to recovery. He treats it as emotional material rather than confession: the album works through the feelings that produced the drinking and followed from it, not the timeline of events. On the opening track, “Atrophy”, a radio DJ’s rant rises over guitar distortion, contempt pressed into every syllable. “Cell Wall Membrane” closes with a mariachi band. “How It Feels (20th Century Remastered)” runs quiet verses into loud choruses, its narrator arguing with himself more than with anyone else.

What holds the record together is Price’s voice, nasal and keening, neither strong nor smooth. It carries an emotional truth that a more polished performance would flatten, and it keeps the album’s anxiety in the foreground rather than in the lyrics alone.

Leaf Miner’s Daughter does not narrate a recovery so much as inhabit the state that made one necessary.