How a Texas Star is Reshaping the Genre’s Future
With the release of "Crisco," Miranda Lambert's tenth studio album, the country music industry will enter its second century, proving timeless genre progenitor Jimmie Rodgers right about his belief that the genre's central hubs share the letter T.
However, given everything the genre has endured over the past generation, it's notable that the 42-year-old superstar’s danceable, pop-ready, and still entirely countrified album shows that a woman from Texas, not a man from Tennessee, could be the country industry's most important performer of the moment.
Sure, many people will get caught in the proto-disco-meets-East Texas dancehall flavor of songs like the album's titular lead single. And yes, there's something wonderful about packing all the swagger of John Travolta's 80s "Urban Cowboy" leading-man energy into the presentation, Ronnie Milsap and Kenny Rogers' swagger into the aesthetic, and George Strait's rifleman assuredness into the track's overall delivery.
However, recently, on the New York Times Popcast, Lambert also simply called herself a "gun-toting redneck."
It's one of many times in this album's release cycle when the governing concept of doing and saying less to achieve more yields everything.
In the last half-decade of the genre's first 100 years, country music has achieved all of the impossible goals. Year-over-year hits, platinum- and diamond-level album and single sales that probably force the Recording Industry Association of America to gift country's hitmakers even rarer, more precious jewels in celebration.
Thus, at the cusp of year one of the next 100 years, a talented team of creatives and a peerless artist joined forces to take stock of all that's happened, strip-mine country's history for its finest elements, and redraw the metaphorical drawing board to incredible effect.
And yes, can country keep scaling to even more impossible heights with this album as the cue? In the past generation, three times as many women as men have repeated ascents of Mount Everest. Miranda has “Choosin’ Texas” breakout star Ella Langley in tow these days. Maybe, to make a statement that shouldn't feel out of turn, there's a belief that Dolly Parton, in legacy, as the world's most beloved and famous woman, is there, too.
Miranda Lambert performs at The 61st Academy of Country Music Awards held at MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 17, 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Dick Clark Productions via Getty Images)
In country music's highest tier of mainstream musical and pop cultural potential, what's unprecedented is now commonplace. "Crisco" is the album that puts that notion into its finest scope yet.
Texas Roots, Modern Collaborations, and Cultural Fusion
Every country and pop album from here on in will contain collaborations as solid as what Beyoncé's work on "Spaghettii," "Sweet Honey Buckiin'" and "Blackbiird," BigXThaPlug's entire "I Hope You're Happy," and now Miranda Lambert and Ella Langley's "Snakekin Boots" have yielded.
Queen Bey, BigX, and Lambert are all Texans.
That's important.
For a second, think Nashville's music industry is presenting you with culture, and you're wrong. Music City is actually a product distribution hub. The culture? That's nuanced, as funny as what Linda Martell tells Beyoncé about genres on "Cowboy Carter."
Country music culture is best when it's Western, rustic, and rural. That's not an empirical thought; it's a financial fact. Blend in a side order of what Lambert calls "Thelma and Louise if they didn't drive off the cliff" on the song. It's a triple-play double-down hit on so many facets of culture organic to Lambert, commercially viable in America, and world-renowned in the corners of hearts universally that the song could easily move so fast to the top of country (and potentially pop) charts that it could trip over itself.
Foremost, snakeskin boots are legendary in Western culture because they blend rugged frontier tradition with high-end luxury and counterculture rebellion. While traditional leather boots were built strictly for hard ranch work, snakeskin crafting shifts the boot's purpose from utilitarian gear to a distinct symbol of wealth, artistry, and individuality.
As well, "Thelma and Louise?" Yes, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon's recklessly entertaining buddy-comedy star vehicle turns 35 in 2026. It also earned three times its production cost, became an iconic statement of timeless outlaw feminism, and won Academy and Golden Globe Awards.
Ella Langley, Miranda Lambert at the 60th Academy Of Country Music Awards held at the Ford Center at The Star on May 08, 2025 in Frisco, Texas. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Penske Media via Getty Images)
Also, dig deeper into all things Miranda Lambert and "Thelma and Louise," and since her debut album "Kerosene," a tie has unified all those elements. Signified through the "Junk Gypsy" brand of antiquers Amie and Jolie Sikes' "Mama Tried" shirt, worn by both Lambert and Langley during the past 20 years, it loops in Merle Haggard as yet another male country influence, like the previously-mentioned quartet of Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers, George Strait and John Travolta, whose energy, via the "Crisco" album, has been matched and potentially exceeded by Lambert and company.
Neotraditionalism and Timeless Traditions
Another underrated facet of the album happens when the songs turn neotraditional.
Imagine the album as feeling like the video for Lambert and all-universe all-time vocalist Chris Stapleton's soulful Dolly- and Kenny-hearkening, Grammy-nominated stringduster disco ballad "A Song To Sing."
