For the past three years, poet and musician Lou Turner has been steadily road dogging it across the country and world, as a member of Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band, on a MJ Lenderman tour, and in her own trio of Nashville indie chooglers, the Styrofoam Winos, but for her masterful new album Strangels, Turner went back home. Feeling the need for solitary exploration while buoyed by the confidence she gained playing stages from Newport to Austin City Limits, she decided to record in her home studio, self-produce, and play almost all the instruments herself (her partner and fellow Winos member Trevor Nikrant contributes pedal steel on a few tracks and keys on one). What emerged was Turner at her freest and most relaxed—her lyrics, succinct and direct, playful and deep; her playing—of guitars, electric bass, upright bass, drums, flute, marimba, synthesizer, organ, and percussion—joyful and adventurous, spanning influences from Judee Sill to Alice Coltrane to Neil Young. Though largely the work of Turner alone, Strangels is not a lonely record. Like her two previous SPINSTER releases, this too is an album with a consistent theme, through which Turner, Noah-like, builds her own weird ark of the animal kingdom’s “strangels” (a portmanteau of strange angels): horses and “bad boy” snakes, fireflies and vultures (“though demonized in our culture”), as she ventures into the flood waters of thematic dualities: the strange and the angelic, the folky and the pokey, the earth-bound and the heavenly, and all the spirited interspecies and interdimensional encounters between. 

Strangels will be released November 6, 2026 on vinyl, CD, and digital platforms.

Strangels Tracklist:

Side A

1. Ants Underfoot

2. Rattle Yr Dags

3. Hidden Lake 

4. For the Love of the Game

5. Beaver Moon

Side B

1. Nouns of Assemblage

2. Sure Ain’t a Horse

3. All That Green

4. No Gate

5. Ark

6. Strange Angels

All songs on Strangels by Lou Turner. Vocals, guitars, electric bass, upright bass, drums, flute, marimba, synthesizer, organ, and percussion by Lou Turner. Pedal steel on tracks 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 11 + keys on 11 by Trevor Nikrant. Strangels was produced by Lou Turner and engineered and mixed by Trevor Nikrant at the Golden Tone Zone, with assistance from Lou Turner. Mastered by Mikey Young. Album cover photos by Trevor Nikrant. Lettering by Bê.