Hovvdy Announce 'Big World,' Share 'Try Try Try'

Hovvdy have announced Big World, a new album due August 14 via Arts & Crafts, and shared its first preview, Try Try Try. The record follows the Austin-born duo’s 2024 self-titled double album and arrives after Charlie Martin and Will Taylor’s move to Nashville, a shift Pitchfork notes is reflected in a more tune-oriented writing approach.

That is the right kind of course correction for Hovvdy. Their best songs tend to feel tiny until they suddenly are not: soft-focus guitar figures, half-mumbled hooks, domestic details that start glowing when the melody catches them from the side. After a generous double album, Big World sounds like a deliberate compression move rather than a retreat.

“The last record felt like such a generous offering: a double-album, deeply personal, you can literally hear me crying on some songs,” Martin says in a press release quoted by Pitchfork and Stereogum. “With this one, we wanted to take on the challenge of making something more concise and to the point, and give the fans something that feels like a shorter but more exciting ride.”

Stereogum reports that Big World was recorded between Nashville and Asheville with longtime collaborator Ben Littlejohn producing. The band also changed its process, arriving with instrumentals fully demoed but lyrics unwritten, letting the words happen in the room. That tracks with Try Try Try, which Stereogum hears as a tight, propulsive power-pop chug while Pitchfork frames its Michael Rees-directed video as a few-beers, home-rehearsal setup.

Hovvdy have a long run of dates behind the record, beginning with June shows supporting Bleachers, August dates supporting Wilco, and a fall North American headline tour that wraps with two nights at Nashville’s The Blue Room. If Big World is meant to be the concise one, the tour is not following that instruction.