At 77 minutes and 17 tracks, Noah Kahan's fourth album The Great Divide arrives like someone who made it to the top of the mountain and discovered there's no cell service. The album documents post-fame disorientation with the kind of precision that made Stick Season a word-of-mouth phenomenon — but it also documents the specific pitfalls of success as subject matter: the anxiety about whether honesty still lands when the audience has multiplied by a factor of twenty.
The opening stretch is genuinely impressive. 'You're Gonna Go' sets the tone immediately — a piano-forward folk-rock track where Kahan sounds like he's addressing someone he can no longer reach, whether that's a past version of himself or someone specific he won't name. The title track is the album's emotional centerpiece: a meditation on a childhood friendship that fractured in the years after one person's life changed dramatically. Kahan's ability to write specificity into universal feelings has always been his sharpest tool, and here it's working.
The Bon Iver influence is everywhere — multi-tracked harmonies, layered acoustic production, tempo shifts that feel earned rather than gratuitous. But there are also moments where Kahan does something unexpected: 'Break My Heart Again' swings with an emo-adjacent guitar line that wouldn't sound out of place on a Brand New B-side. These are the moments where the album stops feeling like a singer-songwriter record and starts feeling like something stranger and better.
Then the middle stretch happens. Tracks nine through thirteen form a section The Guardian aptly described as evidence of 'uncertainty about where to edit.' The sequencing here is the record's real problem — not the songs individually, which are largely solid, but the decision to deploy them in a block that drains momentum at exactly the moment the album needs to push forward. A tighter version of this record at 12 tracks and 55 minutes would be one of the best folk-rock records of the year. At 77 minutes, it tests even sympathetic listeners.
The back half recovers. 'Homesick (Reprise)' is devastating in context, a callback to a fan-favorite that now carries the weight of everything that's changed. Closer 'Until You Come Back' is the album's most ambitious arrangement — strings, piano, and a build that takes six minutes to pay off, and then pays off completely.
What makes The Great Divide worth the investment is Kahan's refusal to aestheticize his success. Most artists who break this big write either one album thanking their fans or one album resenting them. Kahan writes about what it actually feels like to be that person in your hometown, to watch the face of someone who knew you before. That's rarer and more honest than almost anything else in this space right now.
The Great Divide is a big, occasionally unruly record that earns most of its runtime and justifies the rest through the quality of its best moments. It needs an editor. It also doesn't really care.