- Record Label: Interscope Records/Lost Highway
- Release Date: Oct 24, 2025
Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Oct 24, 2025This is a singer/songwriter record in the classic sense. “Returning to Myself” in this case involves sort of returning to the 1970s, a little bit, when you’d put on an LP by a finger-picking sage and fully expect, however foolishly, that it could change your life. Who knows — this one might, in tiny increments, one acoustic guitar lick or exhortation to live fully at a time.
-
Oct 24, 2025Returning to Myself does the difficult work of cracking open the soul to let flow Carlile’s vulnerability, sans traces of flagellation; coming back to the studio to lay down new songs following the substantial gap since her 2021 album In These Silent Days, she has a great deal to say, and she says it gently but firmly, with conviction but without forced redress.
-
Oct 23, 2025The well-decorated singer-songwriter is well past the point of trying to prove anything. Yet, it’s refreshing to see Carlile embracing new approaches. And, of course, it’s beautifully and articulately rendered.
-
MojoOct 23, 2025There's a fine story-telling country song (No One Knows Us); a dramatic rocker (Church & State) - and songs whose piano and multiple harmonies feel like church (You Without Me; Joni). But it never sounds less than gorgeous. [Dec 2025, p.78]
-
Oct 23, 2025With its comparatively restrained approach only reasserting Carlile's gifts as a confident, compassionate, and sympathetic communicator, Returning to Myself offers an equally compelling edition of the musician that may appeal to new, less country-inclined fans.
-
Nov 17, 2025Returning to Myself mostly stays subdued, fitting for the material, but Carlile does rock out, most notably on the explicitly U2-inspired “Church & State”.
-
Oct 24, 2025Returning to Myself is at its best when most committed to Carlile’s interiority. When it strays from that, namely on the Joni Mitchell tribute “Joni,” its premise gets diluted.
-
Classic Rock MagazineOct 23, 2025This is glorious stuff: the punchy, thin lipped Church & State; the affecting wonderfully harmonies of A Woman Oversees; the slowly uncoiling storytelling bound up in the lingering A Long Goodbye. [Nov 2025, p.77]