Pochette de « Mule », le quatrième album d'Orville Peck. Warner Records
He still hides his face behind those leather fringes, but his voice has never been this exposed. Orville Peck, the most singular figure in today’s country music, has announced ‘Mule’, his fourth studio album. It arrives on 18 September via Warner Records, and two tracks are already out to sketch its outline.
An album about addiction and rebuilding
‘Mule’ is billed as the most personal record of Peck’s career. Its thirteen songs read almost like a diary, charting the year that upended his life: the pull of addiction, the hard road toward sobriety, and the slow, uncertain work of putting himself back together. Where his earlier albums played on the mystery of the character, this one chooses to strip it away.
The title says as much about that journey: the mule, the beast of burden that carries its load, keeps its head down and somehow stays on its feet. Peck lays out a chronological story, from the darkest point toward the light, without ever prettifying what he went through. It is a survivor’s record as much as a country one.
For a genre still often tied to a conservative America, the move is anything but trivial. By speaking openly about dependency and relapse, Orville Peck extends one of country’s oldest traditions, the one of songs that look pain straight in the eye, while moving it onto resolutely contemporary ground. The mask, paradoxically, seems to have given him the freedom to say everything.
Two songs to lead the way
To launch the album, Peck shared two tracks with opposite moods. ‘Too Little, Too Late’, the lead single, is the more direct of the two: a nervy country-pop gallop, built for the stage, that slams shut like a door behind you.
At the other end, ‘Prologue (Eulogy Of A Man Turned Mule)’ opens the record like a film scene. The song brings together no less than Emmylou Harris, a towering voice of American country, alongside Noah Cyrus and Allison Russell. Three presences that quietly shadow the story of a man on the edge, and give ‘Mule’ the weight of a major album from the very first minute.
The ‘Man Turned Mule’ tour
Peck’s return will also run through the road. His North American tour, named ‘Man Turned Mule’, kicks off on 28 October in Sacramento, California, and runs through 22 November in New York State. A run of shows conceived as a direct extension of the album, where the intimate is played out loud, night after night, in front of a room.
On stage, Peck has built his reputation on a rare blend of theatricality and sincerity, somewhere between western pageantry and open-hearted confession. Taking the most fragile songs on ‘Mule’ to a live audience should push that contrast even further, setting the masked character against the naked truth of his own lyrics.
A masked cowboy who won’t slow down
In just a few years, Orville Peck has become a fully owned oddity: a masked crooner who has carried country into places it rarely visited, between western imagery, sweeping romance and an openly queer aesthetic. After ‘Pony’ (2019), ‘Bronco’ (2022) and ‘Appaloosa’ (2025), ‘Mule’ confirms a steady release pace and an ambition that shows no sign of fading.
The mask, in fact, has never been a mere stage prop. It shields the man, blurs the line between character and artist, and lets Peck tell his story without fully giving himself away. On ‘Mule’, that mechanism flips: the costume stays, but the storytelling turns brutally honest. That is probably what makes the album so eagerly awaited.
Now the wait is for the full album on 18 September, to take the true measure of the gesture. In the meantime, the two opening tracks already sit among the tracks to hear this week and set the tone for what promises to be his most haunted work yet.
