From the moment I first heard Brennan Wedl rasp “Sock it to me!” at the chorus of “Scorpio,” I was sold, and not just because she was singing about my star sign. The song that opens her self-titled album fizzes like the shaken-up Diet Coke can in the car that she says is “ready to explode.” Wedl sounds like she’s about to do the same, a vocal hybrid of Lucinda Williams and Liz Phair ricocheting around a bounce house constructed of thick slabs of electric guitar and some hearty taps of cowbell. Almost a decade ago, when the Minnesota-born Wedl was a college student living in Boston, she shared vocal duties with bandmates Lea Jaffe and Otto Klammer as a member of the short-lived queercore outfit Dazey and the Scouts, whose 2017 EP Maggot found a new cult fanbase on TikTok in the early 2021. A lot has happened since Dazey and the Scouts amicably disbanded—according to Wedl, they still maintain a “pretty active” group chat. Wedl grew up, moved to Nashville, signed to ANTI-. She amassed a star-studded crew of collaborators, including labelmates MJ Lenderman and Katie Crutchfield, sought-after alt-country and indie rock producer Brad Cook, and grunge revivalist Lindsey Jordan, all of whom have contributed to Wedl’s debut. Though her attitude undoubtedly remains—Wedl’s younger self would be proud of the way she now hisses “Roses between your teeth / I’ll be so sweet it’ll make your tongue bleed”—there’s a pretty vast sonic distance between her self-titled and her work with Dazey. While Wedl once favored tinny guitar sounds influenced by surf-rock and riot grrrl bands, her instrumentals have been beefed up into something with more muscle and some twang to boot. The same can be said of her voice, which melts over every arrangement like molasses—thick, warm, slow, and dark, all of its contours on 360 display. A country pivot is practically a rite of passage for any rockstar who spends some time in Nashville; luckily Wedl takes to it like a lifer. Her outlaw drawl and rhinestone-studded misadventures of knocking back a few too many at local honky tonks never feels put-on. “I felt like June Carter just swingin’ around in the arms of a man with tattoos,” she muses on “Fake Cowboy,” a slow-seared ballad about a one night stand that feels like the little sister to Kacey Musgraves’ “Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy.” With Wedl’s clear-eyed narration, pliable alto voice, and snappy humor, her songs light up like the “neon blue” she mentions at the beginning of the jumpy early-album shredder “I Know How This Goes.” It’s a color motif that’ll return throughout the record: on “High Priestess,” which offers a rare showcase of the stunning upper reaches of her head voice, Wedl ponders how much of her life is just fodder for stories: “My pen is bending nights of reckoning / and hotel room blues”; later, on “June Gloom,” she shouts out Bob Dylan in her description of a miserable lover who’s “tangled up in blues / in your funeral shoes.” Such observations might feel trite or too well-trodden in the hands of a lesser songwriter, but Brennan’s affinity for established country kitsch sounds intuitive to her, and her snarky disposition is balanced by unmatched earnestness. Who else in the already oversaturated alt-country revival could bring back slang like “freakazoid” or swoon “You’re so rock ’n roll” with zero irony? Wedl makes seemingly outdated genre tropes and vintage flourishes sound new and natural, and her embrace of them only makes the novelty of a line like “Let’s get on the Jumbotron at MSG and shake it like an Etch-A-Sketch” more impressive. Though she’s been releasing solo singles and EPs for the past couple years, this record feels like Wedl’s definitive moment of striking out on her own, proving herself as a daring leading lady of Southern rock. To return to the Lucinda Williams/Liz Phair comparison from earlier, there were two songs I found myself repeatedly thinking of while listening to this record: “Happy Woman Blues” and “Mesmerizing” respectively, two very different songs sonically and stylistically, united by an urgency to make the inner workings of one’s mind and heart known at all costs. Brennan Wedl crash-lands in the spotlight in a similar fashion, rough around the edges but burning too bright to ignore. On “Fake Cowboy,” she scans the bar for a rockstar, but all she really needs to do is look in the mirror. [ANTI-] Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.