The first single Noah Kahan has been teasing from his upcoming album will indeed be its title track. “The Great Divide” will emerge Friday (Jan. 30), with its parent LP due April 24 from Mercury. Kahan co-wrote the track with longtime collaborator Gabe Simon and has been playing it routinely since its live debut in April 2024.
“From a long silence forms a divide, a great expanse demanding attention,” he wrote on Instagram of the follow-up to 2022’s breakthrough album Stick Season. “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,” he continued. “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.”
No other details have yet been announced regarding The Great Divide, although Kahan worked on portions of it with producer/songwriter Aaron Dessner of the National (Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams). He’s performed a handful of other unreleased songs at recent shows, including “Deny Deny Deny,” but it’s unclear if they’ll all also appear on the new album.
Kahan will embark on a massive tour later this year in support of the The Great Divide, with specifics pending. For now, his only confirmed show is at the Bonnaroo festival outside Nashville in June.
