- 2026-04-27
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MUSIC
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Noah Kahan Releases New Album “The Great Divide”
American singer-songwriter Noah Kahan released his fourth studio album “The Great Divide” on April 24, 2026 via Mercury Records.
It is his first full-length studio release since the 2022 album “Stick Season”.
The album comprises 17 tracks, which he recorded with Aaron Dessner of American rock band The National and Gabe Simon of American indie-rock band Kopecky at Aaron Dessner's Long Pond Studio in upstate New York.
The deluxe edition of the album titled “The Great Divide: The Last Of The Bugs” comprises 21 tracks, including four additional songs.
The album features Aaron Dessner (guitar, piano, synthesizer, bass, drums, tambourine, banjo, slide guita, mandolin, Mellotron, Hammond B3), Carrie K (drums), Gabe Simon (guitar, mandolin, bass, slide guitar, banjo, Hammond B3), Dylan Jones (organ, piano, banjo, mandolin, guitar), Nina de Vitry (fiddle, cello, violin, mandolin), Benjamin Lanz (trombone), Noah Levine (guitar), Eddy Dunlap (pedal steel guitar), Justin Vernon (banjo, guitar), Alberto Sewald (saw), Sam Westhoff (organ), Rob Moose (string arrangement), Andrew Barr (drums), and Amy Allen (background vocals).- Noah Kahan said of the album, “From a long silence forms a divide, a great expanse demanding attention. I stare across it. I see old friends, my father, my mother, my siblings, my younger self, the great state of Vermont. I want to scream these feelings, to gesticulate wildly at the figures on the other side, but my voice has grown hoarse and muted after years of climbing a ladder towards the wild, spiraling dreams that have materialized in front of me. Instead, I wrote them down next to a piano in Nashville, next to a pond in Guilford Vermont, in a legendary studio in upstate New York, on a farm with a firetower in Only, Tennessee. The songs are the words I would say if I could. They are the fears I dance with in the moments before I drift off to sleep. The music here is my best attempt to delve deeper into the people, places, and feelings that have made me who I am. I am grateful for all of it, for all of you, for listening to them, if you choose to do so.”
- He added, “It is hard to even begin to describe what these last few years making this album has felt like. The collision of fear and pressure and joy and luck and total love has left me wordless, and if you know me personally, I hardly ever shut my mouth. I spent many months walking forward in complete darkness, hands out in front of me, desperate to touch something familiar that would show me I was near the light switch again. As lonely as it felt, and as unfamiliar as the world seemed in those moments, I was never really alone. I don't think any of us ever truly are. I was guided through the wilderness by calm voices, by the stillness of my home state, by the total commitment of my band, producers, and team, by the steady and loving touch of my wife and family, and of course, by the constant and enduring encouragement of you all, who I am so lucky to have as fans. I am very proud of what we are doing together and I hope we can live this dream for a long long time.”
Noah Kahan told Apple Music about the difference between the previous album “Stick Season” and the new album “The Great Divide”, “Stick Season is like doing shrooms and thinking you understand the entire world, and The Great Divide< is like three months later: 'That was great and that was helpful, but there's a lot more we gotta figure out still.' He'll do some shrooms with you, but he's not going to pretend like it's going to change his life. He's not going to become a kayak guide somewhere. He has to go to work in the morning.”
Noah Kahan explained some tracks for the album.
“End of August” via Apple Music
“I wanted to create a scene that just felt like late summer in Vermont or in a small town where there's just that total quiet and you can almost hear music in the air. One thing that my family and I have in Vermont is, like, I walk through the woods and the woods are haunted, but not by mean spirits. We've all individually said, 'Oh, I heard voices in the woods,' and when I was writing that, I wanted it to feel like what those voices would sing if you were just like walking through the woods or driving past the woods in Vermont.”
“Doors”
“I remember I was in the studio and we got to the bridge section and I wanted to go home and watch a basketball game. And so, I was like, 'I’ll write a bridge later' and it took me a year and a half to write the bridge. Two different studio rental spaces. A bunch of different times recording the song, and I always thought, like, 'Man, if I had just written that damn bridge that day, we would’ve saved myself a lot of time.'”
“The Great Divide” via PEOPLE
“My life had changed so much and I felt this real gap growing. I started to think about divide in my life, whether that was the divide between me and this older version of me, or me and the people that I used to know growing up, or the people that are in my life that I'm still trying to keep a relationship with. This song in particular is really about two people who grew up together, but maybe didn't know each other as well as they thought. A lot of my life recently has been realizing the things I wish I could have said to people and the things I wish I could have done differently, and so this song is kind of just an expansion of that.”
“23” via Apple Music
“The song itself is not based on a story of my life, but based on a lot of friendships I have with people who have family members who are struggling with addiction or who have siblings who they can't connect to. It's that feeling of 'I want you back, but I don't want this version of you back' and 'I want that moment when we were sitting over the car hood and you were showing me how the engine worked and everything was normal.' And so seeing who you are now betrays this version of you that I really want you to be in this memory I have of you. It's a little selfish, because it's like you're asking someone to change for you, but it's that kind of childlike innocent hope that someday we'll just be exactly where we were.”
“Porch Light” via Apple Music
“I always worried that my mom felt or my family felt like I wasn't myself anymore and that I was just some ghoul that would come in to extrapolate further success or further emotion for my own gain. The truth is my mom never felt that way. She always felt she always showed me love and showed me patience and understood the gravity of what I was going through. I wanted that hope to be in there, like, 'I'll leave the porch light on for you.'”
“Dan” via Apple Music
“There's a few lines in the album that I feel like speak to that present feeling of, like, you're already there. Like, heaven is a drink in the backyard. Like, where do we go when we die? I wouldn't mind if it was right here. I wouldn't mind if I was sitting by the fire with my buddy, or even lost in the woods, or even in a moment of, like, there's something scary happening but you're with this person and you're experiencing this together in the same exact way.” - source : Apple Music
