Could Alt-Country Star This Is Lorelei Be Preparing to Pivot? ‘This Album Is the Central Point of a Phase’

The thing is,” Nate Amos says between drags of a Marlboro and sips from a zero-sugar Monster Energy, “I’m, like, the perfect age to be a Slipknot kid.

But I ­never got into metal until I was in my late 20s.” On this stiflingly humid late-July afternoon, Amos — the 35-year-old singer-songwriter and mastermind of This Is Lorelei — is perched on a bench in the backyard of a bar in Manhattan’s East Village, draped in a baggy black Slipknot T-shirt, headphones coiled around his neck.

Add in his shaggy brown mane and tattooed knuckles, and he looks the part of a Slipknot kid.

Yet, in conversation, Amos has a deep reverence for a range of genres: In his formative years, he fell in love with the experimental electronic music genre IDM (intelligent dance music) of Flying Lotus (“I really ate that shit up”), Radiohead (“I still look at Kid A and Amnesiac as the Bible”) and The Beach Boys (“there are moments on [ Pet Sounds ] that remain some of the most beautiful moments in pop music”).

Fresh off an appearance at Newport Folk Festival, he also cites Americana favorites like Lucinda Williams and Mary Chapin Carpenter — artists who are more indicative of the music that has made This Is Lorelei one of the most acclaimed acts in the ever-expanding subgenre broadly considered “alt-country.” His new album, The Singer in My Band , out Sept.

11 on Matador, doesn’t just mark a new compositional peak for the musician who has been covered by the likes of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and Geese’s Cameron Winter, but also a refinement of the disarming Americana-inflected indie-rock that earned him a following with his 2024 breakout, Box for Buddy, Box for Star .

Even so, the creatively restless Amos is already eyeing his next musical move.

Growing up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Amos and his sister, Sarah, would jam with their father, the bluegrass musician Bob Amos.

“My dad had Pro Tools,” Amos recalls.

“I would essentially be his studio assistant.

He would show me how to do stuff; even when I was really little, he had me pushing faders and shit.” While studying “audio stuff” at Chicago’s Columbia College in the early 2010s, Amos eagerly got a job at a studio and continued to learn the ropes — and when visiting Vermont on breaks, he began using the downtime to do his own home recording projects, which he dubbed This Is Lorelei.

He posted his first, self-titled release on Bandcamp on New Year’s Day 2014, and soon, he couldn’t confine his experimentation to the Northeast; in Chicago, he and his roommates engaged in “friendly competition” to make as much music as they possibly could.

“There was this mad dash that really forced Lorelei into my day-to-day structure as a writer,” he says.