Deeper Well
Kacey Musgraves trades Golden Hour's disco shimmer for something quieter and harder to grade — a title track about cutting out what isn't serving you, delivered so gently it risks not registering at all.
By Song Reviews · August 22, 2026
Kacey Musgraves trades Golden Hour's disco shimmer for something quieter and harder to grade — a title track about cutting out what isn't serving you, delivered so gently it risks not registering at all.
“Deeper Well” is Kacey Musgraves explaining, calmly and at length, what she’s decided to stop doing — smoking two packs a day, staying up too late, keeping people around who cost more than they give. Musgraves has said the album is tied to her “Saturn’s return,” the astrological framing for a mid-to-late-twenties reckoning, and the title track plays it completely straight: no punchline, no hook designed to interrupt the mood, just a plainly stated inventory of a life being cleaned up. Self-produced with longtime collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, the arrangement matches the lyric’s mood exactly — acoustic guitar, minimal percussion, nothing that asks to be noticed over the writing.
That restraint is also the record’s most-argued-about quality. Coming off Golden Hour, a disco-pop album that won Album of the Year at the Grammys, and Star-Crossed, a breakup record with its own dramatic arc, Deeper Well is a deliberate step down in volume — folk and Americana in place of glitter, a pivot Musgraves clearly intended as growth. Critics split on whether the songs carry that quiet as well as the concept deserves: Pitchfork’s Laura Snapes wrote that the songs “aren’t particularly satisfying when you know what she’s capable of,” while outlets like The Independent and The Daily Telegraph rated it a full five stars. Both readings are defensible from the same fourteen tracks, which is its own kind of achievement — a record patient enough to be read as either meditative or undercooked depending on what a listener came in wanting.
Commercially the album did fine work regardless — a No. 2 debut on the Billboard 200, her highest-ever UK chart placement, three Grammy nominations including Best Country Album, and a Best Country Song win for “The Architect.” “Deeper Well” itself is the thesis statement for that whole project: change described from a safe emotional distance, sung by someone who clearly needed to say it more than she needed anyone to be moved by it.
7.0/10 — a genuinely well-written song about getting your life in order that occasionally forgets a listener needs a reason to lean in.
Hero image: Kacey Musgraves performing at The Greek Theatre, September 14, 2016, by Justin Higuchi, licensed under CC BY 2.0.