Orville Peck - Mule
Bee Delores declares Orville Peck's new album, Mule, one of the best albums of 2026.
From the moment the tight-knit harmonies roar in "Prologue (Eulogy of a Man Turned Mule)," bound by guests Emmylou Harris, Noah Cyrus, and Allison Russell, you witness one of the best albums of 2026 take root. "Come walk through the fire, come stand with the few who break their own hearts to be saved," the trio sing with tremendous power of redwoods. The opener presents the album's raw, earnest plea about Orville Peck's chest-deep wading into the murky, dark waters of life before emerging on the opposite shore, renewed and re-possessed. Peck's Mule decimates the idea that life's bleakness can never be overcome or conquered. It's one thing to endure a tragic shedding of self, as we all encounter sooner or later, and it's another to succumb to it all.
Peck wanders through suffocating solitude in "Big Ol' House," in which he drinks himself into a fire-starting state of being. Fire can be cleansing, but here, at the start of his pilgrimage, it consumes everything in its path until only ash remains. Within that terribly dire place, Peck begins detailing exactly how low he fell. "Ain't no use to trying," he laments, tell-tale percussion throbbing like the tortured Edgar Allan Poe recitation. In "Already Gone," he squeezes the pain from his chest, singing, "Lonesome heart by design." He stretches his voice into the dirt and gravel before ascending into a bellowing cry.
He then steps back for a two-steppin', whistlin' tune, "Rehab Blues," which documents his stint in rehab and getting sober after an overdose. "They watch you take your pills, no thrills, no TV after 9," he warbles in the first verse. The song begins as an acoustic mid-tempo before escalating into a vaudeville act, as he considers, "Get a spoon, dig a hole, buy a bottle and a ball and get the gang back on the road / If I could just jump the wall, then I'd run on home." He follows it with a blues jam session, "Ring the Bell," an admission that he can only write "songs about how I'd rather be dead." And, truth be told, he's just "another reckless man with a master plan to get himself kicked outta hell."
"I'm walking down Hollywood Boulevard / Nothing on my mind but ol' cocaine," he wrings his hands in "Cowboy Heart." He recalls sage wisdom his mother once told him, that he "can never look back unless you walk that way." Those words carry him forward into the travelin' song "The Breeze, The Grass, The Mourning Dove, and Me"–"I know that people change, but some things are just meant to be," he muses–and an fresh acknowledgement of his choices. "You can have a change of heart, but you can't change your decision," he warns in the latter.
Orville Peck leaps into the home stretch ("War of the Worlds," "Mule") with intoxicating honest that nearly rips out the listener's heart. He draws the personal tug-of-war to an apocalyptic setting in the former, and then he confesses that this whole time, he was simply "a man turned mule." He's done running, and he faces what he's done and forges a new, exciting path forward.
Mule is a wonderfully, emotionally rich and musically textured album. Peck has always outpaced most of his peers. But he's never done what he's accomplished here. His songwriting has become blistering; his voice mutated into a transcendent conduit; and his musical capacity something otherworldly and resonant. It's a career best, simple as that.
