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Mar 19, 2025 Web Exclusive By Frank Valish

For 20 years, The Devil Makes Three have been making folk music with a punk spirit. Since joining New West Records, the trio have made some of the best music of that lengthy career in the albums I’m a Stranger Here, Redemption & Ruin, and their last, 2018’s Chains Are Broken. And while it took them seven years between albums, the band’s new LP, Spirits, is unquestionably their best.

There is grief, sadness, despair, and remembrance in Spirits. There’s drinking, drugging, fighting demons, and scraping nickels together to get by. There’s living and there’s life. At times it’s a celebration, at times a wake, all of the tried and true themes of traditional Appalachian music, rendered expertly by a trio of players that evoke a bygone era while somehow never sounding anachronistic but always fresh.

Spirits begins with a trio of haunting masterpieces, “Lights on Me,” “Spirits,” and “Ghosts are Weak,” songs that embody The Devil Makes Three’s loping bare-bones style and set the topical template for the album as a unified work. “Half as High” swings with danceable pulse and guitar work that sounds straight from Johnny Cash’s Tennessee Two. “Hard Times” sounds like a traditional ballad, lamenting poverty and class difference. “The Dark Gets the Best of You” is a haunting commentary on times of division. “I Love Doing Drugs” is a tongue-in-cheek, light-hearted romp. And the album ends with a lullaby reminiscence of days gone by called “Poison Well.”

Together as a 12-track piece (13 if you buy the CD version), Spirits coheres beautifully, sequenced in a manner that takes you on musical journey. And it’s one you’ll yearn to revisit, many times simply flipping the album over at the conclusion of “Poison Well” and starting all over again from the beginning. (www.thedevilmakesthree.com)

Author rating: 8/10