Ashley McBryde

When Ashley McBryde was growing up, there were plenty of women in country music to model herself on, but she quickly realised she didn’t sound like many of them. So where did she turn? “To regular old rock ‘n’ roll. I just let it in,” she told Apple Music in 2020. The tattooed singer/songwriter, born in Waldron, Arkansas in 1993, went to school on loud guitars and did her graduate studies in biker and trucker bars way off the beaten path. After country star Eric Church heard her 2017 EP Jalopies & Expensive Guitars, he pulled her out of his arena crowd to join him onstage. And rather than duet on one of his tracks, they sang one of hers, “Bible and A .44”, for the Star Is Born-like moment, which soon went viral. McBryde has since connected with bigger audiences thanks to her compassion for working-class life and a short story writer’s eye for details, fully apparent on 2018’s Girl Going Nowhere. Her fierce 2020 album, Never Will, brings daylight to small-town secrets, like the dads having affairs and the family that wants to grieve their own damn way. She’s a gleeful truth-teller, forging her own lane in the country world with a self-assured swagger that can only be learned on the harder edges of life.