Natalie Del Carmen has today released her new album titled ‘Pastures’ via Torrez Music Group. ‘Pastures’ unfolds with the quiet confidence of an artist who understands that subtlety can hit harder than spectacle. Natalie Del Carmen crafts songs that feel lived in, where every melody carries emotional fingerprints and every lyric sounds like it was written in the margins of real experience.
The album leans into warm acoustic arrangements and unhurried pacing, allowing her voice to guide listeners through moments of longing, reflection, and cautious optimism. There’s a sense of space throughout — as if each song leaves room for the listener’s own memories to settle in alongside hers.
What gives the album its lasting pull is the way Del Carmen balances intimacy with universality. She writes about friendships, shifting identities, and the uneasy passage from youthful certainty into adult ambiguity without ever sounding overly dramatic or self-absorbed. Instead, her storytelling feels conversational, even comforting, as if she’s letting the audience in on thoughts usually kept private. The instrumentation remains tastefully restrained — gentle strings, understated percussion, and roots-leaning textures add depth without stealing focus — making the emotional core of each track land with greater clarity.
Taken as a whole, ‘Pastures’ plays like a personal journal that accidentally becomes everyone’s story. The record doesn’t chase trends or attempt grand gestures; it succeeds through sincerity, careful songwriting, and performances that reward attentive listening. By the album’s closing moments, there’s a lingering feeling of having traveled somewhere familiar yet newly understood.
It’s a reminder that sometimes the most powerful records aren’t the loudest, but the ones that quietly stay with you long after the final note fades.
About ‘Pastures’
‘Pastures’, a patiently developed, well-crafted record, grapples with self-imposed expectations and the tension they create in an artist. The album follows Natalie Del Carmen, now 24, as she navigates the challenges of newfound adulthood and the wisdom that comes with it. Constantly evolving, Del Carmen began to carry a persistent, stinging trepidation that she must find her way or make sense of her career, relationships, and the ties that shape her daily patterns and rituals with urgency.
Across many of the album’s tracks, Del Carmen imagines herself navigating different pathways in her life from entirely new perspectives, consistently returning to a familiar feeling: restlessness. That restlessness centers on the illusion that, with enough effort, any goal can be achieved, any relationship’s fire can be stoked, and any moment can be transformed into something lasting and powerful. In pursuing it, she finds chaos in quiet moments as they morph into cacophonous pressure points, pushing her to try and produce more potent realities for herself and others. But ‘Pastures’ ultimately reflects a belief system’s foundation cracking, giving way to change. Rather than holding onto that familiar, youthful anxiety, Del Carmen learned how to let go of some weighty expectations she placed upon herself.
“’Pastures’ is about the strange, quiet in-between that defined my early twenties—where I constantly felt on the verge of something, but never quite anywhere. I’ve been in a long season of transition—nothing’s ever certain, except the pressure to keep moving and prove something along the way,” Del Carmen says. “I’ve always felt a kind of urgency, like whatever I’m after is still way ahead of me. I wanted to write about what it feels like to be drifting between who you are and who you’re becoming.”
Tracks like “What Should’ve Been (By Now)” reflect the endless wondering of a perpetually moving mind, while “Plans Upon Plans” reiterates how life can unhinge steadfast ideas about oneself. Ultimately, the album navigates the growing pains of continuously searching for a sense of control over one’s life, loosening the leash and instead allowing moments to pass without every step defined and every milestone deeply known. Simultaneously, many of the record’s tracks take a moment to pause and understand deeply cathartic feelings that come and go. Beautifully enriched tracks like “El Cortez” reimagine previously established, cherished memories of loved ones, painting them with the newfound light of age and wisdom. In this case, a family trip with Del Carmen’s father to a Vegas casino reminded her of his presence and ability to continue making memories. “Good Morning From Magnolia,” with its rich mandolin, swirling fiddles, and strong vocal refrains, calls toward a deeper homecoming, vibrating with warmth and passion for family, friends, and the things that bind people together.
‘Pastures’ was recorded in just eight days in the backwoods of Kingston Springs, just outside of Nashville, with the help of Tennessee-based musical collective Brunjo. The album bridges Del Carmen’s metropolitan roots with her love for traditional country and small-town storytelling, blending acoustic instruments like mandolin, pedal steel, and her grandfather’s 1930s banjo with modern folk arrangements. The album features mixing from GRAMMY-award-winning producer Brandon Bell (Brandi Carlile, Joni Mitchell, Allison Russell, Alison Krauss) and mastery by highly esteemed music professional Eric Conn (Neil Young, John Prine, Sheryl Crow).
