Young Blood by Marcus King

Young Blood, Marcus King's second solo album, landed on August 26, 2022, through Easy Eye Sound and American Recordings, cut at Easy Eye Sound Studios in Nashville with Dan Auerbach producing. It came two years after El Dorado, the album under his own name that earned the Greenville, South Carolina guitar slinger a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album, and here the amps go all the way up.

King wrote the originals after a rough breakup in 2021, but the heartache comes out as heat rather than moping: fat, fuzzy riffs, a swaggering groove, and King hollering like he's trying to outshout his own guitar. "Hard Working Man" and "Blood on the Tracks" both reached Billboard's Adult Alternative Airplay chart, at 25 and 30, and critics were won over, pushing it to 77 on Metacritic, while Mojo's Mark Blake reckoned King had made good on his promise.

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