Elijah Johnston’s latest album, “Stupid Soul”, sees the Atlanta artist inhabiting some of his most commercially agreeable moments.

Elijah Johnston’s latest album, “Stupid Soul”, sees the Atlanta singer-songwriter inhabiting some of his most commercially agreeable moments. While this makes for a little less memorable of an experience than his other projects, he injects just enough dissonance to keep us hooked. 

Johnston’s projects are always marked by an awkward split. Whether he’d admit it or not, he seems to gleefully inhabit a kind of self-conscious midway point between two separate poles of genre pop - emo and country. Throughout his discography he goes through great pains to smooth this distinction out and slips seamlessly back and forth depending on mood. Stupid Soul is, to my knowledge, the first time we get to see him luxuriate in these differences. In the process it feels like he tells us a version of the truth. 

Broadly, “Stupid Soul” finds Johnston orbiting a very silo’d version of alt-country-pop more than he has on previous releases. While this would generally add up to a less interesting listening experience than one might pull from the choral-tinged twang of albums like 2023’s “Hometown Vampire” or even his nearly decade-old debut “Moonbeam”, the artificial patina much of the instrumentation slathers across skeletal, honest lyricism makes for something unique.

Flashes of naked sentimentality (a little too-consciously reminiscent of Postal Service and adjacent acts) are prominent on songs like “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Instant Replay” and comprise the bulk of what makes this album enjoyable. A confusing motif here is that Johnston works to keep these moments under-wraps - a small and perfect confessional piece will surface and then get buried immediately in a kind of contextless and rote pattern designed to maximize listenability. As an example, the lonely and Orbison-esque rock dive “Baby Bands” manages to artfully convert pangs of self-assured envy into a more resigned and wistful emotion (“All of the baby bands, you know they never really know how to sing.”) that might pass as wisdom. This brief meditation is followed immediately by “Oxygen”, a suburban dirt-road anthem which pits a definite low point into the project. 

A few standouts here are his cover of Bruce Springsteen's, “Valentine’s Day” and “Everything We Hold Dear”. “Everything We Hold Dear”, featuring fellow ATL singer-songwriter Rose Hotel is possibly the most direct example of the almost-pop-almost-folk-almost-anything tilt Johnston chose for this project - I could imagine this just as easily as a 2019 Chris Stapleton radio single or a 2011 single on WREK. It’s to our great benefit that it’s neither. 

The penultimate track “Double Fault” is an engrossing and a neat little capstone on the binary walk Johnston takes through the entirety of this album (“Sublimate that love inside, you’re never alright now”), and because of that it’s genuinely baffling that it’s not the closer. The actual finishing song on this project, “Football Season”, is an unnervingly squeaky clean and inoffensive country-pop artifact and Johnston choosing to spotlight it by way of using it as an album bookend feels almost like self-sabotage. A charitable interpretation would hold that the slight hints of something darker - “Just found out today that you’re not coming how” - clamped down by embedding them within the aura of a high school fall are conscious attempts at communicating to us an inner struggle of some kind. Frankly, it’s not clear to me if that’s the case.