Lambchop- Punching The Clown

Label: Merge

Released 8/28/2026

To hear Kurt Wagner tell it, Punching the Clown — the seventeenth album by beloved shapeshifting Nashville institution Lambchop, began as a ghost hunt. After hearing a song on the radio while driving one night — “a minimal single chord strummed banjo and a small group of voices” — he went looking for it and failed. In his pursuit, he discovered “lined-out singing,” a form of acapella call-and-response that became a root of American gospel and country music when Scottish immigrants settled in Appalachia. The song, typically a hymn, is led by a clerk, who begins the verse alone before a choir swells up to accompany them on the rest of the line.

Track listing:

1. Just West of Nicollet
2. A Doctor in the House
3. Weakened
4. Stella
5. Punching the Clown
6. White People
7. The New World Wave
8. Andrew Jackson Asshat
9. Afterburner
10. Cigar
11. To Do
12. No Chicago