Expectations by Katie Pruitt

Expectations, Katie Pruitt's debut album, came out on Rounder Records on February 21, 2020, and it's a record made almost entirely out of her own life. The Nashville-based songwriter grew up in the Atlanta suburbs in a Catholic family and went to Catholic school, and these songs dig into that life with an unguarded, plainspoken candor that never feels like a diary left open by accident.

Critics mostly leaned in. Pitchfork admired the strong arrangements and stately ballads, Exclaim! praised the truth-telling lyrics and called her band first-rate, and American Songwriter liked production that keeps her words up front while mixing genres; Paste felt the emotional depth but found some of the songwriting formulaic. Metacritic's tally landed at 76. Then, in November 2020, the record picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, a nod to how good the whole thing sounds.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.