The Great Divide — Noah Kahan
Noah Kahan / Mercury / 5 May 2026 ★★★☆☆ (5/10)
There’s a version of The Great Divide that earns everything it’s reaching for. Noah Kahan has the instincts, the voice, and — on his best days — the pen to pull off a grand, sprawling reckoning with success, home, and the people you leave behind when you make it. That version exists in flashes here. It just doesn’t exist for 77 minutes.
Let’s be honest about where we’re starting from. Stick Season was a genuinely compelling record — specific in a way that most folk-adjacent albums refuse to be, rooted in Vermont in a way that felt earned rather than aesthetic. Its title track became inescapable for good reason. A Best New Artist Grammy nomination, two nights at Fenway Park — Kahan wasn’t just buzzy, he was building something. So when he reunites with producer Gabe Simon and brings in Aaron Dessner — a man who has made an art form out of coaxing sprawling, emotionally intelligent records from people who have a lot to say — expectations aren’t unfair. They’re proportional.
The first few tracks suggest those expectations might be met. “Doors” is exactly the kind of furious, mid-tempo folk-rock this album promises: Kahan’s voice straining at the edges as he maps the geography of a relationship that’s shifting under pressure, percussion that feels like a door slamming on a cold night. “American Cars” does something similar with geography and class anxiety, and it’s sharper for it, the kind of song that makes you lean forward rather than settle back. These are good songs. Better than good, actually.
“I don’t want to be the person you remember / I want to be the person standing here”
That line, buried in “The Great Divide” itself, is the album in miniature — the tension between legacy and presence, between what you were in a place and what you’ve become somewhere else. It’s the kind of lyric that makes you wish the whole record lived at that altitude.
But it doesn’t. At seventeen tracks and just over 77 minutes, The Great Divide makes the same mistake too many artists make in the aftermath of a breakthrough: it confuses abundance with generosity. “Dashboard” is pleasant without being memorable. “Deny Deny Deny” covers ground that “Doors” already covered more efficiently. “Spoiled” and “All Them Horses” feel like sketches that didn’t quite make it to the finish line — there’s an idea in both of them, but neither one arrives anywhere decisive. You start to feel, somewhere around track eleven, that Kahan and his collaborators were so committed to the album’s emotional architecture — absence and presence, stasis and movement, anger softening into love — that they forgot to interrogate which individual pieces were actually pulling their weight.
The Dessner influence is audible in the production’s more restrained moments, and in theory that’s a good thing. His work with The National and on Taylor Swift’s folklore proved he knows how to frame a voice without crowding it. But here, the collaboration doesn’t quite spark. Where Dessner’s productions often achieve a kind of pressurised stillness, The Great Divide too frequently lands in a middle ground that’s neither intimate nor expansive — it’s just large. The closer, “Dan”, aims for devastating and lands at affecting, which is the album’s problem in concentrated form.
When the anger everyone’s been talking about actually arrives, it’s electric. Kahan has been described as making “a breakup album with a place,” and “Downfall” and “Headed North” are where that description clicks into focus — both tracks have a sourness to them, an unwillingness to let anyone, including himself, fully off the hook, that feels genuinely new for an artist who has sometimes leaned too comfortably into warmth. There are comparisons to be made to Phoebe Bridgers at her most unsentimental — specifically the Lost Weekend record — but where Bridgers weaponises understatement, Kahan tends to announce his intentions, which blunts the knife slightly.
“Porch Light” is the album’s most complete moment and, frustratingly, makes the case for everything else falling short. It’s controlled and specific and genuinely moving — a song about returning somewhere that’s changed in your absence, or changed you, or possibly both. It sounds like the album’s thesis statement and would have made a devastating closing track. Instead it arrives at position eleven, and the album continues for another six songs.
We don’t doubt that The Great Divide will connect with the audience who found Stick Season life-changing. Kahan’s specificity — the names, the roads, the seasonal references — remains intact, and there’s real feeling throughout. But feeling isn’t the same as focus, and an album this long requires a ruthlessness in the editing room that nobody involved seemed willing to apply. The expanded “Last of the Bugs” edition, which adds four more tracks, is a choice we are genuinely struggling to understand.
At its peak, The Great Divide is a reminder of what Kahan is capable of. At its most indulgent, it’s a reminder that capability and discipline are not the same thing — and that sometimes the bravest thing a great songwriter can do is leave the song off the record.