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RUSTON KELLY : PALE, THROUGH THE WINDOW
- Pale, Through The Window
- Give Up The Ghost
- Wayside
- Half Past Three
- Me And You
- Twisted Root
- Still
- Waiting To Love You
- I See You
- Pickleball
- House In The Country
- Great Wide Open
- All In
Label : Rounder Records
Length : 48:31
Release Date : September 12, 2025
Review (AllMusic) : Ruston Kelly comes clean with his emotions on his fourth album, 2025's Pale, Through the Window. The follow-up to 2023's The Weakness, the album finds the South Carolina native once again reuniting with longtime producer Jarrad Kritzstein. Together, they dig into some of the most emotionally straightforward and romantic songs Kelly has written. Having overcome drug addiction and a 2015 overdose, as well as a well-publicized divorce, Kelly has plenty of baggage to unpack. It's a feeling he conjures on "The Great Wide Open," a slow-building anthem that highlights the potent emo-influences running through his work. He sings, "From all the weight I carried/Everything for so long/Into the great wide open/I surrender and I fall." It's that feeling of letting go and accepting the most honest version of yourself that is imbued throughout all of Pale, Through the Window. There's a sense that having been through tough times, Kelly has found a level of solace and maybe even a deep, lasting relationship. Perhaps he's met someone who fills his "soul with solid gold" as he alludes to in "Pickle Ball," a song that nicely evokes the twangy guitar rock of Wilco. He's more explicit on the album-closer "All In," his voice trembling with throaty affection as he sings, "I’m sitting in your kitchen with your mom and aunt and sister/With my hand on your leg/And it just feels right." Whether it's the tremulous and self-critical title track, the pedal-steel accented "Wayside," or the effusive "Waiting to Love You," Kelly beams with a rooted sense of who he is. All of this is highly relatable and Kelly excels at writing songs that immediately pull you into his emotional orbit.
Review (Americana UK) : Few artists so consistently bare their souls with such blunt honestly as Ruston Kelly. Repeatedly he seeks some kind of release from calamitous experiences ranging from addiction to failed relationship only to find himself back in the depths of depression once again. Such candour runs through his three solo studio albums with a bellow of defiance in his 2023 release ‘Weakness’. For this album Kelly introduces what may seem a complete change of direction, namely joy. But ‘Pale Through the Window’ is neither revelation nor a self-help manual. If Kelly has not exorcised his demons, he can live with them. He can find happiness alongside struggle and what really comes through is a sense of gratitude that he is alive and can experience emotions lighter than relentless darkness. ‘Pale Through the Window’ is a soundscape. Lush arrangements swirl around lyrics that pull no punches to release sonic waves of emotion. The opener and title track sets the scene, “Spending most my days alone/ Dreaming of connection/ Pale, through the window”. Kelly sings with a wistful acceptance of his lot. He is quiet, there is almost an echo as his feelings reverberate, as he ponders, “I don’t know how I ended up/ At the old bar off of Eastland”. If this sounds more a continuation of his previous album he quickly heads in a different direction. ‘Wayside’ opens a door to the world outside Kelly’s self-imposed wall of self-examination. There is a nervous energy as if he struggles, quite understandably, to make some sense of this clamour. Longtime collaborator and producer Jarrad K and Kelly’s touring band work up a powerful, urgent sound that invigorates. Love songs tended to be a rare feature of Kelly’s work but now he embraces that emotion with touching simplicity in ‘Me and You’. His devotion is unconditional but not suffocating. He offers the closest company or space admitting in the end, “Cuz with you’s where I belong/ And if you ever think of quittin’/ Just listen to this song”. Kelly takes these feelings to a higher level on ‘Waiting to Love You’, an anthem of commitment. The big sound takes a more country pop hue but there above all rides Kelly’s authenticity. One emotion that has never been part of Kelly’s repertoire is any sense of self-pity. As he picks himself up he seems very aware of that resilience. ’Pickleball’ speaks again of love but with the proviso that, “I’m sick of burning out and saying sorry/ She said I don’t ever wanna see you like that”. The crescendo that builds up underscores that promise. Ruston Kelly’s determination never to give up fighting his problems is impressive. That he can do so with self-deprecation, hope and joy adds to his achievement. ‘Pale Through the Window’ is the result.
