Orville Peck

It’d be no small understatement to call this year an artistic renaissance for Orville Peck, the trailblazing country performer who has spent the last 11 months soaring to new creative heights. After 2024’s beloved collaboration album, Stampede-which featured such icons as Willie Nelson, Kylie Minogue, Elton John, and more-the masked singer took on an entirely new challenge: Broadway. In his mesmerizing, layered debut as the Emcee in Cabaret, Peck won legions of new fans and critical acclaim in kind during his 128-show run in the celebrated production. Uprooting his life from California to New York City for nearly half a year, the Pony and Bronco singer-songwriter found newfound musical, lyrical inspiration wherever he turned. “I was trying to challenge myself with being more vulnerable with songwriting, and I think that experience felt so insanely vulnerable for me,” he says of the doors Cabaret unlocked. “Obviously I was performing without my mask, which was so new for me, but the nature of the material being so heavy-with me going in really wanting to do a good job-pushed me to even more new levels of vulnerability.” Somehow, between rehearsals, performances, and martial arts training for a starring role in a late summer movie shoot (Street Fighter, due out in 2026), he kept finding his mind returning to music. So he did what he always does: he started writing, and linked with Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Jacob Portrait (Alex G, Porches, Lil Yachty, and more) to start crafting the songs that would eventually make up Appaloosa. The seven-song EP reunites Peck with longtime collaborator Noah Cyrus on “Atchafalaya;” pays tribute to his Cabaret stint with a cover of the Sally Bowles’ number “Maybe This Time;’ and plumbs new emotional ground with “Oh My Days”-which the artist calls his “first-ever love song, considering that I always write about heartbreak, not love.” “I always tend to sing and write about what’s going on in my life, and that felt like a natural, big part of my life that’s evolved since Bronco-which was very much about coming out of a relationship,” Peck says. “This is the first batch of songs that are about the start of this new relationship, and the fears and doubts and insecurities that come with new feelings for someone, especially after coming out of such a tumultuous time in the Bronco world. These songs are about a time when I felt very nervous about being heartbroken again, and what it meant to fall in love again for the first time in a long time.” Peck recorded Appaloosa in Brooklyn during rare free windows in his calendar. Its title, he says, felt like slipping on a glove. “An appaloosa is a famously spotted horse, and in some ways, to me that represents a singularity-a uniqueness,” he says. “In my mind, I picture a bunch of different horses all standing around, all different breeds, but you would notice the appaloosa standing out because their coat is so distinct and so unique. These last few years, since Bronco, a big part of my own path has been really embracing who I am, realizing that my confidence was always really greatly affected by being insecure about my uniqueness instead of embracing it.” “I think in some ways, at the moment, I feel kind of like an appaloosa,” he adds. “I’ve finally accepted I just am and will probably always be or feel different, I think. But instead of that feeling alienating like it used to for most of my life, now it makes me feel excited and happy and lucky to feel different. I’m in my appaloosa era right now.” That freedom-creatively, personally, professionally-unlocked a desire in Peck as he embarked upon the Appaloosa process. “This year, I got to do so many things that were lifelong dreams, so much so that I’m actually now adamantly happy that I don’t fit into those rooms and boxes,” he says. “I made a conscious decision on this album to return to as pure of a place as I could. When I made Pony, I didn’t have an audience; no one knew who I was, no one cared, and I didn’t have anybody to answer to. There were no expectations on me whatsoever, and when there’s no ears or eyes on you, you can really make art for yourself.” Appaloosa is, in every sense, a project based on “what I wanted to hear,” Orville says. “It was entirely about what I wanted it to sound like without caring about how it would be received or understood.” In that sense, he was able to return to his roots “in terms of production and songwriting and sound,” he says. “I was going back to references that I really liked when I was a teenager-there’s all these shoegaze-y, alternative moments on the album. It allowed me to pivot to where I came from, having learned a lot of new things along the way.” Free of expectations, what Peck created is one of his most exhilarating and alive bodies of work yet. Throughout Appaloosa’s seven songs, fans will hear Orville at his most unburdened, creating for the sake of artistic expression. Tone-setter “Dreaded Sundown” opens the project “cinematically, laying out this new flavor and telling this story about being okay being alone with yourself, especially after a period of pain and betrayal.” “Drift Away” follows, inspired by Orville’s childhood love of alt-rock acts like the Pixies, the Breeders, and the Smashing Pumpkins. “I wanted it to be an ode to being an outsider in a small town, me and all my fellow freaky friends living in a sleepy town, looking for ways to get up to fun.” Noah Cyrus joins him on “Atchafalaya,” a track that chronicles his journey from California to New York for Cabaret, putting his personal life and the things he loved on hold to “do the other things you love”-all wrapped in lyrics trailing the route from Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin up to the Big Apple. Upon arrival in New York, there’s a heartbreaking cover of what he calls “lyrically a country song in a lot of ways”: “Maybe This Time,” a salute to his debut on the Great White Way. “In the show when Eva Noblezada would sing this one, I would be busy doing a really crazy quick change,” he says. “But I would be adamantly trying to go faster and faster each time so I could run to the side stage and watch her finish. It covers so many nuances of what the human experience.” “Oh My Days”-his “first love song, I think!”-tells the story of finding his partner and those feelings that come with the first love after the worst love. “My body was walking towards him, and my heart and my soul were running in the other direction because I was so traumatized,” he says. “‘Oh My Days’ is about talking yourself out of something that you know is making you happy because you’re frightened-and overcoming those fears, too.” “Oh My Days,” Peck says, has been burning a hole in his back pocket for four years, waiting for the right project to find its home. But “My Side of the Mountain” came from more raw experiences, chronicling a break with his partner during which both needed “to take some time to work on ourselves,” he remembers. At the time, both lived literally one canyon apart in Los Angeles. “I would lay awake at night knowing that he was literally 10 minutes away from me over the other side of the mountain,” he says. “So this song is an ode to what I was going through at that time-that I could probably shout loud enough and he could hear me, and the idea of letting someone go, even if it’s just temporarily, to focus on yourself.” Appaloosa closes with “It’s the End of the World,” a song Orville started writing the same day as the 2024 election. “The most important thing I think that we can do sometimes is to try and carve out happiness where and how we can find it, especially in times when it is just so easy to get disheartened about what’s going on in the world,” he says. “This was my way of grabbing the person next to me and just saying, ‘You know? Eff it, let’s Thelma and Louise it and just try and find some happiness in all of this despair.'” “I’d call this one a positively nihilistic anthem about the world burning,” he adds with a chuckle. Promising a much shorter wait between projects, Orville says he’s already begun thinking about and writing his next musical chapter. “Even in some of the absolute most hopeless, hard, dark times of my life, art and specifically music has been what has saved my life over and over again,” he says. And I don’t even mean just making it. I mean getting to enjoy it. So my hope is that even though we are in what feels like such bleak times that people will still continue to make art that feels like it is important or matters or helps people.”