"World Famous," the whimsical, scene-setting fantasy that opens August Ponthier's debut album, Everywhere Isn't Texas, dreams that perhaps the singer-songwriter's chance of being a superstar might only materialize a "multiverse away." They sing of mingling with Elvira and Vincent Price, performing in underwater theaters and talking to "ghosts and ghouls" over the radio. "World famous, not on Earth," they sing, as if dazed, the song's twinkling omnichord making Ponthier sound like a figurine twirling in a haunted music box. "So in what world, am I famous?"
It's never been more difficult for a new artist to breakthrough in the music industry — to release a sustaining hit album on the strength of the music alone than fad trends, to build a loyal fanbase, to get people to hear you. The industry continues to be in a weird place, and every day it only seems to get more bizarre, as bland megastars continue to enthrall the masses, generative AI threatens to whittle humanity entirely out of the art and the competition for attention increases. Ponthier, a 29-year-old Brooklyn artist originally from the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, gets this surreality intimately. The artist's debut album comes after scrappily building a career on social media, multiple introductory EPs and opening for artists like Maren Morris and Brandi Carlile. But it also comes after a stint being signed and then dropped by Interscope records before Ponthier even had a chance to release it; "I was kicking and screaming with my claws in," they told Variety of the split. They'd been on the major label since becoming a full-time musician, which released their 2021 breakthrough single, "Cowboy," and it was all they'd ever known. What to make of all the career still left ahead of them?
Plenty of musicians, typically at even the slightest brush of first real fame, complain about the state of the industry in their songwriting, with alienating results. But Ponthier's existentialism extends far beyond their embattled job as an artist. How, exactly, does Ponthier fit in here? It's a question they consider across Everywhere Isn't Texas's catchy, self-aware country-pop songs, not just about music but about the shifting complexity of their life: the trappings of young adulthood and its gendered expectations, their constrictive upbringing back home and the illuminatingly free spaces of New York. Ponthier has already built a modest career making hits about being a perpetual outsider searching for the exits: "Cowboy" was about leaving their hometown only to realize that they can't hide their inner Southerner, on the plucky "Faking My Own Death" Ponthier warned that they're always on the brink of falling off the face of the Earth — "the only promise I can make is I'm changing all my plans." But Everywhere Isn't Texas is Ponthier's true opus to the wonders of self-discovery and reinvention, a fully realized, pristine debut about how exhilarating and even terrifying it can be to keep changing all your plans.
"You don't have to stay in this state, alone," Ponthier sings on the title track, a song about the singer leaving the confines of the town they grew up in, where they lived uncomfortably as a late bloomer trying to fake their way out of being their true self. Ponthier's "state" is the Lone Star, but the song's mantra is sort of a thesis statement for the album, as Ponthier shakes off the isolation and prescriptions they've shouldered since they were a kid. "I'm wearing my ribbons as I'm doing my taxes," Ponthier sings on the "Ribbons & Taxes," musing over its bubblegum acoustics about how they still don't feel like the grown-up they're meant to be, cracking that if they'd feel like "a child bride" if they were to marry at the same age their mom did. It's the kind of #adulting song fit for a generation of girlies, but Ponthier, who came out as non-binary just before Everywhere Isn't Texas was finalized, may feel particularly youthful for their age because they're making up for lost time. On the whip fast, jangle pop of "Betty," Ponthier tells of intersecting with an old classmate who similarly hid behind a mask in adolescence, the two of them now finally free. "Let's be who we were already!" Ponthier sings, joyously, in the song's chorus, as if emerging from the dark into a beam of sunshine that graces them alone.
Comparisons to peers like Sabrina Carpenter, who has dug her heels into country tropes, or Chappell Roan, whose hits about being a queer outcast now fill stadiums, are tempting listening to Ponthier. But despite the artist's flashier visuals (on social media, they'll promote a song dressed like a neon green alien) and a latent, funny songwriting streak (like on gender-bending "Handsome," when they goofily compare themselves to a number of young Hollywood hunks like Timothée Chalamet and Jacob Elordi), Everywhere Isn't Texas is deeply interior. Working with a handful of major names in the pop songwriting space on the album (including Carpenter's right-hand woman Amy Allen and veteran Dan Wilson, who's co-written hits with Adele and The Chicks) Everywhere Isn't Texas stays grounded in Ponthier's experiences, and doesn't wear its country streak like caricature. Its writing hovers somewhere between the highly diaristic roots of Taylor Swift's early catalog and Phoebe Bridgers' indie rock melancholia, the latter most obvious in the crackling, layered vocals of "Angry Man." Ponthier's gift on Everywhere Isn't Texas is a subtle one: transforming so many personal revelations into songs that remind any listener that it's never too late to veer off the expected course dictated by your tiny hometown or your family. These aren't songs about running for the exits, but confident tales from the other side, and as they sing on "Ribbons & Taxes": "It's baby's first time living, and you don't get to practice."
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