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Apr 30, 2026Yet another career-best offering. .... Her voice is clear, pure and precise – delivered over deftly picked acoustic and swooning slide guitars – making each truth all the more devastating. Middle of Nowhere isn’t Musgraves at an impasse. No, she’s exactly where she needs to be.
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May 1, 2026That’s the trick of Middle of Nowhere: it never rushes to define what comes next. Instead, Musgraves lingers in the in-between, finding humor, heartbreak and a surprising amount of peace along the way.
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May 5, 2026Musgraves is gifted at letting the melodrama slip into something sensual and ‘Mexico Honey’, and its neon-lit innuendos, proves that her pen is still razor sharp. .... Her voice is as serene as ever and it rarely complicates her desire to embrace the undefined. If anything, it amplifies it through her day-glo incisiveness.
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May 1, 2026The album’s only real misfire, the half-rapped profession of lust “Mexico Honey,” is an indicator that the “dry spell” announced toward the beginning of the album is over. But creatively, “Middle of Nowhere” is anything but a dry spell; this is her true return to a deeper well.
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May 1, 2026With her sharp pen and a deft balance of traditional and modern sounds, Middle of Nowhere is a reminder of why Musgraves is a lone star of her calibre.
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May 1, 2026Subtly arranged, tinged with western swing and traditional Mexican music, the low-key sound gets back to Musgraves’ rural roots and makes a smart backdrop to these beautifully weary songs about reckoning with delusion.
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Apr 30, 2026Musgraves’ chameleon soul is clearly her superpower, as none of those new terrains have ever felt wholly out of place for her. But it makes sense that this is where the dime-store cowgirl sounds most self-assured.
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Apr 30, 2026If Musgraves seemed slightly adrift in the years since 2018’s Golden Hour, Middle of Nowhere marks a true homecoming.
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UncutApr 30, 2026Line for line it's her best and funniest album in a decade. [Jun 2026, p.33]
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Apr 30, 2026She knows exactly what she’s doing here – instead of simply incorporating other musical elements within country, Musgraves is inverting the process – she’s incorporating country music elements within other musical forms, often searching the best balance between the two.
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Apr 30, 2026Middle of Nowhere are confident and cohesive, but Musgrave’s lyrical point of view seems to blow hither and yon from song to song.
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May 1, 2026A sumptuously produced record with an enviable hit-to-miss ratio, Middle of Nowhere delivers more than enough drama, humour, and sparkle to solidify Musgraves’ place on the country music throne.
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May 4, 2026Although the classic country production gives Middle of Nowhere a more conservative tone compared to Deeper Well or Golden Hour, Kacey Musgraves nonetheless continues to create unified narratives that almost every listener can relate to, no matter their walk of life.
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May 1, 2026It isn’t flawless: a few tracks blur together in the middle stretch, and some lyrical moments fall flat. But the integrity and conviction behind the creative statement more than compensate.
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May 1, 2026Sometimes staid and sometimes stirring, Middle of Nowhere finds her at a creative crossroads, in the middle of the road.