Magic Tuber Stringband

For the better part of the last decade, North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband has increasingly tested the boundaries between the past and the present, the acoustic and the electronic, the core of tradition and the edge of the avant-garde. Courtney Werner and Evan Morgan met a dozen years ago, both then members of a vital and long-running underground at Duke University. Their first releases together were pleasantly bifurcated, with striking versions of standards like the fiddle tune “Peep O’ Day” and the traveling-hardship anthem “Cumberland Gap” countering Elliott Carter-in-Appalachia improvisations like “Goatsucker in Nonsuch Woods.” But as they played, those streams eventually found their confluence, their respect for and erudition in the old ways serving as Magic Tuber’s fuel for seeking out what was ahead. The spectacular Needlefall, their Thrill Jockey debut from 2024, curved from gorgeous instrumental acoustic hymns into acoustic minimalism, from spectral drones to a kind of country jazz.

Any sense of separation disappeared for 2026’s incredible and important Heavy Water, the band’s second Thrill Jockey LP and first with an official third member, Mike DeVito. Werner is an ecological researcher, studying how the chemicals we put into our world impact the animals who live in it. These ideas filter into Heavy Water, a compelling and poignant instrumental contemplation of Southern towns that the federal government destroyed in the nuclear-arms race. Magic Tuber’s love of old songs is still here—listen for the gorgeous guitar melody above frog song during “Where the Place Becomes Forgetting” or the sophisticated and lyrical interplay of “Marker of a Drowning.” But that sensibility is swallowed by the need to say something about the world as it is, to encapsulate the way the place we’ve wrought makes us feel. These pieces are haunted and damaged, honest portraits of a paradise lost, sans empty clichés about how it can right itself.