Phoebe Hunt shares the existential new single “Galloping” from her forthcoming album Nothing Else Matters, which releases on July 28 via Thirty Tigers. Encapsulating the overall theme of the record, “Galloping” ruminates on the never-ending chase for a dream and the implications of that pursuit. The song is accompanied by an inspirational music video. 

“’Galloping’ is about the never-ending chase for the dream,” says Hunt. “The quest for what is constantly out of reach. The race for the thrill. The desire to win. The mental and emotional challenge we put ourselves in to become ‘something more’ when all we really want is to get back home.” 

After years of writing, recording, and touring with genre-bending folk band The Belleville Outfit, and more recently as bandleader with her own backing band The Gatherers, Nothing Else Matters finds Phoebe Hunt as a woman standing alone with just her voice and her fiddle. The songs were born amidst a sense of frustration with the difficulties of scheduling and distance, when she was off the road in Nashville during 2020, far from her bandmates in Brooklyn. As she flipped through a notebook of around thirty song ideas she’d written over the course of several months, Hunt knew that she was ready to make another record and wanted a way to express herself in spite of the circumstances. The debut single and title track “Nothing Else Matters” is a beautifully sparse coming-of-age song that was recently featured at The Bluegrass Situation.

Though this is Hunt’s most stripped down outing to date, there is an unmatched strength at the heart of Nothing Else Matters. Through eleven powerful and haunting tracks, all written by Hunt with co-writers including Maya Devitry, Jillette Johnson, and Dustin Welch, she grapples with existential implications of what it means to be both an artist and a human being. But while there’s a fluid sense of questioning, the final takeaway is the deep, authentic expression of a woman who knows she is in fact enough. In spite of her circumstances, in opposition to the difficulties, she has the answer to all of it already—flowing through her hands and across her instrument, moving through her chest and out of her mouth. 

Photo Courtesy: Nicola Gell