Review: Flat Tired’s debut album, 'Better Part of the Year', is weaving together loss, emotional growth and no small amount of heartbreak.

Sandwiched in between classic country conventions and hints of something truly special, Flat Tired’s debut album Better Part of the Year weaves loss, emotional growth and no small amount of heartbreak together into a package that occasionally feels like a sun-bleached 8-track tape.

In comparison to 2024’s Other States EP, Better Part of the Year sees the band taking a few more risks and fleshing out textures they’ve previously found a decent degree of comfort within. Many core pieces - such as Griffin Miller's haunting vocals (shaped similarly to Richard Buckner’s minimalist confessional style) harmoniously dancing around Emma K. Shibley’s earnest harmonies and Davis Wright’s agreeable steel tones - are cranked up ever so slightly. Some amount of confession has been baked into Flat Tired’s work from the beginning, but this project seems to see them truly become comfortable with slipping from fun into melancholy and back again. 

Wait Just A Minute is a great example of what I’m talking about here, a kind of hammocking country lullaby inflected with Sunday morning piano. So straightforward and wholesome it loops around to become tongue-in-cheek. The album’s penultimate track Footprints in Pollen is another such moment, where an encouraging optimism dips back down into the cold honesty of self-reflection “Waited up until the last minute, what’s your plan to get the work finished young man.” Shibley’s solo vocals crooning across the lonely moon-puddle of Wave is a definite highlight, as well as Miller’s introspective bobbing around steel on Stormchaser, “That creeping feeling I’ve been here too long”

That said, the band’s refusal to neatly fit into one category causes a few pieces of this project to fall flat every now and again. Dead Center is an extremely sturdy song in and of itself, but doesn’t add much in the way of momentum and it’s not particularly as inventive as every other track seems to be. Some components of The Cycling Hum bet a little too strongly on stained glass lyricism and in the process obscuring the genuine sentiment underneath (remedied immediately by Settipani’s solemn blues guitar play-out).

Despite these brief intervals of disconnect, Better Part of the Year is a charming and very human freshman long-form project. It’s not always the case that genuine goodwill between the members of a band is audible, and one comes away from this album with the sense that Flat Tired are legitimate friends. That lends a certain recurring glint of authentic hopefulness which really shines (“Our old house will hold with all its might” on the album closer). I greatly look forward to seeing where else Flat Tired will take their comradery - and their steel guitar - in the future.