7/10

After four acoustic albums built around fingerpicked guitars and carefully observed songwriting, Shannon Hudson sounds ready to tear the doors off on 'Cross Stitch'. The Leander, Texas singer-songwriter’s latest record is his most electric to date, and that shift gives these ten songs a wonderfully immediate sense of energy without sacrificing the emotional detail that has always sat at the heart of his work.

From the opening moments of ‘Black Roses’, he makes that change unmistakable. Guitars arrive with grit and purpose, the distortion feels alive, and there's a loose, classic-rock confidence running through the track that recalls Tom Petty and early Wilco at their most natural. Yet 'Cross Stitch' never feels like a nostalgic exercise as he draws from that lineage while writing firmly from the present.

And that present is complicated. Across the album, he explores disconnection, strained relationships and the feeling of watching people drift further apart from one another. ‘Touch and Go’ captures the slow collapse of a partnership, while ‘Lockdown’ looks beyond the pandemic itself towards divisions that were already there. ‘Game Changer’ pushes back against the endless pressure to optimise every part of modern life, and ‘Is It Over Now’ carries a more subdued, uneasy weight.

The title-track becomes especially important within that wider arc. ‘Cross Stitch’ isn't simply another song about fracture; it offers the possibility of repair. That tension between breaking apart and choosing to reconnect gives the album its emotional backbone, while closer ‘Leave it All Behind’ leaves us with the question that seems to hover over the entire record: whether people still have the patience to meet each other halfway.

But what makes 'Cross Stitch' especially impressive is how naturally the frontman handles the move into a fuller rock sound. He produced, mixed and mastered the album himself and played every guitar, yet the record never feels overly controlled. There's dirt beneath its fingernails, looseness in the arrangements and a real sense of a songwriter rediscovering the thrill of volume.

With this new offering, Shannon Hudson hasn't abandoned the intimacy of his acoustic work; he has simply plugged it in. Raw, thoughtful and full of conviction, it feels like a bold new chapter from an artist still finding fresh ways to make deeply intimate songs hit even harder.