Album Review: Noah Kahan - 'The Great Divide'
There is something about Noah Kahan’s new album that feels familiar. “The Great Divide” is comforting in a way that’s hard to manufacture.
Kahan leans fully into this sense of warmth and nostalgia, delivering a record that feels both like a continuation of everything fans already love, whilst marking a subtle, searching step forward.
From the first listen, it’s clear - this is unmistakably Noah Kahan. The layered vocals, the homely, almost fireside intimacy, it has it all. But what elevates “The Great Divide” beyond a simple retread is the emotional clarity running through it. If “Stick Season” was his breakthrough, this feels like the reckoning that follows.
The emotional depth of this album is sharpened further if you’ve seen his recent documentary “Noah Kahan: Out of Body,” it reframes the singer-songwriter not just as a storyteller, but as someone actively living through the weight of the stories he tells. The documentary peels back the curtain on his personal struggles, and “The Great Divide” feels, in many ways, like the musical counterpart. It’s intimate, vulnerable, and unflinchingly human.
The title track, “The Great Divide,” sets the tone early. It echoes the emotional DNA of “Orange Juice,” tracing the quiet aftermath of a fractured relationship, with a kind of aching goodwill. It’s the sound of wishing someone well from a distance and despite the fact that you are no longer close, you still want the best for them.
Kahan explains that this was “the first time he sat down with a guitar since Stick Season,” adding that it “felt like there’s a real story here that feels sonically where I want to be and comes from a more mature place, but also lyrically is touching on something that’s not retreading ground for me.”
Elsewhere, “Paid Time Off” leans further into folk, its foot-tapping rhythm, whilst “Willing and Able” stands out as one of the record’s most affecting moments. A portrait of sibling love in all its messy, unfiltered honesty, it captures the peculiar intimacy of relationships that can swing from tenderness to conflict in seconds. Lines like “we can fight like we used to fight, boney limbs, red-faced and teary-eyed” and “so come on, let’s fight about the childhood like we don’t care what the other one thinks” feel almost intrusive in their specificity in the best way. And then, in a quiet gut-punch, “wish I could do nothing with you” lands as a simple but devastating expression of the way that life can get in the way.
There’s a noticeable willingness across the album to let songs breathe and have their time to shine. Many stretch longer than expected, unspooling at their own pace rather than rushing toward a hook.
Still, Kahan hasn’t lost his instinct for anthems. “Dashboard” and “Deny Deny Deny” have all the makings of a live staple, they are the kind of songs destined to be screamed back at him in arenas and stadiums. It’s easy to imagine them echoing across massive crowds this summer, a shared catharsis between artist and audience.
“Headed North” is like a conversation, or more, a letter to a friend - the whole album is conversational as Kahan tells a story whilst warmth of his voice just melts into the tones that fans know and love.
And yet, for all the scale his career has reached, “The Great Divide” feels rooted in something much smaller. Recorded across spaces like a secluded farm outside Nashville and intimate studio environments, the album carries a sense of isolation that mirrors its themes. Kahan himself has spoken about the strange loneliness that can follow success, that disorienting feeling of achieving everything you dreamed of and still feeling unmoored. That tension sits at the heart of this record.
“It’s a life,” he adds of his new normal, “that quite frankly I didn’t feel like I deserved or even earned.
“You’d be surprised by how many people feel isolated by success and isolated by the big moment.”
To that end, as has long been his natural bent, Kahan channelled this admittedly uncomfortable tension into highly detailed yet universally relatable songs that now appear on his forthcoming album. “I think it’s important to be honest about what it really feels like for me right now,” he adds of his creative mindset.
Ultimately, “The Great Divide” doesn’t try to reinvent Noah Kahan. It doesn’t need to. Instead, it refines what he does best: capturing the quiet, complicated emotions that live between life’s big moments.
It’s the sound of an artist learning how to sit with his own contradictions, and inviting listeners to do the same - he’s just a regular person who grew up in a small town and wants people to know that it’s okay to struggle and to talk about these struggles, because at the end of the day, we’re all human.
Words by Hollie Carr
