sundays

“sundays” makes its argument through blunt, almost deliberately unpoetic comparison: you wouldn’t eat only on Sundays, you wouldn’t drive a car on an empty tank all week and expect it to run – so why would faith work that way? It’s a simple device, closer to a sermon illustration than a typical CCM lyric, and Josiah Queen leans into that plainness rather than dressing it up, trusting the comparisons to land on their own logic rather than reaching for more conventional worship-song imagery. Producer John Michael Howell builds the arrangement to match the argument’s own shape – a stripped-back, nearly bare vocal opening that gradually thickens into a full folk-rock chorus, the production essentially miming the song’s thesis about something small building into something sustaining.

The song arrived in August as a single from Queen’s upcoming third album, Damascus Road (out October 23, two days before this review), and its existence is itself a small data point in Queen’s career: he’s said he asked fans to vote on which song from the album they wanted released next, making “sundays” a crowd-selected single rather than a label’s calculated pick. That’s a meaningful detail for an artist seven 2026 GMA Dove Award nominations deep, including Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year – a young, fast-rising CCM artist still treating his own audience’s preference as worth deferring to on something as basic as a release date.

Where the song is strongest is in refusing to let its central idea stay abstract. A lot of contemporary worship music argues for consistency and devotion in language general enough to apply to anything; “sundays” picks the two most mundane possible analogies – eating, driving on a full tank – and trusts that specificity to do more persuading than a more elevated metaphor would.

7.5/10 – a simple argument, well-built, and more persuasive for how plainly it’s made.

Hero image: Josiah Queen performing live. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.