TLDR
Southall opens up their sound and their past on the new album “Kinfolk”, then carries those family stories onto a national tour with rock heavyweights.
Some bands tighten the rules when the spotlight gets brighter. Southall did the opposite. In an Oklahoma studio, frontman Read Southall walked in with one guiding principle for “Kinfolk”, the group’s first album in three years. As he put it, “Anything goes.”
The band had already survived one reinvention. Their self-titled 2023 album, “Southall”, marked the move from the Read Southall Band to a leaner, louder identity. That record pushed hard into room-filling rock and cut away most of the country flavor that defined their early days on the Red Dirt circuit. It did the job, planting a flag for the renamed band, but it also left emotional corners of their story unexplored.
“Kinfolk” is the response. Recorded at 115 Recording in Norman, Oklahoma, with producer Wes Sharon, its nine tracks remove the last remaining guardrails. Sharon leaned into the chaos rather than sanding it down. “If you’re trying to corral everything, you’re probably gonna lose a lot,” he says. “I like challenges, and I also think the listeners are looking for something other than the obvious.”
The heart of that risk lives in “Southwestern Son”, Read Southall’s most personal song to date. It revisits the family farm that went under when he was a teenager. Over electric twang, he sings, “Worst thing that ever really happened to me / We lost the farm when I was just thirteen / Turns out burnt up cotton ain’t worth nothing at all.” He admits, “I’ve always wanted to write that song and never did. I wanted to explain why I was the way I was.”
Time and distance from that loss sharpened the perspective. Southall recalls watching friends from more comfortable homes spin out. “All my friends that grew up with successful parents are all the ones that are addicted to dope and can’t get it together,” he says. “I look back now and see that, without it, I would have been just like that.” What once felt like a door slamming shut begins to sound, on “Kinfolk”, like the rough beginning of a new path.
Across the album, home is less a place than a pressure point. “Okie Pokin’ Out” plays like a loud, winking love letter to Oklahoma, with nods to beating the Texas Longhorns, onion-fried burgers, and Red Dirt pride. At the other extreme sits “Worse Things”, written by drummer Reid Barber, who left the band in March after a decade. Built around the line “there’s worse things in this life than dying”, it traces the slow decline of a loved one. Sharon surrounds it with strings and choral vocals that feel like a front-row seat at a small-town funeral.
On “House Money”, electric guitars and percussion clatter together to mimic slot machines and coins sliding across casino felt. The production choices keep circling the same question. How much of who you are comes from the ground you grew up on, and how much from the way you fight to leave it, or stay?
Those questions are about to echo far beyond Oklahoma. Following the release of “Kinfolk”, Southall is stepping onto the biggest stages of their career on the Southern Hospitality Tour, co-headlined by the Black Crowes and Whiskey Myers, scheduled from May through August 2026. It is a leap from Red Dirt bars to cross-country sheds, and a test of whether intensely personal songs about farms, funerals, and family pride can connect from the lawn seats.
“Kinfolk” does not choose between muscle and vulnerability. It lets both stand in the same light. If the gamble connects, Southall’s latest chapter may read less like a regional success story and more like the first draft of a long-haul American rock career.
Will “Kinfolk” turn Southall from a Red Dirt favorite into a lasting touring force, or does the album hit closest for those who share their small-town roots?