It transports you to a 1980s discotheque in rural Texas, with a roller-skating rink in the middle and a mechanical bull in the back room. The main floor is where the breezy, pulse-pounding romance transpires. In the back room, though, next to that mechanical bull, like Mickey Gilley's establishments of the era, the cheek-to-cheek, dip-and-twirl traditional wooing via two-stepping happens.
Natalie Hemby co-wrote "Cowboy Curtsy." Jesse Frasure's behind the boards, and Country Music Hall of Famer Paul Franklin's playing steel guitar. Hemby's one of the most Grammy-winning songwriters of the modern era. Frasure's a multi-hyphenate talent who cut his teeth working with Garth Brooks' manager, Bob Doyle, and with Young Money artists like Lil Wayne, Drake, and Nicki Minaj as a private event DJ. Paul Franklin has played pedal steel on probably all of your favorite country songs and started his career touring with the iconic Barbara Mandrell.
The quartet finds a shared bond on a heart-tugger ballad that feels culled from the Patsy Cline catalog, and it's less stunning than proof that, in country music's next chapter, the traditions live forever.
From that same era, "Two Things Can't Be True" feels like Gene Pitney's "A Town Without Pity" and Audrey Hepburn's "Moon River" are two of popular music's most incredible celebrations of the value of mastering both measure and tone as a singer and player. Similarly, Dann Huff, a guitarist with four decades of work that harkens back to Michael Jackson, delivers timelessly bittersweet, romantic tones to accompany Lambert's performance on "Two Things Can't Be True."
Say the same thing about "Whiskey Business" feeling like a rambler borrowed from any number of 1975 to 1983 male country hitmakers with a toe in Teddy Pendergrass while chasing down Kenny Rogers and Conway Twitty, or "Cutting Onions," which, strangely enough, feels like Lambert standing ten toes down on her early-era catalog in what feels like an acceptance of something of a rock-solid legacy she's developed in country's historical remembrance of itself.
Country music, like hip-hop and so many other genres, can often lean into its massively lucrative, popular future without celebrating and embracing all aspects of its past.
Crossover Swagger and Artistic Intentionality
But remembering to do so creates some of “Crisco”'s most heartwarming, celebratory moments.
There should be moments that not just fans of quality artistry, but those who work in the music industry, should take away from "Crisco."
Dave Cobb's mix on Derek Mixon's drums and JT Cure's bass on "A Song To Sing" achieves a level of universally understandable crossover swagger that country music hasn't felt since the Bee Gees were routinely active in the genre in the early 1980s.
In that song, there's a level of "masculine femininity" of sorts that feels like it's inviting two people onto and beyond the dance floor, in equal measure; it's intentionally sensual in a way that country music, perhaps because of its ever-present sacred-to-sanctified musical imbalance, does not achieve nearly often enough.
"Sunset Marquis" is a vibe. Miranda's clearly stayed in the legendary Los Angeles extended stay hotel and loves the Sunset Strip, too, not just in the casual tourist way. There's a real need to discover and curate more artists in country's crossover moment who know both what iconic country and Western things are and feel like, but can also be culturally conversant in emotional tugs at things that don't always make people feel like they have to own a pearl-snap shirt, Wranglers, and snakeskin boots to want to share in the passionate enjoyment of shared cultural awareness.
"Crisco" is fun in the same way that Dolly Parton's "Two Doors Down" is. There's a "just enough" disco flavor there to let you know there's an iridescent ball over your head. Still, there's more than enough country flavor to keep people from believing their favorite female country star of the past 20 years is throwing out the baby with the metaphorical bathwater and chasing seemingly nonexistent trends.
Overall, the level of obvious intentionality and clear desire to reverently honor so many parts of country's traditions, while carefully ensuring that another has space to thrive in ways that perhaps it hasn't in years prior, is key.
Country’s Defiantly Feminine Future
There's a hope that may exist in some hearts that the success of "Crisco" suddenly imbues country fans with the desire to hear Johnny Lee's "Looking For Love," either Terri Gibbs or Summer Dean's takes on "Somebody's Knockin," the Skatt Brothers "Night At The Outpost," or any great number of disco-fied country grooves of various interests, styles, and tastes.
Or you'll be in the female majority, wanting Riley Green, Parker McCollum, or Tucker Wetmore to return serve with some hip-shaking hits.
But what's more likely is that, as much as this album should send you to the dance floor ASAP, it's when it returns to tradition that it really settles in the listener's heart.
In general, country music is entering a fascinating era in which it can replicate any genre, any style, exceedingly well, while staying firmly within the purview of its traditions.
If you think there's something beyond that, maybe it's reimagining every male-dominated trope country has ever fostered and unleashed on the global stage, seen through a female-dominated lens.
It's not Loretta taking her man to "Fist City," and it's not Tammy standing by a man, either. Instead, it's having the temerity to tell a man that when you're in the lead, it's best to follow or get out of the way.
If you're lucky, she'll turn around and offer you the honor of a dance instead.
Beyond "country and disco," that's the meaning of country "cookin' with Crisco," now and in the future.