Ben de la Cour’s visceral songwriting grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go. Weaving evocative stories of desperate characters with his signature “Americanoir” sound, de la Cour shines an empathetic, raw, and at times bleak light on the human condition. New Roses, Ben de la Cour’s sixth album, is a claustrophobic yet hopeful record that is by turns gritty and bleak and soaring and beautiful, building to a heart-wrenching story of reckoning and resilience.

Raised in Brooklyn, de la Cour lived in London, Cuba and across the United States before making his home in the American south over a decade and a half ago. Drawing on inspiration from writers and musicians alike—Townes Van Zandt, Jimi Hendrix, Nick Cave, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, James Baldwin and Carson McCullers among them—de la Cour’s gothic folk songs are as heartbreaking as they are beautiful.