Lambchop - Punching the Clown [LP]

Release Date: August 21, 2026
Label: Merge Records
To hear Kurt Wagner tell it, Punching the Clown - the seventeenth album by beloved shapeshifting Nashville institution Lambchop, out August 21, 2026 on Merge Records and City Slang - 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 gospel singing that began in Scotland in the 1800s and 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.