Kacey Musgraves Stretched Country Into Disco on Golden Hour — and It Holds Up Eight Years Later

Kacey Musgraves opens up her sound on Golden Hour, trading strict country lines for pop, disco and a haze of dreamlike sound. The album runs 13 tracks and 45 minutes, and it moves like a single mood rather than a set of singles. Musgraves sings about love, loss and wonder with a directness that never wears thin.

The Opening Run: Slow Burn to Butterflies

Slow Burn starts the record at a walking pace, all steel guitar and patience, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Lonely Weekend keeps the mood low-lit and unhurried. Then Butterflies lifts the record into full color, a love song built on a simple, glowing hook that critics singled out as one of the best things here.

Mother and the Quiet Middle

Oh, What a World leans into electronic effects and synth without losing the plain delivery Musgraves is known for. Mother is the shortest thing on the album at 1:18, a brief, plain pause that hits harder for its size. Love Is a Wild Thing and Space Cowboy round out the middle stretch, the latter another standout, its images blunt and plain: a horse let out of a gate, a heart let go the same way.

Happy & Sad sits right at the center of the record.

It names its own contradiction in the title and then proves it, joy and dread sung in the same breath, and it’s one of the most quietly painful tracks Musgraves has put to tape.

Velvet Elvis Through High Horse

Velvet Elvis is a short, playful turn, all glitter and no weight, a breather before the record’s back half. Wonder Woman turns inward again, plain about the cost of holding a relationship together alone. High Horse closes this stretch as the album’s disco move, a genuine dance track with a chorus built for singing along, and it’s one of the tracks that earns Golden Hour its reputation as a genre-blender rather than a straight country record.

Golden Hour and Rainbow

Golden Hour, the song, is the peak of the record: warm, unhurried, in love without irony. Rainbow closes things on a note of comfort rather than resolution, a quiet hand extended rather than a grand finish. Both tracks were called out by critics, and both earn it.

Here’s the album laid out in full, running order kept as released:

What the Critics Heard

Pitchfork wrote that “the mystical grandeur of Golden Hour creates a magnetic effect as Kacey Musgraves sings simply about the world as if she’s the first person to notice.” One review described the sound of the record as warm and full, sitting between two hard feelings — one of pain, one of getting past it. Metacritic put the album at 89 out of 100. Pitchfork’s own score landed at 8.7 out of 10.

Where the Reviews Split

Not every reviewer was won over completely.

A handful of dissenting notices called parts of the record dull or too pop-leaning, arguing that Musgraves had drifted too far from the genre that made her name. Those complaints are worth naming, but they don’t hold up against the record as a whole. Golden Hour isn’t diluted country — it’s country stretched wide enough to hold disco and a dreamlike haze without breaking, and Musgraves sounds fully in control of the mix the entire way through.

The Verdict on Golden Hour

This is a record about seeing the world clearly for once, love included, and it never goes too far to make that point. The writing stays plain and personal even when the production goes wide. Every shift in genre serves the song underneath it, not the other way around.

Golden Hour earns its praise. The Metacritic score of 89 and Pitchfork’s 8.7 both back that up, and the record plays like it, warm and sure of itself from Slow Burn to Rainbow — with Butterflies, High Horse, Slow Burn, Space Cowboy, the title track and Rainbow standing tallest on their own.

album review · country pop · Golden Hour · Kacey Musgraves · Pitchfork