Couvo’s ‘Empty Country’ is In It With Us
A Record for These Times, These Streets, and Life in The Middle of It
by calli ferguson
Empty Country Album Cover by Michelle LoBianco
When words, systems, and ‘answers’ can’t quite capture the entangled emotion they reach for, music can help to bridge the gap. Empty Country, an album released this summer by New York City indie rock artist Couvo, is a good soundtrack for moments like those.
One description for Couvo’s music reads: “the perfect music for your End of the World playlist.” A phrase that made me think… How do you know about that playlist??
Like many people, I’ve turned to music in some of my stickiest confrontations with existential dread and troubling times. I have scraped the archives of cultural or artistic works that could (maybe) make (some form of) emotional “sense” of things. I’d peer into music history for clues about how people in the past were peopling through their own troubled eras. I’d desperately throw together playlists. Some songs fit (often in contorted ways) into the ‘protest’ genre, and others simply evoked emotional catharsis– they felt human with me. “for these ___ times,” I titled one playlist in 2020.
What most of us look for when we create an “End of the World” playlist is a place to put our emotions, or some piece of media to make sense of them with. What Josh Couvares (of Couvo) delivers with his latest album is not necessarily answers, but a companion in the questions.
Part of that companionship comes through sonic nostalgia. These songs braid early-2000s alternative rock anthems, a bit of heartland grit, folksy lyricism, and modern reverb.
The album listens smoothly, starting off strong with the eponymous track, “Empty Country”. You only get one shot at a first impression, and this one introduces itself with a danceable rhythm and a catchy melody, coming in with the lyrics: “Someone’s running down the street/ Screaming, ‘The market’s gonna crash.’ ” Immediately, we’re dancing through the anxiety of an unpredictable political landscape. It’s a familiar paradox: everything on the brink of collapse, but we savor the joy we still need. Sometimes joy has to arrive disguised as catharsis. That’s what happens in this chorus.
There’s certainly something Springsteen-coded at work here. Down to hiding political vegetables in a jammable anthem recipe, I might describe “Born In The USA” using pretty similar language. But Couvo threads in that distinctly early-aughts ache, giving the record its familiar but still-new emotional texture.
As the album progresses, it juggles these broader themes with personal ones (kind of how many of us feel we need to). While living this unprecedented collective experience, we are also faced with our own lives: dreams, love, healing, and everyday survival. One of Empty Country’s gifts is how it makes a listener feel accompanied through it all. Even when the feelings are confusing or contradictory, there is magic in having art that reminds us we’re not alone in it (cliché as that may sound). It’s a particularly fun listen for young people in New York City. Couvo shouts out local spots from Goldie’s Bar to Union Pool, Goodnight Sonny, and several streets in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan– the specificity of it is a satisfying touch to the ‘we’re all stumbling through it together’ feeling. What you get here is something that was probably missing from all of my previous ‘End of the World’-type playlists: a project from someone who’s also “in it”.
photo by Gannon Padget
On the note of the thematic depth, I would be remiss not to mention the incredibly poetic lyricism all over Empty Country. “Why Do You Want” and “A Sharp Knife” both feel dreamy in sound and theme. They deal with what we genuinely want versus what we’ve been taught to want, and the soft temptation to choose something simpler. “A Sharp Knife” brings the album into a quieter, more vulnerable space. Its lyrics are gripping. For instance:
Well I said, I don’t know, but you talk too loud
When you say you wanna live quiet and free
Yeah, you got your dreams
But your voice sounds like a match looking for gasoline
And it won’t be hard to find that spark for free
But when it comes I hope you’re done with me.
It’s followed by a verse about nuns who pray for a hundred years, wishing for something to “make my days so small and clear”. It’s this kind of relatable search for meaning-making that made Empty Country hit. Couvo returns to these everyday emotional negotiations like imagined dreams versus actualized manifestations of them, action versus exhaustion, motion versus pause.
Empty Country sits inside that search. It’s a project willing to hold two truths at once: the chaos of the world spinning out and the tenderness of trying to live inside it. “Days of Disaray” does this in almost eight minutes of what feels like a poem set to a tune. It imagines a psychic’s response to loneliness, or Bezos dropped into the “real world,” and in concert with the album, brings us back to the very human desire of trying to locate ourselves within the madness.
For “end of the world” music, this album seems to be more interested in the messy middle. It meets us where we are— whether it’s walking down Nassau Avenue, spiraling on the L Train, or mulling over why the world feels both too big and too small— in the reality of what it means to be a person right now. The fun part is in finding out what that means. So, whether the record is something to decode or be in your feels with, my note for you, listener, would be to engage with Empty Country with presence, and see what threads it tugs for you.
💿 stream Empty Country on spotify or On Soundcloud
📻 stay tuned with Couvo on Instagram or On Youtube