Noah Kahan amps up the stomp and holler genre with The Great Divide, reigniting a fire that many had tried to put out before. We were close but the kindling brought to the flame fallen on by Mumford and Sons is still, somehow, burning. Kahan is at least earnest despite his popularity. A reissue of Stick Season where each song featured a familiar artist or big name from 2024 did feel a bit like a cash-in, but some moments actively revamped the songs and gave them a refreshing new layer. The Great Divide offers a direct contrast to Stick Season but, at its core, maintains that inevitably relevant feeling of leaving your hometown. It’s an easy talking point for those who found themselves with a mixed bag of emotions in tow when they headed to pastures new. Sam Fender, who collaborated with Kahan for the Stick Season reissue, set a contemporary benchmark for that sound that The Great Divide can never reach. Thematically, that is.
Kahan’s brand of folk rock is a welcome one. He has layered a few subgenres on top of one another, and it is, effectively, a nice time to be had with a strong voice and a solid songwriter. Whether he can go the distance, that is what The Great Divide seeks to answer. Kahan has a clean and clinical voice, which has him struggling to stand out. He’s too tailor-made for pop flavours that never last. A soft voice is not a bad voice, but it is when the lyrical standouts aren’t all that great. What can be heard as considerate actually feels rather cowardly. Opening song End of August notes neighbours who vote for someone who will always win, but never does Kahan show he has the nerve to take a sharper prod at those who do, or to question why. He just “mmm’s” his way through without penetrating that politically sensitive moment. He dodges this often on The Great Divide in favour of safe-sounding, piano-led instrumentals. Nice enough the first time, but over an hour begins to stagnate.
A trouble Kahan never quite manages to overcome on The Great Divide is the simpler tone of his songwriting. Ideas which are separated from song to song that, if overlapping and complimentary to one another, would gel much better than the staggered slog that he has put out here. Moments of contemplation are much easier when there is a reason for us to contemplate. Kahan hopes his listeners fill in the blanks, though this is not a problem unique to him. He deals almost entirely in cliché to get to the emotional core of his song. Packs of cigarettes, hopeful, floaty acoustics, these are the fundamentals of the country genre and Kahan does very little to emphasize what these foundations can do for his work. He plods along with a light and nice style, but not much more than that. There’s a minor pick-up in quality around Paid Time Off, but there isn’t much else from there.
Kahan notes that he has soul, still, on Haircut. That is subject to opinion. He rattles off a quantity that’ll impress his fans and have them wanting more, but too much of a good thing comes to mind. Too much of a middling writer is worse, as evidenced by The Great Divide. Kahan is popular through that cliché style of writing and would be hard-pressed to break from that now. A shame that he cannot; he has done little with this collection of songs other than pluck at people’s heartstrings so hard they’re blind to the obvious commentary he so frequently makes throughout this fourth studio album. Instrumental consistency and overlap from song to song is no problem if the message changes. It does not for Kahan. There is hardly even the suggestion of uncharted waters here, and it becomes a similarly sounding crunch of stomp-and-holler stylishness.
