Waxahatchee

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Kathryn Crutchfield told Apple Music of Waxahatchee, a name that nods to her native Alabama. “Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird,” she adds. As Waxahatchee, Crutchfield wraps her Southern roots and outsider disposition into lo-fi confessionals and open-road reflections that strip heartache, existentialism and sobriety into their rawest, barest forms. The project took shape in 2010 while Crutchfield was still active with P.S. Eliot, a pop-punk duo with her twin sister, Allison. The pair had been playing together since high school but, alone in her family’s vacation home near Alabama’s Waxahatchee Creek, Crutchfield was inspired to write and record her intimate 2012 debut, American Weekend. Since then, the project has gradually expanded in vision, collaboration and sound. The restless indie rock of 2013’s Cerulean Salt and 2017’s Out in the Storm has transformed into the impassioned Americana of 2020’s Saint Cloud +3 and 2024’s Tigers Blood—an evolution that digs ever deeper into the alt-country influences of Crutchfield’s youth.