Waylon Payne, pedigreed son of '70s country star Sammi Smith, brings a delicate, poetically unguarded touch to the role of the downhome troubadour. Karen Pittelman, front woman of Karen & the Sorrows, sings disarmingly tender tunes with an artful sweetness that matches the gussied-up, vintage country look she's cultivated. Sarah Shook and Jaime Wyatt, who've more recently staked out space at alt-country's punkish and outlaw poles, respectively, shape their songs around hard-living antihero personas stoically surveying damage they've wrought, while Cindy Emch, of the Secret Emchy Society takes a brassy, barroom belting approach to roguery. Mary Gauthier and the Indigos' Amy Ray have long been emblems of visceral expression, toughened witnesses to suffering at the social margins who often sing in stern, lower registers. There's rich variety, too, in the ways that performers shape melodies and use their voices, sometimes decentering or dissolving rigid, gendered binaries. Brandon Stansell favors contemporary country-pop production and ponders small-town identity and youthful rejection from a personalized, openly emotional vantage, while Cameron Hawthorn draws on a disco-influenced, modern country era to depict line-dancing lust in one of his videos Ty Herndon flipped the gender of the pronouns in a rerecording of one of his '90s country hits. Kristin Davidson and Carolyn Phillips, of the acoustic duo Hardened and Tempered, gently conjure wanderlust in the wide-open western spaces of cowboy mythology. There are the subtle yet significant storytelling choices of Mercy Bell, who captures uneasy recollections of coming of age and coming out. Kevin Thornton, the nimble imagination behind Indiana Queen, translated the anxious yearning in his songs into a visual album that treats male bodies with wistful admiration and desire and conveys the melancholy of finding a certain kind of success just out of reach in Nashville. Loamlands, the musical vehicle of nonbinary North Carolina songwriter Kym Register, has in its repertoire a somber lament of the historic, regional slaying of two gay men. Though their archetypal work together has mostly leaned toward folk-rock, the Indigo Girls have long spun stories of southern queer lives, and a new one, 'Country Radio,' written and sung by the duo's Emily Saliers, paints a portrait of a smalltown, gay fan for whom mainstream country songs are a source of both fantasy and exclusion. Others, like the duo Tina & Her Pony and the vocally trained singer-songwriter Eli Conley, sketch characters whose identities defy heterosexual or cisgender norms in compelling detail. Music Features Not-So-Lone Rangers: Out In The Country All Year Long

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