Review (Album Of The Year) : At this point you should know who Ruston Kelly is – and I say that beyond the scope of this channel, where I’ve repeatedly heralded him among the best acts of the late 2010s and 2020s for three absolute slam dunks in a row. No, I’m saying that in the perspective that it seems like his prospects have been improving since the difficult healing journey of The Weakness in 2023; supporting Noah Kahan on tour, falling in love, even finding if not God some form of spiritual awakening, all of which seems to have invigorated him to find more purpose and structure going forward. But for an artist who built his career from infusing the complicated vulnerability and fluttery textures of emo into country music, I was a bit concerned how it would work on an album… but then I remembered that Shape & Destroy while coming out of a darker place was about accepting love into his life, the framing might be a little different five years down the line but he’s proven that he can do this! So it shouldn’t be surprising that this was one of my most hotly anticipated albums of 2025… and now that I’ve heard it multiple times and will confirm he’s indeed four for four with great albums, it’s a project that gives me both more and less to say than you’d hope as a critic. When it comes to at least the content, it’s incredibly easy to discuss because it effectively functions as Shape & Destroy Part 2, reinforcing the lessons he attempted to learn on The Weakness when finding new love – the arc of the last album centered the reality of therapy that you had to be willing to do the work to heal, identify your culpability as the architect of your own destruction, and keep trudging forward, but eventually you have to deal with the history, the shadow of everything that came before, of which you’ve been shaped. Thus the work changes: not letting yourself be defined by your trauma, allowing yourself to not have all the answers and be loved, where it’s not surprising that he found some form of faith to help fill in the gap if you rip that trauma out, but also how his new partner isn’t as willing to tolerate the self-destructive turmoil. Shape & Destroy lived in that place, love amidst the swirling darkness he hadn’t processed, but where there was a certain self-indulgence in the relationship as his wallow could push him and those around him into messier spaces, whereas this is trying to come out the other side, recognize he needs to be better for his partner, especially when doing so leads him to feel happier and addressing the question of being worthy of that. I really love how the album begins with a spare, ghostly title track saturated in reverb, where he feels haunted by his past only to keep seeing himself in that window, ghosts that the next song asks he give up to move on as the jingling percussion surrounds similar ghostly textures but the vocal lead is way sharper to accentuate that immediacy. And it adds to the stakes when you see the consequences of a chaotic world and aging on the gentle midnight drive of ‘Half Past Three’ where his normal impulses would push him to a familiar bad place, or how the acoustic ballad with a few ghostly tremolo flourishes ‘Twisted Root’ has him try to get the roots of his past addictions, or the pedal-steel accented ballad ‘Still’ posing the question of wanting bliss, willful escape, or wanting peace to live with who he was and grow forward, and I really love the snarled twang bouncing off the synth swell of ‘Pickleball’ by showing the partner who is willing to love him and be with him… but you know, she doesn’t want to see him self-destruct over and over again when she loves him, and she knows he’s the one who has to make the choice. And there’s a really poignant observation on the bass-driven pulse of the penultimate ‘Great Wide Open’ that I really liked: he built a perception of a man, an artist, who must always be alone and tormented with the hopes that it’d give him more roads to travel… but it’s myopic and self-aggrandizing, it shrinks your lens, depriving you of a wider world which is just waiting for you to truly go all in and find the rest of your life. And around all of that great introspection… are relatively straightforward love songs, where I can respect that for Kelly there’s a direct courage in pure vulnerable sincerity, that this is where he is and they’d have that resonance. But it’s also a lane only marginally removed from where he is now, and the lack of tempo or momentum or more cutting turns of phrase feel like a winning formula starting to become threadbare – all Ruston Kelly albums tend to feel a little languid and sprawling, short on momentum, and this is no exception, which feels ironic given Shape & Destroy also had this issue and the same justification of the softer stability that comes with being in love, and yet that project had a breadth in metaphors and introspection that helped some of the softer melancholic moments feel distinct from each other, whereas the love songs here feel a bit sparing of that detail. And I’m not saying that’s not the case here when we look at the compositions and production – hell, I’d argue the return of Jarrad K over Nate Mercereau brings a consistency to the production balance and reverb that was missed on The Weakness, even if I’ll note the ironic juxtaposition in the metatext of this album trying to move forward – but when it comes to organic, soft-focus, gently synth-accented acoustic and piano ballads, it feels like the slight shifts in the instrumental palette are paying smaller dividends, I’ve heard him explore this territory multiple times before. Maybe it feels more pronounced because for the louder cuts there isn’t the same immediate muscle or punch – ‘Pickleball’ has some great guitar work, it absolutely rocks as an album highlight, but the 80s-inflected adult contemporary touches of ‘Me and You’ feel weirdly backwards-looking alongside the stock cottagecore twang and musings of ‘House In The Country’, but even then I think I’d take those over whatever the hell was happening with the synthesized gargling on ‘Waiting To Love You’; Kelly has admitted in passing that song was written for another artist, and when that artist didn’t cut it, he should have taken that as a sign, the energy is absolutely undercut by the messy tones and writing that just feels too broadly sketched. And that’s what makes Pale, Through The Window a little difficult to untangle: for its formula, you can argue it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do, and Ruston Kelly can deliver some heartwrenching detail and emotional nuance at his best, this is an album that feels settled and in love and I wish him all the best for it… but either through a combination of slightly less intriguing lyrics or his production formula starting to run dry on momentum or novelty, it just doesn’t grip me as starkly as his first three albums have. Still quite excellent, absolutely worth hearing in a rough year for country… but if we’re looking back through that window, I agree with Kelly that it’s probably time to look forward.