Andrew Combs

Hailed by everyone from NPR (who hosted Combs for an acclaimed Tiny Desk performance in 2023) to Rolling Stone (who deemed him "a pop perfectionist"), Combs has built his career with a chameleonic sound that explores subtlety, nuance, and the grey area between folk, country, and classic pop. The exploration continues with Dream Pictures, an album that finds its creator embracing atmospheric textures and heady, homegrown experimentation. The album opens with "Fly In My Wine" — an instrumental sound collage laced with upright piano, buzzing pedal steel, and field-recorded audio from a visit to Richard Serra's installation at the Bilbao Guggenheim — and closes with the title track, where Combs' voice leaps into a gorgeous falsetto during every chorus. Between those two bookends is a record that's astral one moment and delicately earthbound the next, grounded in genuine song craft and a willingness to get weird.