Stephanie Lambring -- Hypocrite

Stephanie Lambring is the best songwriter you don’t know about. Lambring is an uncompromising lyricist, and she kneecaps us immediately with “Cover Girl,” a biting indictment of the beauty standards she was expected to upload when she first got to Nashville. It wasn’t until her stunning album Autonomy that Lambring took the reigns of her own life in hand and proved to the execs that there was more to her than a crystalline voice and sharp pen. (She gets into that on the sassy “Two-Faced.”)

Hypocrite exams its theme from a variety of angles. “Good Mother” addresses Lambring’s internal conflicts about motherhood, while “Purity Ring” is a pounding rocker that addresses the damage done by patriarchal condemnations of sexuality. Lambring hits upon her country roots with “Jasper,” a memorial to a small-town loner whom nobody got to know. The song stands out because it weaponizes country’s primary tropes of nostalgia and small-town values while painting a portrait of what happens to outsiders in these supposedly tight-knit communities.

Lambring doesn’t spare criticism for herself, as the cutting “Mirror” shows. This album is a tour de force of the lies we tell ourselves, and Lambring puts them directly in front of our noses. Lamrbing isn’t so much judgment-free as she is reminding us that we should not be the ones casting the first stone, or even the second. Hypocrite isn’t for the faint of heart. When they said “three chords in the truth,” they weren’t prepared for Lambring.

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