Moss Henry - Gone Away (2025) Hi-Res

You don’t normally get country music coming out of the Caribbean. But in a dispatch from the US Virgin Islands comes the debut album of Moss Henry, a rugged new voice in country.

Unlike his peers, Henry leaves a relatively faint digital trail. Perhaps this speaks more to his lifestyle- packing up everything in Knoxville, Tennessee to become a boat captain on an island is fairly outlaw. With no website and a sporadic a social media presence, there is very little to glean from Henry’s background, which makes his music speak for itself.

The opener, ‘Damn Good’, kicks off a standard country album. There’s a line about driving a truck and one about having a girl on your mind, stuff that inspired hundreds of country records of yore. But the very next second, on ‘Let It Rain’, comes, out of absolutely nowhere, a distorted, psychedelic lap steel guitar. And yet, one song later, we are instantly back in Tennessee with the title track. “Love picked me up, won’t let me go / Now I’m gone away”, he sings against a train beat.

Throughout “Gone Away”, it becomes evident that the sound comes first for Henry before anything else. These 10 tracks explore a variety of atmospheres that, if disjointed, still retain some bluesy, weathered tones and gravelly vocals. This comes at a slight expense, in the form of the album’s lyricism. In ‘Already Gone’ Henry sings about cocaine “running down my neck” which raises some questions about the method of its ingestion, and in the final track, he avows that while he may have many chores to complete, “the only thing getting done is you”.

Yet listeners would really have to strain their ears to pick these out, because for every lyrical blunder, there’s an equally powerful moment elsewhere. The production on ‘Thankful’ is spectacular, lending itself well to the earnest, optimistic style of the new generation of country, and the chorus, “I’m thankful for it all”, is simple and pure. ‘Broke Down in Brunswick’ harbours the same humility, bearing some sonic similarity to Bright Eyes’ ‘Another Travelin’ Song’.

There is truly something to be said about presenting one’s music with no fanfare or manufactured buzz. Online algorithms are already clogged with self-promotion, and Henry could have easily stood in front of a phone and compared his art to that of heralded music legends, as so many newcomers do these days. Instead, he lets “Gone Away” do the talking, making it all the more genuine and pristine.