Into The Music
Noah Kahan made it big by writing songs about wanting to leave Vermont and then feeling terrible about leaving Vermont, and now he’s about to release his fourth album, launch a stadium tour, and debut a documentary about the gap between who he was and who he’s become. The recursion here is so perfect it almost feels engineered, except that Kahan seems constitutionally incapable of not being sincere.
Born in Strafford, Vermont, on January 1, 1997, Kahan was writing songs by age eight and uploading them to the internet in his teens. He signed to Republic Records in 2017, released his debut album Busyhead in 2019, and then spent a few years doing what most indie-folk-adjacent singer-songwriters do: building quietly, releasing EPs, being excellent in rooms that were too small for him. The commercial turning point came with Stick Season in 2022, specifically with the title track, which captured something about rural alienation and seasonal depression so precisely that it went viral on TikTok and ended up peaking at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. That’s the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen to different artists.
The Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever) deluxe edition in 2023 expanded the album with collaborations including Post Malone, Hozier, Kacey Musgraves, and Sam Fender, each of which fit so naturally into Kahan’s world that they clarified rather than disrupted it. A live album from his sold-out Fenway Park show followed in 2024. Then, this year, his SXSW documentary Out of Body arrived, examining the specific friction of becoming famous in a context that was never built for fame.
The new album is called The Great Divide, set for April 24, 2026, and the lead single has been circulating since January, when it debuted during the Grammys. Produced alongside Gabe Simon with contributions from Aaron Dessner, the record explores what Kahan describes as disconnect and unspoken truths within family and friendship. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is not a departure. It’s a continuation of the same project he’s been running since he started: honest accounting of what it costs to be a person who feels things acutely and can’t stop writing about it.
His openness about anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia has made him one of the more talked-about artists in terms of mental health conversations in music. This isn’t incidental to his appeal. His audience, largely young, largely people who feel too much and are not sure what to do with it, connects with him precisely because he doesn’t aestheticize his struggle. He just describes it. There’s a very specific kind of relief in hearing someone articulate what you’ve been unable to, and Kahan has built a career on providing that relief with enough melody attached that it doesn’t feel like a therapy session.
The Great Divide Tour runs June through August, hitting stadiums and arenas across North America, with Gigi Perez in support. If Fenway felt like an arrival, this one feels like the territory has expanded beyond anything that Strafford could have prepared him for. Whether that tension produces great songs or produces a person who has finally made peace with how far he’s come from where he started is, at this point, the most interesting open question in his catalog.