Raised in Los Angeles and shaped by the city’s cultural diversity, Natalie Del Carmen began writing songs as a teenager and quickly developed a style that weaves vivid narratives with melodic warmth and standout vocals. A Berklee College of Music graduate, she honed her craft among a community of talented peers before releasing her 2023 debut album, Bloodline, which earned critical acclaim for its fusion of American roots music with a distinctive, youthful perspective, with maturity well beyond her years. ‘Pastures’ singles, “El Cortez,” “Plans Upon Plans,” and “June, You’re On My Mind,” have garnered early praise from outlets like The Bluegrass Situation, CMA, Atwood Magazine, Ditty TV, Country Central, Holler, and Saving Country Music, and earned coveted spots on Sirius XM Outlaw Country and Spotify’s Emerging Americana editorial playlist. Following her Americanafest debut with performances at The Bluebird Cafe and Whiskey Jam, Del Carmen is initiating new listeners and inspiring fans as one of the genre’s brightest voices.
About Natalie Del Carmen
Raised amongst the pavement and pop radio of Los Angeles, Natalie Del Carmen creates her own musical geography with ‘Pastures’. It’s the sound of a modern-day folksinger narrowing her focus and expanding her reach, funneling the wide-ranging sounds that appeared on her debut album — 2023’s critically-acclaimed Bloodline — into a sharp, singular version of American roots music.
‘Pastures’ doesn’t sound like the work of a Gen Z songwriter with metropolitan roots. Instead, its songs are poised and pastoral, filled with acoustic instruments — including the 1930s banjo she inherited from her grandfather — that evoke a landscape far more remote than Southern California. Some songwriters make music that reflects their surroundings, but Del Carmen takes a different path, turning herself into a musical world-builder. At just 24 years old, she’s chased down an Americana sound of her own making.
“I’ve heard stories about people growing up in small towns, wanting to move to a big city,” she says. “That’s not me. I love living in a city, but I also feel connected to a traditional country sound and a small-town lifestyle. I crave both.” With ‘Pastures’, she builds a bridge between those two contrasts. Songs like the wistful, waltzing “Plans Upon Plans” and the nostalgic “Leanne” make no apologies for their countrified arrangements, but their lyrics tell a more universal story, capturing the zeitgeist of 20something life in all its charmed and contradictory glory. Like her musical heroes — from Brandi Carlile to Gregory Alan Isakov to The Lumineers — Del Carmen embraces her folksy roots without abandoning a wider audience, delivering coming-of-age songs that transcend genre and generation. After all, navigating the twists and turns of early adulthood is hard work, wherever you live.
Like Bloodline, ‘Pastures’ was recorded with Brunjo, the Tennessee-based musical collective whose members first crossed paths with Del Carmen while attending Berklee College of Music. Two years after graduation, the musicians reunited in a studio on the outskirts of Nashville, where they tracked ‘Pastures’ during eight inspired days. Combining organic instruments with MIDI textures, they created unique soundscapes for each song, from the booming western arrangement of “Heyday” to the cinematic folk of “Good Morning from Magnolia.” With its light layers of mandolin, pedal steel, acoustic guitar, and brushed percussion, ‘Pastures’ ornaments — but never overwhelms — the songs that Del Carmen wrote back home in Los Angeles, dreaming up a world with less freeways, more fiddle, and green pastureland stretching into the distance.
“To me, a pasture sounds like an open place where you can go anywhere,” she says. “Sometimes, that’s the most freeing thing… but other times, it can be an open invitation for doubt. Sometimes, it can be easy to write about love, because it’s so accessible. But I try to write about things that are harder to talk about, like failing, or trying to live up to society’s expectations, or grief, or the pressure to amount. With ‘Pastures’, I’m letting myself be free to make the music I want to make… and I’m letting myself do it on my timeline.”
With ‘Pastures’, Natalie Del Carmen joins the ranks of Kat Hasty, Maggie Antone, Noeline Hoffman, Ken Pomeroy, and other empowered artists bringing a female perspective — and a youthful outlook — to the Americana space.
LINKS:
https://nataliedelcarmen.com/
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/natalie-del-carmen/1534096217
https://www.youtube.com/user/Natalbugs/videos
https://www.instagram.com/natalie.del.carmen/
https://www.tiktok.com/@nataliedelcarmen
https://open.spotify.com/artist/0TMQOD1S7h7Dr86QQWHdiG
