ALBUM REVIEW: ‘Believer’ Finds NC Duo Blue Cactus Confident and Sure-Footed

Believer, the latest from North Carolina country duo Blue Cactus, starts strong.

“Everyone says ‘when it rains, it pours,’” Steph Stewart sings. “I ain’t seen this kind of rain before.” It’s an effective country songwriting technique:Sstart broad with a common idiom, then narrow the topic to something more personal. With its multiple hooks, with its jangle and drive, “This Kind of Rain” could easily be the lead single from a Nashville working songwriter rather than a duo from central North Carolina.

“I don’t know if I’m getting better / if I’m getting worse,” Stewart sings. “I’m getting by.”

Yes, of course, North Carolina is a music state with deep sonic traditions. It boasts songwriters and pickers and gospel choirs, plus thriving communities of hip-hop, indie-rock, and indie-folk. Country artists, though, are rarer in this Southern state. (When Stewart and her partner Mario Arnez were interviewed before Blue Cactus’s 2017 debut, they pored over books of Nudie Suits as if studying sacred texts.) Stewart and Arnez’s unselfconscious passion for Nashville pageantry is mirrored by their dedication to hooks and arrangements — and to not making the same album twice.

Believer, the first Blue Cactus album wholly fronted by Stewart, finds Blue Cactus confident and sure-footed.

“Do you remember feeling low? / Getting high with the boys in the black light glow,” Stewart sings on the downcast, lyrically inspired “Kings.” “Flying down country roads / always late to supper but you need another upper to go.” For those of us raised in the nowhere corners of the rural South, this captures a familiar feeling of being simultaneously trapped and free. There’s an darkness here evocative of Amanda Shires.

In spots, Believer echoes Emmylou Harris, with Arnez easily serves the Buddy Miller of the equation. In fairness, the album ranges beyond country in spots. On the heels of gentle psychedelic interlude “Counting the Days,” “Paper Cup” infers the minimalist existential West Coast folk of Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad.

Believer closes with a nod to Patsy Cline. For a few verses, final track “Gone” lives in the same low-tempo twilit space as Cline’s “Faded Love” or “True Love.” Then the tune shifts from old-school Nashville waltz to Bakersfield swing, a subtle flex from a band with a respectable sonic vocabulary.

Blue Cactus’ Believer is due out April 25, 2025 via Sleepy Cat Records.